ABOUT THIS EPISODE
For close to 100 years if you were young and beautiful and talented the American Dream had a specific shape. You went to Los Angeles. You waited tables. You sent headshots. You hoped — you prayed — that someone powerful noticed you. A producer. An agent. A studio executive. In the darkest iterations it was someone like Harvey Weinstein: the man with a casting couch and a contract. Access to this dream depended on someone deciding whether you were worth making famous. It’s no secret here’s Carrie Fischer at George Lucas’s tribute in a joke about something that was all too real, saying “I hope I slept with you to get the job because if not who the hell was that guy.”
But the old ways are dying. The new American dream is stranger, more subversive, and depending on your perspective maybe more troubling, than the old one. In some versions it looks like this: a 50 foot woman played by a legitimate celebrity depicting an only fans star while terrorizing an urban area in revealing clothing.
I kid you not. This same scene appears in two different hit shows featuring the DIY porn industry.
No one exemplifies the new celebrity economy better than Sophie Rain. She grew up on food stamps, joined OnlyFans and made ninety-five million dollars. Not from a long standing career. Not with a record deal or a film franchise. Ninety-five million dollars, from her bedroom, talking directly to the people who believed they could gain a sliver of her personal attention. No power broker decided she was worth taking a risk on. It was just her, and the audience, and a platform that takes twenty cents on the dollar. And, yeah, I know we’re talking about pornography here, but we are also talking about fame itself because technological adaptations that happen in that space eventually get adopted everywhere else, too. And something strange is happening on Only Fans.
