Some Men Pay for Sex. Others Pay for Feedback
On paying to be desired—and sometimes to be destroyed
Sometimes I spend too much time on the internet, and on those days I can experience an overwhelming sense of sadness. There’s so much that needs to be addressed in society, and it feels like the people in power have all of the wrong ideas. One of my favorite tools for coping with this is curiosity. Instead of getting angry at things I can’t control, I try to engage with “simple” questions. For starters, have you ever taken a moment to investigate the activity of men on OnlyFans?
It's no secret at this point, thousands of women have, or are creating OnlyFans accounts to sell explicit content. It may not surprise you that the largest customer base is men. That aside, one of the most profitable sections for many of the women selling content are “Dick Ratings.”
It’s true, there are people on Only fans making a killing off of rating dicks. Here’s how it works. A criminally horny man will find an Only Fans model to project his sexual fantasies on to. After subscribing to her page, he has the option to purchase custom videos, or he can pay a small fee to send a picture of his erect penis to the content creator. She receives it, and then rates it based on whatever criteria she has created for this process. Some men want compliments, others want to be shamed.
But here’s the thing about this new economic stimulant, it’s become so popular that OF models who do not provide this service started getting spammed with unsolicited dick pictures. Leading some to now have in their bio’s “I DON’T DO DICK RATINGS.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to have helped. Eventually Only fans made it so that subscribers would have to pay if they wanted to message their creators.
I first learned about this while at a party. One of the guests, we’ll call her Jen, was bragging about her thriving Only fans career. A bunch of us were interested in the topic and before long, there was a section of the room blocked off so that she could regale us with her experiences.
The dick rating confession wasn’t even the most surprising thing. Apparently most of the women using only fans rely on A.I to chat with their subscribers, some of them even use A.I. to generate their content. While there’s a lot to unpack there, someone else will have to do it, because what had most of us in a chokehold were the dick ratings. Because, why would a man pay a stranger to grade their downstairs area?
With heavy discomfort, and no clear answer in sight, most of us in the room resorted to joking on the men, or calling them creeps. Despite the easy target, Jen didn’t find this amusing at all. Instead she defended the men, arguing that there was nothing wrong with “wanting to feel special.” The room burst into laughter and chaos ensued, but what she said struck a nerve. Our current society does a lot to make the lives of women difficult and dangerous, and while it’s true that men generally benefit from the restrictive structures of patriarchy, we also suffer from it in big and small ways.
While I’ll admit it’s a little funny, a lot of men struggle with anxiety over society’s expectation around how big or small they should be down below. For many, myself included at one time, the size of my junk was vitally important to who I was as a man, which meant I needed to have decent size, or be considered less than.
This obsession is so strong within the manosphere, that there are tools you can purchase online to “extend your length,” and if that doesn’t work, you can now look into surgery. But how do you know if you’re the right size? This isn’t something you can consult with your friends about, and even with romantic partners, there’s a level of vulnerability that is necessary to have this conversation. Vulnerability that men have been told is a threat to their masculinity. So with limited options, I can a hundred percent understand why someone would resort to Only fans.
They pay a small fee, and a beautiful woman tells them how wonderful they are and how “big it is.” To most people that may feel like someone looking to have their ego stroked, and maybe it is, but I think a lot of these men just want to be desired, they want to feel like they’re doing something right, they want to feel special. That might sound crazy to you, but I get it, because the biggest lesson men get from patriarchy is that we are not enough, and because of this, we shouldn’t like ourselves.
I spent an uncomfortable amount of years not liking the person looking back at me in the mirror. That self hatred influenced the way I showed up in the world, it also made me incredibly sad and lonely. I couldn’t express these things outwardly, so I over compensated with aggression, arrogance, and narcissism. Hell, if Onlyfans would have existed when I was 22, I probably would have spent a bunch of money looking for some affirmation as well. I’m in a better place today but that took years of work. The growing dick rating economy tells me that millions of men still need our help, so now we have a choice. We can keep laughing at them, or help them break the chains of their own prisons.
I must confess my only touchpoint with any of this is "Margo's Got Money Troubles." Have you read it? It made the whole thing feel a little lighter than I'm sure these users experience it to be. Thanks for this thoughtful piece, Stanley.