Until last week, Leonid Radvinsky was completely unknown to the general public. His name and photograph emerged in the coverage of his death — from cancer, at the age of 43.
The young entrepreneur had become a billionaire eight years ago when he bought and scaled an online platform for the sexual exploitation of women. The pandemic did him a favour, and his product became one of the most recognised brands in the world: OnlyFans.
The platform also caught another tailwind. It emerged at a moment when rights have become confused with entitlements, and when a nakedly transactional worldview has been applied to even the most intimate dimensions of human life. Can’t have a child? Rent a woman as a surrogate. Don’t want a real relationship? Subscribe, and you’ll have a digital sexual companion who will obediently satisfy your every desire.
In all of this commerce, women’s position hasn’t changed at all. They remain exactly where the patriarchal system has always placed them. So the prostitution of the new age needed repackaging — a relaunch that would make it look less repellent than it actually is.
Enter the language of sex work and the mythology of empowerment — deployed not to protect women, but to lure them. To sand down the stigma of selling your body, just enough to make it palatable.
That was the wrapper OnlyFans came in: bodily autonomy, economic independence, self-determination. When the pandemic hit, it was sold to women as a quick and easy route to cash, and to men as a chance for “contactless” paid sex. The growth was explosive — up more than 500% from the start of the pandemic, with the upward trend continuing to this day.
The “easy money” narrative was the first thing to collapse. According to available analyses, the top 1% of content creators absorb around a third of all revenue, while the top 10% take three quarters. The vast majority of women producing live pornographic content for the platform earn next to nothing. The only way to increase earnings is to escalate — to produce harder, more extreme material. The platform’s most successful streamers have resorted, for example, to videos depicting gang rape and simulated strangulation.
Testimonies from women who tried this “freedom” describe patterns of psychological deterioration, serious trauma, and social isolation. Reports are also growing of women coerced by partners and pimps into joining the platform — confirming that, whatever the new branding says, prostitution is everything we have always known it to be.
Leonid Radvinsky didn’t invent anything new. What he did — with considerable success — was modernise the oldest system of exploitation in the world. And sell it as progressive and liberal. A trade built on the most conservative, most retrograde ideas about women that have ever existed.
