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What OnlyFans Is Selling
(Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images,Illustration by The Free Press)
The booming adult content site offers titillation. But it also offers so much more.
By Kat Rosenfield
05.17.25 — Weekend Culture
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“I’ve been slapped, hit, spit on,” Courtney said. “I’ve had concussions from the job.”

Courtney is 38 years old and looks like the platonic ideal of a porn star: glossy black hair, pouty lips, inch-long fake eyelashes with heavy winged liner. She has twin nipple piercings and breasts that seem to defy gravity; these might also be fake, but I didn’t ask. She’s been having sex professionally for a while now and joined the adult content platform OnlyFans in 2019, and so you might think she’s telling a cautionary tale about the dangers of pornography.

But that violent workplace she’s talking about isn’t the bedroom where she films her content. It’s the school where she worked as a special ed teacher before quitting to make porn full time.

It was not, as she describes it, a particularly tough call.

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Kat Rosenfield
Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer at The Free Press and author of five novels, including the Edgar-nominated No One Will Miss Her. Prior to joining The Free Press, she was a reporter at MTV News and a columnist at UnHerd, where she wrote about American culture and politics. Her work has also appeared in Vulture, Playboy, The Boston Globe, and Reason, among others.
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