On Friday night, Foundations singer Kate Nash appeared on RTÉ’s the Late Late Show to promote her Only Fans.
Nash has joined the site – described as a ‘DIY porn’ website, and in recent months has proudly spoken about her plans to monetise pictures of her bottom to help her pay for her music tours. The British musician, 37, whose mother is from Ballymun, said that she had been causing “a bit of a ruckus over in the UK about the state of the music industry”.
The singer said that selling x-rated pictures helped her cover the cost of food, staff and accommodation on tour, as she hit out at the “exploitative” music industry which she said makes it hard to make a living.
What a world, eh? Those Big Labels who make you feel you need to resort to selling lewd pictures of yourself to strangers on the internet to (as Nash herself put it) buy Christmas presents for your family.
But maybe there’s an obvious question Nash should ponder: If you can’t make money doing your job, have you thought that just maybe you’re in the wrong one? What does a male artist do if his music isn’t selling?
“The music industry is very exploitative. Any artist underneath stadium or arena level is really struggling to profit on tour and from their recorded music,” Nash said.
“It’s become a bad state of affairs, the grassroots is in crisis, loads of venues are closing. And so when I was on tour in November, I hadn’t toured properly since before Covid, so I was experiencing the financial pinch. It doesn’t make financial sense to put out a record and tour in the same year, which I think is a disgrace.”
So the music industry is exploitative and awful, but Only Fans, a platform used to exploit and degrade women, is absolutely fine. Spare me.
Clearly RTÉ agrees, and seized the opportunity to promote the porn site on primetime television – on the same national broadcaster which received a €725 million bailout from the government. We’re being forced therefore, not only to contribute towards the dull-as-ditchwater Late Late, but to have our taxes spent on this rubbish promoting Only Fans. No wonder people refuse to pay for the licence.
RTÉ prides itself on presenting us with “inspirational women” who are breaking that glass ceiling and being fabulous role models for women, but this is utter tripe. Plus, is there anything more cringy than the staid, compliant, pro-establishment national broadcaster trying to get down with the cool kids especially when said supposed cool kid is long past her hits (even though Foundations was a banger).
“So much respect for Kate Nash and how she’s taking control of her music career,” the Late Show trilled on X. They were rightly ratioed in the comments.
The selection of the story and its timing was more than likely geared towards International Women’s Day, but it’s also a little bit insane – given that a criminal probe, reported by the UK’s Mirror newspaper last month, revealed that more than a thousand crime reports have been linked to the Only Fans site. It’s alleged that hundreds of UK women were involved in coercion and control, rape, sextortion, and revenge porn.
We’ve all heard so many horrible stories about the site. Yet, we are supposed to be ok with our wages going towards a washed-up British celebrity flying over to enlighten us all about the wonders of Only Fans. It increasingly feels like we are setting women up to fail.
In this post Me Too world, where we are supposed to be more worried than ever about women’s safety, it’s rather curious that we don’t give a thought to the alleged crimes on the platform.
The subscription-based website’s Ukrainian-born owner has made over £1bn since he bought the company six years ago. He’s laughing all the way to the bank – and of course, he’s a man – while there are multiple cases of women claiming they have been forced to perform sex work on the site by controlling partners. Others claim they have been secretly filmed and that sex tapes were sold to former partners for cash. It’s not hard to find the negative outcomes.
We are encouraging young women to make poor choices – we are so afraid of victim-blaming that even the most sensible among us are reluctant to tell girls that it’s not a good idea to sell your body to weirdos on the internet, or may not be safe to go home with a stranger on a night out. We complain about men all the time in this culture, yet we are happy to platform Only Fans creators telling women it’s good for their bank balance to entertain creepy blokes on the internet.
Modern culture encourages total licentiousness and then, when things go wrong, we wring our hands together and have nothing more to say than,“Oh well, men are awful.” We are actively enabling an explosion of poor choices, which are likely helping to create the plethora of negative mental health patterns in young females.
“I started the OnlyFans and I’m making more money now from my arse than my music,” Nash triumphantly told Patrick Kielty, but there was very little questioning of whether she is really a winner here. The impression the audience is given is that everything is rosy – Nash can suddenly pay for her tours and keep the music dream alive. We are supposed to coddle her, and embrace a new definition of sex worker to include the pathetic offerings on Only Fans which seem to get worse by the minute – with controversial porn star Lily Phillips Controversial recently using the platform to boast she would be hitting up nursing homes to bed elderly men for the camera.
We are also supposed to take it for granted that just because a woman says she wants to do something, she is telling the truth. Women do all kinds of degrading things sexually for men. A lot of the time they do so not because that’s what they want, but because it’s what some men want.
Maybe women really are built differently these days and do want to spend their time creating hypersexualised content for men, but I doubt it. Sex differences do exist. It is a biological reality that women’s sexuality is a complicated network of connections, and that sex is more bonding and emotional for women – yet the cultural discourse increasingly focuses on the kinds of women who are outliers in our culture. The more gregarious and outspoken women, Only Fans celebrities like Kate Nash and Lily Allen, are pushed out as a positive example for us when most women are not like this, and do not see sexuality this way. It’s the tyranny of the minority.
There’s also a clear trade off when it comes to Only Fans that needs to be mentioned. In the long term, it makes life more difficult for women. Not easier. While the vast majority of women will make very little money (most will earn a pittance, and the creator distribution is worse than even podcasts) those who will make a reasonable amount are making obvious trade-offs. It’s incredibly short-term thinking. The things that do make women fulfilled and bring joy – like marriage and motherhood and achievement – are going to be immediately harder for someone who’s had an Only Fans account because most men don’t want to date an Only Fans girl. There are huge reputational risks for earning a tiny amount of money. It is, objectively, a crazy thing to do.
After all, what is appealing or special to a man about being with a girl like Lilly Phillips, who, as beautiful as she may be, has slept with over one thousand other men. Only Fans is not today or tomorrow – like the Late Late implies. It’s forever. There’s an idea that you can do this kind of thing for a while, then when you’re slightly older, you automatically find a partner and have children and can forget all about it. But Only Fans is a form of archeological evidence that women have to carry around with them for the rest of their lives. The pornographic content doesn’t just disappear – shouldn’t we at least remind young women that they have the rest of their lives ahead of them?
The one-sided, unquestioning coverage and promotion of Only Fans by RTÉ is a serious programming error, and one we shouldn’t have to pay for with our licence fee.