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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.

Normally rich people never get any more than a very very minor amount of sympathy when they die, not just on Reddit but anywhere, unless they are entertainers (including athletes). There are rare exceptions, for example extremely beloved politicians.

But by and large, the public simply will not have sympathy for a rich non-entertainer who dies young. This is not just a Reddit thing, it's almost universal, and not just in the US, but across the world.

So the lack of sympathy for this particular man, I think, doesn't necessarily mean much.

As for OnlyFans, it is to porn what Uber is to taxis. It cuts out the previous middleman and replaces it with a computerized middleman.

I think it's probably a good thing overall for wannabe porn actresses to be able to make porn in their bedrooms without needing pimps or producers. The people who are losing out are the pimps and producers, but I imagine that their reputation for being amoral is likely deserved, so I figure that the benefit to the girls probably outweighs the loss to the pimps and producers.

You're forgetting the margin here. Making something easier incentivizes more of it. It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is who are destined to sell porn no matter what and are either going to be treated well or poorly. There's a large demographic of mostly normal women who go to college and get jobs and, in the absence of OnlyFans, would never become porn actresses because that's kind of a big deal and that's now what they want to do with their life. But if you make it easy, if you advertise it and show them a bunch of young women like themselves getting millions of dollars, they might download the app and start selling nudes for a few hundred bucks to get some extra spending money or pay some bills.

I argue that this is bad for them. The reputational damage, especially considering the possibility of these nudes showing up and damaging their relationships, careers, or children several decades in the future, is not worth the few hundred bucks most of them make doing this. 90%+ of OnlyFans creators would be better off if the app never existed, because they never would have become porn actresses in the first place. I don't think the value gained by the career porn actresses gaining more control over their career is worth the value lost by everyone else.

It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is who are destined to sell porn no matter what

Sadly there is a correlation with women that were sexually abused as children and teens and those engaging in sex work.

That category of women is luckily not a "fixed" percentage. But I do feel that maybe it changes the calculus a bit.