SEPTEMBER 26, 2025 | OPINION | By Fiona Frankel
The relationship between women’s sexuality and liberation has and likely will always be littered with controversy. Looking at our grandparents’ generation, female sexual expression was hardly considered and heavily stigmatized. Sex education in the early twentieth century was limited to discussions of anatomy through a purely procreative lens. In the 1950s, the federal government cracked down on sexual expression, most notably through the criminalization of homosexuality, exclusive funding of abstinence-based education and enforcement of anti-obscenity legislation. The former was discussed as a concept complicit in predation towards children, and anti-sodomy laws were weaponized against all forms of same-sex relationships.
Our parents lived through the advent of Madonna in the 1980s, the ‘Queen of Pop’ and an emerging sex symbol. As the best-selling female recording artist of all time, her work both on and off stage embraced sex and sexuality in unprecedented ways, particularly during the AIDS crisis through political advocacy and activism. Popular culture, not including pornography, was a medium that remained sexually stigmatizing, though Madonna’s work had a significant impact in mitigating this. It is worth noting that Black blues artists in the 1920s had been the first to sing about sex, pleasure, and lesbianism, though Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer” received far more attention for the open discussion of religious guilt, innocence and sexual agency due to the combined forces of racism and cultural modernization sixty years later.
Still, at the advent of the twenty-first century, discussion around women’s sexuality remained suppressed. This was exacerbated by the breakdown of the pornography paywall in 2007 with the introduction of Pornhub. Subsequently, virtually anyone could access content depicting women in primarily subservient, degrading roles, often experiencing sexual violence, including choking, hair-pulling and hitting, with no talk of consent. Despite the heavy presence of women in sexual situations in the media and popular culture, there was little conversation about the experience of these women, or any women for that matter. Third-wave feminism, emerging concurrently, rejected the previously understood ‘monolith’ of women fighting for equity and instead recognized the urgent need for intersectionality within the movement, particularly in relation to race. Feminists in the early twenty-first century were ready and willing to deem Pornhub and similar sites as perpetrators of misogyny and violence against women, even as they entered the public sphere of normalization.
Within the past decade, however, a new form of sexual media has gained traction, fracturing the long-held beliefs that united feminists against pornography. In 2015, OnlyFans was launched, gaining traction five years later during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of self-distributed pornography directly from creators. Whereas traditional, in-person sex workers commonly experience stigmatization, discrimination and sexual harassment from clientele, many OnlyFans creators see the platform as an opportunity for safer sex work that protects both their identity and body. It is also incredibly profitable: though the per-subscriber cost remains low at an average of $2.06, some of the most popular creators have made eight-figure profits. Sophie Rain, the site’s most popular active user, generated $43 million within a year of using OnlyFans, known for her self-proclaimed virginal status and religious themes.
With these social and financial incentives, it is unsurprising that the website has emerged as a purported opportunity for female empowerment, epitomizing the ‘girl-boss’ nature that has plagued twenty-first century expressions of feminism. The monetization of women’s sexuality, once viewed as an exploitative practice at the hands of pimps, is now seen as a tool of agency for the empowered modern woman. Admittedly, OnlyFans has enabled many women to break financial barriers they may not have been able to otherwise. Rain, for example, could not have realistically reached this level of economic freedom she now maintains in her former occupation as a waitress.
The consumers on OnlyFans, those paying for content, are overwhelmingly male. With this fact comes the inherent reality that no matter how women’s bodies are presented, they will be objectified and sexualized by many men. Consequently, there is an argument from proponents of OnlyFans that women can and should exploit this objectification, an action that has been framed as women making the system work for them, accepting the unfortunate reality of the patriarchy and utilizing it for financial and societal gain, as men have been doing for centuries. While OnlyFans and the concept of self-distributed pornography may have their drawbacks, their use has been widely viewed as a progressive reclamation of female empowerment.
Yet Rain and similar creators have reached financial liberation that is conditionally dependent upon the exploitation of their bodies and sexuality, emblematic of centuries of gendered commercialization. For centuries, women’s sexuality has been commodified by men, whether through sex slavery, prostitution, media depictions, or adult film content. In a historically sexually repressive Western society, some women have argued that ownership over their own sexual expression is emotionally rewarding, vindicating, and an opportunity to reclaim bodies that have been systemically controlled by others.
This idea echoes elements of the conversation around feminism today, particularly through the media. Pop icon Sabrina Carpenter has been widely celebrated within the past year, with many interpreting her sexually suggestive music and performances as empowering, a celebration of sex and femininity through an innocent exterior. Carpenter’s newly released album, “Man’s Best Friend,” featured a cover of the artist on her hands and knees knelt by a (presumably) man’s standing figure, as he holds her up by a fistful of her hair. Though controversial, much of the public reaction to the cover, particularly from white women, celebrated it as empowering, satirical and unconventional.
However, it is the cover’s exact conventionality that creates its pitfalls. Similar to pornography, especially OnlyFans, it is difficult—if not impossible—for women to be wholly empowered by reenacting the very systems and behaviors used to oppress them. The fistful of blonde, tangled hair on Carpenter’s album cover is not grabbed in isolation; contrarily, it is emblematic of the proliferation of rough sex present in popular culture and adolescent behavior currently, in which violent actions towards women deriving from pornography are bleeding into the mainstream. The same can be said for OnlyFans, in which women can profit off of men’s sexual desire while conversely making themselves, once again, financially dependent upon male consumption of their sexuality.
These representations claiming to celebrate women’s pleasure have alternatively commodified bodies that are and have been systemically attacked by reproductive health barriers. They have repackaged sexual exploitation as empowerment, consequently characterizing any critique of practices as anti-feminist, kink-shaming and prudish. This has driven an overall deprioritization of emotional connection as it relates to sex, influencing the proliferation of hookup culture among teens and young adults.
Particularly concerning media representation, sexual expression that depicts such behavior does not exist within a vacuum. Purportedly feminist pornographic representations of erotic asphyxiation, hair pulling, and a myriad of other tools of sexual violence are inherently perpetuating this conduct as the norm, when it is anything but. In a study comparing undergraduate women who have been repeatedly choked to those who had not, neuroscientists at the American Academy of Neurology found that the former showed a reduction in cortical folding in the brain. Additionally, they exemplified widespread cortical thickening associated with an elevated risk of later-onset mental illness. “In completing simple memory tasks, their brains had to work far harder than the control group, recruiting from more regions to achieve the same level of accuracy.”
It is this very behavior that is currently being practiced across Pornhub and XVideos, and simultaneously in the beds of many high school and college students. As the United States emerges from its historically shameful stigma surrounding sex, it has fallen into an overcorrective system in which the structures once used to oppress and control women have been rebranded as empowering, when they are, in fact, quite the opposite. The solutions to a history littered with homophobia, religious persecution, and abstinence-only education will not come from oversexualized depictions of women through media and behavior. In reality, these practices are actively disempowering, stripping women of the autonomy fought for during three waves of feminism and erasing the intersectionality pivotal to sexual and feminist liberation.