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Every now and then, the modern world produces a trend so ghastly you can’t help but sit back and think, would a global Islamic Caliphate really be that bad?

One such fad is the sudden growth of OnlyFans, a monthly paid subscription content service, which has turned hefty chunks of the young female population into amateur pornographers.

The premise is simple: start an account, set the price, and then drip-feed content to monthly-paying subscribers.

The site doesn’t exclusively host sex workers; home-baking mothers and some fitness and yoga businesses also use the platform to market their services. But its model is similar to that of once-popular social media site Tumblr; once the porn goes, it’s finished.

The platform has around 17.5 million global users and over 70,000 content creators, who have received over $150 million since its launch. The Huffington Post reported that it has enjoyed a 75 percent spike in new users during the COVID-19 shutdown.

Lots of its users are making a lot of money. Some have so many online admirers that they are able to turn their business into real estate.

Over the Easter weekend, one OnlyFans user tweeted a photo of herself posing in front of a detached suburban house with the caption “say what you want about OnlyFans but I just moved into my dream house at 22.”

And, because memes are the only form of art that the right has excelled at in some 200 years, it was swiftly mocked by various anonymous accounts.

Using the same caption, some users shared photos of homes from popular video games. Another posted the house in Swansea famous for its resemblance to Adolf Hitler.

But it’s not all fun, games and niche internet memes. The reality is that OnlyFans is at its core a destructive concept. With an economy that rarely rewards virtue and hard work, young women are being lured into a line of work that they will likely regret in years to come.

The expansion of the private into the semi-public nature of paywalls is not as secure as the site would like its users to think. Massive content leaks and heartbreaking stories about relatives of models being shown what they upload are common. Last week, a British girl called Lenn Holmes tweeted that someone had sent her paywalled photos to her brother. It received over 4,000 likes.

Men are being harmed, too. A Dazed headline from 2018 claimed OnlyFans is “where porn is more intimate than ever.” Maybe this is true. But porn is to intimacy as a chick-demolishing meat grinder is to deftness.

The sad truth of the matter is that these women aren’t profiteering off their nudity—internet porn scythed away the dollars-for-pixelated-flesh market years ago—but rather the illusion of attachment and closeness that lonely young men all too easily fall for.

Some of the platform’s most popular users will remember to message their clients on their birthdays, or phone them after they have recovered from surgery. They might even know their kids’ names. Many men have duped themselves into believing this faux-intimacy, but if their monthly $20 payments stopped rolling in, I doubt they would still have amateur sex workers asking after their pets.

One OnlyFans model Danii Harwood told The New York Times that “You can get porn for free,” she said, adding: “Guys don’t want to pay for that. They want the opportunity to get to know somebody they’ve seen in a magazine or on social media. I’m like their online girlfriend.”

Some months she earns over $52,000.

These are replacements for the girlfriends that young men might have had in times gone by where young people were more likely to meet, get married and have sex.

There is a pile of depressing evidence to demonstrate that this just isn’t happening as much anymore. Marriage rates in the UK are at their lowest since the 1970s and barely more than half of American adults report that they live with a spouse, the lowest on record. It was at 70 percent in 1967.

And so, young men have turned to commercialized e-girlfriends. Instead of buying a girl they have been dating some flowers, they tip an online model; instead of dates, they watch cam shows by their favorite models.

This makes our world worse in a number of ways and is especially bad if you’re a conservative. Marriage civilizes men, it reduces their likelihood to take risks — not because women work hard to improve men, but rather men realize that maintaining a partner is something to work towards. There is often a significant ‘marriage gap’ in post-election polling, showing married men and women being more likely to vote for right-leaning candidates. Conservative journalist Ed West has written about how the decline of sex and marriage is making liberal women more progressive and conservative men more radical.

One of the most haunting cultural images of the last decade came from Blade Runner 2049, where Ryan Gosling’s character “K” is partnered with a hologram girlfriend, Joi.

K finds solace in a mirage of a deep, interpersonal relationship that is nothing more than an inauthentic transaction in his unfulfilling life. She expects nothing of him and flicks between being both his housewife and seductress.

OnlyFans is a small sample of that world, where the beautiful, natural impulses of affection and attention are being warped by a digital, commercialized lie. K’s life now feels like a possible future.

Conservatives aren’t known for their optimism, but I desperately hope that after the pandemic’s spread has halted and people return to the streets, pubs and clubs, e-models and men with virtual girlfriends abandon the spurious for the actual.

Charlie Peters writes from the UK.