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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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So onlyfans owner has died of cancer.

OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky dies of cancer at 43 Under his ownership, OnlyFans turned from a platform that once avoided explicit ⁠content into an adults-only phenomenon with more than 300 million users and over $1 billion in annual revenue, powered by erotic performers and celebrity influencers.

Which means that in the next 72 hours we will hear a lot of hot takes about onlyfans. Then it will be Trump all over again.

One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone. The guy may have been the most exposed to culture war dude in the world - some hate him because of onlyfans, some hate him because he is jewish and aipac donor.

For onlyfans - I don't think this is boon for humanity. And I think in a way it is just Sports Betting but for women. Mild to severe ruin of your life for the slim chance to make it big. There could be such things as too many creators, too many influences, too many habibis living in Dubai and Bali.

IMO OnlyFans is to women what video game lootboxes / sportsbetting are to men. Deep in male nature is the desire to seek fortune through competition / warring, and deep in female nature is the desire to present themselves for sex and obtain resources from the wealthy. These are primitive drives, millions of years old, predating modern human evolution. In both instances it triggers an urge that can overpower rational risk-reward calculation in many people. These things should be banned just like cocaine is banned. They are physiologically the same as cocaine. Cocaine is an endogenous dopamine hack, OF / gambling are exogenous dopamine hacks.

I mean, the 'issue' is that many people can use cocaine and not be addicted, not have it screw up their life, and treat it like a party drug when they're out having fun.

Likewise with sex. I honestly believe there's some subset of women who can be 'happy whores' and generally enjoy promiscuity without it dragging other aspects of their life down. A small subset.

So you have some that aren't debilitated by the 'mere' availability of the vice, and arguably their life is enhanced by using it on occasion for fun.

And then you have a larger group that would be debilitated but if there's enough friction to obtain their vice, they won't bother.

But the dishonesty is usually downplaying the impact the vice has on the second group and emphasizing the interests of the first group to promote universal availability, and at the very least enable various workarounds for the second group even if we DO try to regulate it.

My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."

In practice, everything seems to trend towards universal availability UNLESS you ban and aggressively enforce rules against the vice.

Likewise with sex. I honestly believe there's some subset of women who can be 'happy whores' and generally enjoy promiscuity without it dragging other aspects of their life down. A small subset.

Women tend to age out of it, in my experience. The majority of women with high body counts usually end up snagging a man at some point, and mostly seem content to be monogamous. Look at my first ex from med school, she was well known to be... promiscuous (I don't know if she ever cheated on me, but there were rumors). She slept around with a concerning number of men (by Indian standards) and had a kink for East Asian-looking dudes (Nepali, Assamese etc, India is diverse). Yet my Instagram feed was cursed by images of her recent engagement to another doctor. I chortled at how butt ugly he is, and how much weight she's gained, but hey, he's a surgical resident and seems wealthy enough. I'm most surprised by the fact that she didn't marry someone who looks like her type.

(Her mom was a gyno, and had a reputation of her own)

In general, the costs of early promiscuity in women are overrated. It's quite easy to hide or suppress body counts, unless you're on record as a prostitute or pornstar. And even then, there are men who are desperate enough to marry you, though they might be a little far from ideal.

Dated a girl when I first moved to my current town who made money on the side as a professional domme.

Showed me her website and everything.

I immediately determined that I wouldn't be marrying her, but being new in town and her being fun to hang out with meant I kept having her around. She also was a REALLY talented singer. Had a hilarious 'date' where I took her to a Country Karaoke bar, and she couldn't resist getting up there and belting out some classic show tunes, to the audience's confusion.

She moved away about a year later, then did end up marrying a dude. Then they divorced about 2-3 years ago. It appeared amicable.

From what I know of her I think she's genuinely enjoying life, and the traditional path was never going to play out for her anyway.

I think the impacts of promiscuity are unfortunately hard to predict, and will depend on exactly how 'traumatic' some of the experiences are, and each one is basically rolling the dice on sustaining permanent emotional damage. Just like how some people can be moderate smokers their whole lives and never really suffer, and others get throat cancer in their 40's.

So from the side of the male suitor, having knowledge of a woman's body count requires you to accept some level of unavoidable risk if you keep her around.

Pretty much what I argued in May last year, expanded to my second-most popular post on Substack. There are a small subset of women for whom sexual promiscuity and a career in pornography will be a net-positive to their quality of life. For the majority, it will be net-negative.

Interesting. Just followed you on SS.

Yep. And there's probably a way to filter for the women for whom its a minimally harmful diversion/hobby so that they're mainly the ones getting into the sex trades while actively dissuading any other women.

One of the most controversial ideas I've ever had is to hire genetic researchers to identify the 'slut genes' that predict, e.g. hypersexuality, high openness to new experiences, low disgust, and whatever particular brain chemistry it is that makes a woman achieve maximum bliss when she's violating social norms, so we get a profile we can use to identify these women quickly.

And once you've identified that, scour the population for such women then shuttle them away to a particular planned community with very, VERY different norms than your average town (think the exact inverse of an intentional religious community). Then charge men THROUGH THE NOSE to buy property/move there.

Wait, is that just Las Vegas?

I don't think genetic profiling is necessary: these women tend to make themselves known via dyed hair and tattoos.

Nah, too easy to fake or mistake that signal.

I've known more than a handful of women who are UTTERLY NORMAL LOOKING (or maybe just small, discreet signals), and hold down professional careers... and are ridiculously down to clown in some fairly depraved ways when the social context is right. Then clean themselves up and get back to work the next day.

