When Sophie Rain joined OnlyFans, the “paid subscription” service best known for homemade pornography, she claimed to be 18 years old. She would later admit to shaving two years off her age. After joining OnlyFans, in May 2023 she claims to have earned over $43m in 2024 from posing by swimming pools, suggestively sucking lollipops and flashing the occasional nipple.

Whatever the truth of her age, Rain’s brand depends on projecting an aura of adolescent exploration, continuously blurring the line between innocence and experience. As in a teen movie, you can watch her hanging out at the mall with young friends, browsing for lipsticks. In earlier incarnations, Rain’s marketing offered cruder versions of this pitch. “I may be a virgin, but I’m not that innocent as you might think… FULLY NUDE CONTENT AVAILABLE!!!”, reads an outdated Facebook page.

Now, like most OnlyFans creators, she offers a multi-tier model at different subscription rates. The more you pay, the more you get to see just how technical Sophie Rain’s virginity now is.

Leonid Radvinsky, who died this week at the age of 43, built an empire of $4.7bn by promising young women that they could be the next Sophie Rain – if only they removed enough clothes. Radvinsky started out at 17 by selling passwords to porn sites, five years before he founded a webcam business which featured women stripping off and masturbating. 

But this was just preamble to the enterprise that changed the world’s sexual and commercial lives. In 2018, Radvinsky took a 75 per cent stake in the parent company of OnlyFans, then a niche and largely sexless service which allowed minor celebrities to post content directly for fans. It was Radvinsky who oversaw the site’s transformation into a platform best known for homemade pornography, jumping from 13 million users in 2019 to over 375 million today. It was Radvinsky who crafted the company’s corrupting ethos: not only should every man long for pornography (hardly a new state of affairs), but every woman should long to create it. Thanks to him, pornography is now an aspirational career path.

Spend much time on Sophie Rain’s social media pages, and you’ll find teenage girls posting photographs of themselves in the comments, aping her look and aspiring to live her lifestyle. It’s a world promising easy money, temporary attention and eventual degradation. This is his legacy.

Radvinsky was lucky as well as devious. He took control of OnlyFans just over a year before Covid-19 lockdowns shuttered the world, confining both men and women to their bedrooms. Women, often working freelance and part-time, were most likely to lose work. In the US, women accounted for 54 per cent of job losses, despite only making up 39 per cent of the workforce. Across the world, they were 1.8 times more likely to lose work than men.

Fortunately, Radvinsky was there to step in. OnlyFans stepped up its online advertising, eagerly recruiting new adult performers. The number of new “creators”, most of them female, rose by 42 per cent in the first lockdown. One UK newspaper quoted Lexi, a 36-year-old pole dancer, begging others not to compete with her. “If you’re going to set up a subscription site for a bit of a fun, please don’t. There are people who are using it to try and survive at the moment.”

Radvinsky and his colleagues always tried to divert attention from the economic drivers pushing women into appearing on their platform. CEO Keily Blair has described the company as “feminist”, arguing that “OnlyFans only succeeds when its creators succeed”. Yet, for every newly minted millionaire like Sophie Rain, there are millions of OnlyFans workers struggling to earn the equivalent of a living wage, given the average “creator” pulls in just $180 a month. 

Much of this is down to the machinations of OnlyFans agencies, which operate independently from the company to recruit, manage and exploit teams of women. This is old-school pimping, with all the traditional promises of easy money dissolving later down into the line into threats and blackmail. In 2024, the magazine Cosmopolitan published an investigation which exposed agency workers withholding pay from creators and planning to blackmail performers with the threat of leaking explicit, unaired material. OnlyFans itself takes 20 per cent of creators’ profits; agencies can take up to 60 per cent. Is this empowerment, or more exploitation?

Look at the hours that OnlyFans are expected to put in, and the economics get worse. OnlyFans is a parasocial entity, building the illusion that subscribers enjoy direct relationships with their favourite strippers. This means an expectation of 24/7 availability. Many agencies now employ “chatters”, who pretend to be the pictured performer in order to sext with users round the clock. Many are based in impoverished countries, such as the Philippines. A recent court case found that organised chat “farms” systematically harvest users’ data “to extract maximum financial benefits”.

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. Prostitution and pornography have always been built on exploitation. But it is the very parasocial nature of OnlyFans that makes it so new, and so dangerous. He may only have had 43 years on the planet, but Leonid Radvinsky built a world in which self-sexualisation was just one more step along the influencer’s journey. The illusion that his platform lets women hold the power is built on the oldest misogynistic myth out there: that whether wife or whore, we exist to take men for a financial ride; that female life is easy, as long as you have access to a man’s wallet.

The teenage Leonid Radvinsky made his first money selling access to porn; at an age when teenage girls are already starring on it. Is he worth mourning? There are millions of people more worth our tears.

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