That has changed, he believes, because of social media showing different expressions of heterosexuality
He doesn’t think there would have been many heterosexual lads 20 or even ten years ago that would have marketed explicit content of themselves to a gay audience. “It can be terrible,” he says, “because you can compare yourself to someone driving a Ferrari and be like why am I not living that life, but it can liberate you to do something you have felt that you have always wanted to do”.
OnlyFans offers people with no pornography experience an opportunity to market their bodies. For instance, Danny Blue, who has over 800 subscribers to his OnlyFans account, works full time in construction. At $ a subscriber he makes enough from OnlyFans to cover his rent, bills, and car, meaning that he saves all the money he makes as a digger operator. Like Ryan, Danny’s following was built through social media. A video shared to his 100k Twitter followers of him masturbating in his digger has been viewed over one million times.
It’s not just in his DMs and on forums either: “You get the people that are not your friends that have a whisper and judge you about it.” Before the first video was filmed, he knew that he would be thought to be gay. “Using dildos and that, it’s obvious people are going to question (my sexuality) and I’d be silly to think they wouldn’t. It was definitely something I was aware of.” Yet, he went ahead nonetheless. Refreshingly, despite being heterosexual, he shrugged that someone might think he was gay. In his words: “At the end of the day, I work hard and earn a lot of money doing what I do – why not.”
Danny’s content is more explicit than Ryan’s – Danny performs with sex toys – and because of this, he has the unusual experience of being a heterosexual man subject to homophobic abuse
It took Aaron McCleod, who is a full time electrician, over a year of thinking to make his decision to set up his OnlyFans account – his first post was three weeks ago.