I know there's more of them amongst us who probably haven't been given the opportunity to act out and would leap at it given the chance. But you can't just go around asking them at random, can you. Dating apps might have made it more efficient for them to find outlets, if nothing else.

One sign that does pop up a lot... dead dads. But I think that only interacts with genetic effects.

Do you have their phone numbers?

Yes.

Wait - so that the community would have lots of free sex, or so that all the social-norms-violating women would be reverse psychologized into becoming tradwives?

I'd expect it would be a lot of free sex, swinging, actual harems, and probably some dudes getting killed by other dudes over romantic beefs.

But its either going to succeed on its own merits and help quarantine the hypersexuals from the larger population, or it becomes a helpful cautionary tale you can point out to the 'normal' women.

Imagine taking freshly graduated 18 year old girls on a guided safari through the streets of Orgyville (in an armored bus, mind) to 'scare them straight' about the realities of unrestrained male and female sexuality before sending them off to college.

And for those girls who find the experience appealing, have them spit in a cup and after the test results come back, send them their invite in the mail 2 weeks later.

Yes, I'm proposing recreating the towns of Soddom and Gommorah from the classic Biblical cautionary tale "God smites the sin-riddled towns of Soddom and Gommorah."

I don't know about God, but I could think of a whole bunch of men who would want to smite this town, for pricing them out of happy whores they could have otherwise dated organically.

You could have a lottery to move in, then a whole range of premuim passes to stuff into lootboxes for those who want to purchase extra chances. If you're exploiting primal drives, might as well exploit them to the max.

You know, sure. Why NOT add in a gambling addiction as a requirement to enter.

Likewise, airdrop pallets of uncut cocaine in on a weekly basis.

Then once a year have a 'purge night' which is broadcast to the rest of the country on PPV.

This'll help clear space for more dudes to move in.

My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."

But isn't this "friction" what causes the vice to be be debilitating in the first place? There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc. It's not the actual sex that directly ruins women's lives in the way that doing too much cocaine will physically kill you, it's the very same negative consequences which, yes, also serve the prosocial function of warning most away from that lifestyle.

if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc.

I disagree. I think the stigma is the effect, not the cause, and the cause is biological, not social, in nature.

The stigma exists for a reason, it didn't just emerge from the ether.

There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma

Hard disagree. Most men (most "male people", if we're still doing the trans-inclusive thing) see a boost to their self-esteem the morning after a one-night stand, while most women see a decrease to theirs. Claim that this is purely the result of social stigma, internalised misogyny, internalised slut-shaming etc. all you like: from an evolutionary perspective, I don't think it's hard to understand why the sex which does the impregnating would feel good after carrying out the act which is a reliable evolutionary proxy for impregnating, while the sex getting impregnated would feel bad after doing that act without extracting commitment from the impregnater.

But we're not talking about one-night stands; we're talking about nude pics and camgirls. Even taking the innateness of the feeling you describe for granted it's nonobvious that the evo-psych dynamic would translate to that kind of thing - indeed someone upthread argued the opposite, that being camgirls makes women feel good about themselves for atavistic reasons because it activates the "I am successfully wooing high-status males" circuits rather than the "I've just had sex" circuits.

Well we're talking about two different things which are loosely correlated, and I'm basically just summarising an argument I made elsewhere.

When it comes to promiscuity, I think the proportion of women for whom it is a net-positive is very small. Most women will feel sad the morning after a one-night stand. Stigma and internalised slut-shaming may play some role in this, but I'd hazard a guess the same is true even in free love communes.

When it comes to pornography, among circles of friends, it's generally seen as poor form for a woman to directly tell one of her female friends that she isn't very good-looking: deranged yasslighting seems to be the rule rather than the exception. As a consequence of this, many women end up with an inflated perception of how physically attractive they are, and some decide to open an OnlyFans account on that basis: after all, if you're a 10/10 bad bitch, you're sure to make bank. But they're in for a rude awakening when, after a few months, their account is pulling down somewhere near the median of the OnlyFans income distribution, thousands of dollars below the US minimum wage, and potentially for far more hours worked. No matter how much we end the "social stigma" associated with sex work, if a woman joins a platform in which her expected revenue is heavily correlated with her physical attractiveness, and then she doesn't end up making much money, that's bound to be a disheartening experience. (I think this is what @coffee_enjoyer's comment upthread was arguing: that OnlyFans sells woman a fantasy of being able to use their sex appeal to extract money from wealthy men, but most of these women, by virtue of being insufficiently attractive, are being sold a bill of goods.) It will be an even more disheartening experience if the only way she can make ends meet is by appealing to the fetishes of perverts: I can't imagine anyone feels that good about themselves after a long hard day of producing golden shower videos. And we can talk about "ending the stigma" til the cows come home, but short of a nudist colony, every employer will look a little askance at someone (male or female) if they Google their name and the first result is a photo of their rectum.

I mean more directly. If you can't just order up drugs from an app for immediate delivery, but have to go to a sketchy part of town, with cash, know the right passphrases and handshakes, and STILL risk getting ripped off on occasion. If you can only find prostitutes in the red light district, where its highly shameful to go... these are things that will divert or discourage the average person.

The friction on the back end, that makes it hard to leave the vice, yes, that's also a factor. But we've successfully made it almost frictionless for people to indulge vices, whilst all the standard difficulties of leaving the hole once you've dug it remain, which is probably why things seem sharply WORSE than in previous years.

Same for betting. Getting onto a PPH back in the day required some modicum of effort/connections, plus way more friction with the cash.