In 2016, Guy Stokely gave his son, Tim, a £10,000 loan to start a company. “Having lent him money to start various other ventures I said ‘Tim, this is going to be the last one,’” Guy told the Financial Times. But Tim paid his dad back within the year: the company he founded was called OnlyFans. 

Tim “would not disclose” to the Times how much money he got when Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukranian who has been owning and running porn sites for more than two decades, bought a majority stake in OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International Limited. Also not mentioned in the Times’s glowing write-up was the fact that Fenix is, shall we say, enormously sus: it generates hundreds of millions in sales and is run by none other than Guy, Tim, and Radvinsky themselves. It is also listed as having a grand total of two employees—at least one of whom must be publicist Daniel Blythe. Blythe “largely helps the men behind [Fenix] avoid interviews,” wrote the New York Times’s Jacob Bernstein. OnlyFans “is run by people whose most apparent trait is opacity,” a diplomatic way of saying they don’t want you to know what they’re up to or why they need a shell company—unless of course it’s to redirect their income and put calls from reporters on hold. 

Now it gets…sus-er. Last week OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content “to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.” Haley McNamara, an activist with the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation, seems to have been among those who helped encourage banks and payment processors to cut ties with the site “because it’s incapable of meaningfully verifying age or consent.” Except—psych!—OnlyFans’ leadership announced today they are reversing course. “we have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community…. OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.”  

In other words, it looks as if the secretive London millionaires worked out some kind of backroom deal with their banker pals, who will now give OnlyFans a pass on the whole not-being-monsters thing. Sure, that sweet Christian girl at the Centre for Whatever and Stuff raised some valid concerns. Nice to see a regular citizen can almost break through the hardened carapace of corruption and indifference that now shields our scabrous ruling elites from conscience and consequences. But in the end the exoskeleton was just too thick. What’s a little child porn and sex trafficking when you’re raking in that sweet sweet dough? 

There is a word for a man who surreptitiously orchestrates the sexual exploitation of women for his own financial gain. There are many words, actually, but the most accurate one is also one of the only ones we can actually print: Tim Stokely is a pimp. Look past the glamor and mystique afforded him by our degraded age, and you will see him and his mafia family for what they are: seedy lowlifes who pant over their greasy lucre in the shadows.  

Normally, behavior this reprehensible and unmanly brings with it a measure of shame and social opprobrium. Normally, too, pimps have to prey on women who are otherwise outcast and vulnerable, who feel they have nowhere and no one else to turn to. But the age of chivalry is gone; the dirtbags run the world now, and they are doing their best to convince all women they have nowhere else to turn. Where else will they find income? And anyway how else will they find meaning and self-worth if not by gaining the maximal level of income possible?  

The feminism which counts women as second-class citizens unless they make up 50% of the workforce, is by definition the feminism which makes money the full measure of a woman’s worth. “No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children,” said Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan in 1975. If success for women—or for anyone, really—is defined by their distance from the home, then the natural conclusion is to succeed in the market at any cost. But of course, there have always been men lying in wait for women who are desperate to enter the market.  

Small wonder, then, that our unctuous overlords have prostrated themselves to a run-of-the-mill wannabe gangster who lures women down dark alleyways like every miserable slimebag who ever stalked the streets before him. In better days, anyone who suggested a scheme as noxious as OnlyFans would be hounded out of town with pitchforks. These days, though, you get a fortune doing things that ought to get you an ostracism. What a farce, what a tragedy, and what a hideous indictment of our ruling class.