OnlyFans offers a way of making money for differently abled bodies, without needing to leave the house. Petra Daniels, a 68-year-old former actor, got into webcamming after falling over on her way to work in 1999. She developed frozen shoulder, which turned into arthritis. For a while, she sat around in her apartment, depressed and out of work. Then she saw an ad in the paper looking for a cam girl. “Boom, boom, boom,” she said, “that’s how it all started.”
When the pandemic hit, she launched an OnlyFans account. She’d dress up in wigs and stockings and neon crotchless tights, setting up her camera on timer and sprawling herself over her sofa in seductive poses. Sometimes she’d act out characters, at her fans’ requests. “They love the ‘mommy,’” she said. “Today, I have to do a custom video for guy and he wants ‘auntie’.”
Petra notices a vast difference between how she is perceived on and off OnlyFans. “When I go on dating sites, it makes me feel worse about myself than I ever have in my life,” she said. “Guys, don’t look at me.” But on OnlyFans, things are different. “I have all these intricate relationships,” she said, “so much desire!” Her fans will shower her in compliment after compliment — “‘you’re God’s gift,’ and ‘I can’t believe you’re not married,’ and all of that!” OnlyFans feels like a parallel world — a world in which she is seen, respected and desired.
In her essay ‘The Double Standard of Aging,’ Susan Sontag explores how a “visceral horror felt at aging female flesh” is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” she wrote, “the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place.” Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms.
Michelle reckons that it’s precisely her age that attracts her fans. The parts of herself that she grew up hating — “stretch marks, hanging boobs, fat butt” — is exactly what her fans adore. OnlyFans has taught her “that it’s okay to be my age and be sexual. That it’s okay to be my age and be plump. That it’s okay to be my age and show my stretch marks and my fat.”
“You don’t stop being a sexual human being when you reach a certain age,” Michelle said. “You are born a sexual human being and you continue to be a sexual human being until the day you die” — “Young people need to wrap their head around that.”
I visited Hattie’s apartment four times that winter. One Sunday, she told me that she’d booked a one way ticket to Anguilla. She needed the sun; and a hot pool. Before I left her apartment, she asked me if I could take a painting off her wall and rehang it upside down. Clambering onto her sofa to unhook the frame, I asked her why. She pointed at three orange circles, floating against a wash of dark green. “They either can be falling, or rising,” she said, “depending on how it’s hung.”
“Before it was pessimistic. It has to be optimistic,” she smiled.
“There’s a lightness,” she said, “rising up towards the sun. And I love the sun. Up towards the sky and the clouds and the openness of eternity.”