When Intimacy Becomes a Transaction

People Pay for Intimacy—and Get Addiction Instead

A few days ago, one of Poland’s entertainment programmes hosted by a well-known media celebrity featured a “star” of an erotic OnlyFans channel. The appearance quickly triggered a storm across the Polish internet, and the comments were overwhelmingly critical. Many argued that this kind of coverage helps normalize the objectification of women and treats emotion and intimacy as commodities.

Presenting this in the language of ‘entrepreneurship’ is simply complicity in a culture that teaches girls and young women that their bodies are products, and that dignity can be converted into reach and bank transfers. When sexualization, loneliness, and emotional deficits become media ‘content,’ it is young people who pay the price, not celebrities.

This is how Krystyna Romanowska—a journalist and writer, the author of dozens of books and articles, including pieces on human relationships published in Holistic News—put it on her Facebook profile.

We are not naming the guest or the programme, because we do not want to amplify a message that reduces a human being to the status of merchandise.

They Pay for Closeness and Lose Far More

Users in Poland spent more than 87,000,000 USD on OnlyFans over the last year, according to summaries of the Wrapped 2025 report. That represents a 19 percent year-on-year increase, placing Poland 6th in Europe and 12th worldwide.

The problem is that this is not just about adult content. The platform sells the illusion of an intimate relationship. That illusion keeps users coming back, spending more, and finding it harder to disconnect. As addiction specialist Dr. Johnelle Smith argues in an analysis published by AddictionResource.net, the mechanism can lead to financial problems, relationship crises, and worsening mental health.

Descriptions like these—of addiction to platforms that manufacture the illusion of closeness and emotion online—appear regularly in expert commentary and specialist analysis. More and more often, researchers and commentators stress that the effects of using OnlyFans on mental and even physical health are serious, and that they affect both sides of the exchange. The consequences burden both the women providing these services and the men consuming them.

Research indexed in PubMed Central has examined OnlyFans users as a distinct group, while broader commentary on subscriber behavior repeatedly links the platform to parasocial attachment, relationship strain, and emotional substitution rather than ordinary entertainment.

Can a society that cares about human dignity use legal tools to limit the reach of a platform like this? And how would it do so? This is not really a question about sex, sexualization, or prying into personal freedom and choice. The deeper question concerns human dignity itself: are we, as a society, willing to accept a system that turns the most intimate sphere of life into a toxic business?

The Illusion of Online Intimacy Pulls People in Fast

Although OnlyFans was created for entirely different purposes, it is now widely known above all for sexually explicit content, and major reporting has long described the platform as one whose growth was driven primarily by pornographic creators. Creators may see the platform as a gold mine, many women as a seemingly easy source of income, and customers as a convenient way to satisfy desire. In reality, as experts have pointed out, it is an illusion of closeness in online form. It is an illusion because the platform exploits users’ basic emotions, plays on them, and manipulates them through mechanisms that feel “real.”

For some men, it functions as a way of coping with loneliness, anxiety, or low self-esteem. But this is not a real human relationship.

Who Spends the Most, and Why

According to research discussed in public-facing analyses of OnlyFans users, subscribers are disproportionately male, often married, and frequently motivated by something more than sexual novelty. Many are looking, above all, to mute loneliness.

A widely cited 2022 study found that OnlyFans users were predominantly white, married men, and later commentary built on that finding to argue that the stereotype of the isolated, single subscriber misses the point.

In an interview with Holistic News, the psychologist Dr. Tomasz Witkowski points to another factor: anonymity, which allows the customer to avoid the consequences of having a secret exposed.

One may suppose that such interactions are not perceived by users themselves as actual betrayal of a partner, because they lack physical contact. It also seems that when a partner finds out about such activity, the consequences of that disclosure are probably less severe than in the case of a classic physical affair with another person.

Dr. Witkowski added this in his conversation with the portal.

OnlyFans and Mental Health

Research available through PubMed Central has pointed to a negative relationship between OnlyFans use and several dimensions of intimate life. Use of the platform has been associated with lower sexual satisfaction and weaker communication in real relationships. It also appears to increase the risk of infidelity. The loneliness, anxiety, and low self-esteem that users try to drown out often come back like a boomerang once the platform session ends.

Relationships Begin to Change

That happens because the illusion of online closeness vanishes the moment the paid time runs out. Yet the harshest effects of online erotic content are often borne by the women themselves—the women who sell their bodies, their time, and sometimes their dignity while performing the oldest profession in a modern form.

Women Pay a High Price

For many of them, OnlyFans is a destructive platform. Women often face verbal abuse from clients, demands they never agreed to, and constant pressure to keep subscribers engaged for as long as possible. The platform’s internal logic works against them. They must remain permanently available, because regularity is rewarded. They also surrender a share of their earnings to the platform. OnlyFans’ widely reported business model pays creators 80 percent and keeps 20 percent for the company.

This form of prostitution may look modern, but it leads to problems women in the sex trade have faced for years: objectification, difficulty building trust, damaged relationships, trouble changing professions, and tension in family life. Even if they hide what they do for a long time, the risk of exposure never disappears.

Leaks of material, identity tracing, and the spread of content beyond the platform are no longer rare. More and more often, they bring real consequences outside the online world. That is why many of these women, after years of doing this work, struggle with serious psychological burdens and find it difficult to begin again.

As Dr. Magdalena Grzyb, a criminologist at Jagiellonian University, told Holistic News:

The exploitation of these women—through the pressure to create ever more extreme content or to do whatever these men demand so they will keep paying—amounts to entering some form of slavery. It is worth adding that these girls often numb themselves with drugs in order to produce that harsh ‘content.’

Sweden Responds, Poland Still Hesitates

Because of the negative consequences the platform has for both customers and the women themselves, some countries have moved to limit or effectively block access to this type of service. As Klub Jagielloński reported, Sweden became one such country when it tightened the law in 2025. Since July 1, 2025, paying someone to perform a specific sexual act online, whether live or remote, has been illegal under Sweden’s extended prohibition on purchasing sexual acts.

In practice, Swedes can no longer buy pornographic services through the platform in the form targeted by the law. This is not a total ban on using the site. More broadly, it is a ban on purchasing sexual services via the internet.

Can People Break Free of It?

Does that mean the platform’s destructive influence cannot be limited? Dr. Tomasz Witkowski suggests that something can restrain the temptation to use a toxic service like this: greater awareness.

What makes partners remain faithful in their relationships is a satisfying sexual life—and probably not only that, but more broadly a satisfying relationship with the other partner. That can be regarded as the best guarantee that people will not seek this kind of attraction outside the relationship.

That was Dr. Witkowski’s conclusion in his conversation with our portal.

Rejecting the use of a platform like this is not about censorship or limiting freedom. It is about something far more uncomfortable: recognizing that when someone pays for another person’s attention, emotion, and intimacy, they support a system that treats human relationships as transactions and reduces women to the role of a product.

That is where the real problem begins, because the connection between OnlyFans and mental health does not end with temporary entertainment. It goes deeper and changes the way people think about closeness and relationships. A mechanism that seems harmless at first can easily turn into addiction, reinforced by what experts increasingly describe as the illusion of online intimacy. How many more millions of dollars will people spend to buy something that only pretends to be closeness and emotion, while in truth it harms another human being?

Read this article in Polish: To tylko wygląda niewinnie. Płacą za bliskość, dostają uzależnienie