OnlyFans Models, The Bible, And Stopping Their Sexathon
“Everything that was good came from Britain” is what my American godfather Joe would often say to me growing up. The best clothing, cars, food, and tableware were all British-made. It is a reputation that has slowly dwindled over the decades as manufacturing has moved east into Asia, leaving behind JCB, Weetabix, and, of course, financial services. Yet there is one further and highly lucrative export we should be far less proud of: OnlyFans.
Even the most innocent-minded consumer of news cannot have escaped the sordid tales surrounding this subscription platform in recent weeks. Known for its mix of dance tutorials, fetish videos (including, apparently, Lily Allen’s feet), and its main attraction—explicit adult content—OnlyFans has become a British-born phenomenon with global consequences.
The site, operating under the company name Fenix International Limited, is a distinctly British affair. Founded in 2016 by Essex brothers, Tim and Thomas Stokely it has around 3 million“content creators” and around 260 million users. The platform has seen huge increases in revenues since the 2020 lockdown, taking £1.3 billion last year. It is thought Tim and Tom sealed profits of over £658 million before tax over that same period. Their Dad, Guy Stokely, who provided the initial £10K loan for the company, now serves as their financial director. Yet, for all its commercial success, it has been the shocking behaviour of three of the OnlyFans models that has dominated headlines in recent days and weeks.
A few days ago, 25-year-old Victoria Thomas Bowen was issued a suspended sentence for dousing Nigel Farage with a banana milkshake back in June. The porn star will have to let down her 22K followers on instagram for a 13-week stint, as she enters one of His Majesties Prisons. She also has to complete community service and pay a fine.
More troubling is 25-year-old Tia Billingham, known by her stage name Bonnie Blue. Bonnie gained infamy for filming encounters with “barely legal” university students aged 18–19. In her most recent spree across British university campuses, she reportedly slept with 158 young men in just two weeks. Bonnie has expressed glee in “taking virginities” and bedding married men on camera. On one occasion, she even boasted about having sexual relations with both a father and his son in quick succession. Her antics have led to bans from Tinder and two Commonwealth countries over grooming concerns. Yet, she was still invited onto Good Morning Britain, where she defended her career choice opposite the pleasantly stern questions of ex actual model Cat Deeley.
The third woman is 23-year-old Lily Phillips who, to the utter amazement of the liberal media, was found crying after having sex with 101 men in a single day. She said her lurid stunt wasn’t for “weak girls” and, despite forgetting all but five of the men—a clear sign of trauma—claimed the whole thing was a warm-up act for something bigger in the new year.
The two girls have clearly been working and planning together. In one Instagram video, they film the feet of 19 men lining a corridor awaiting their moment of degrading pleasure with the “models.” Watching it, I couldn't help but think of a story recounted by Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution of a 15-year-old minor groomed from a local care home, tied down, and brutally raped by around 50 paying, mainly Pakistani customers, in a single night. Witnesses said the men lined the corridors awaiting their turn.
Yet when it comes to Only Fans, we are led to believe something altogether different: it’s consensual, it’s “educational” (to use Bonnie’s word), and it’s “paying bills.” It’s also ambitious. Uncontent with their current notoriety, both girls appear to be involved in a race to the base—not for scaling the highest mountains or traversing the Arctic tundras like the Britons of olden times, like Hillary Scott, but in a quest to sleep with the most number of people in a day. Bonnie Blue has stated her plans to sleep with 950, Phillips 1,000, in Los Angeles in January next year. That’s roughly one man every 45 seconds for 24 hours.
Why write all of this? You may be thinking. To expose it is to promote it, and how can this be helpful for a church that already has a large porn/mastication problem? Is it not shameful to discuss what the wicked do in secret? (Ephesians 5:12). I don’t doubt this, yet at the same time, I fear that unless we give these ladies a proper biblical appraisal, their sin—which is watched by tens of thousands of paying viewers a month and attracts the attention of countless more—will maintain something of an allure to readers if not taken captive by Christ’s word.
The Bible has a word for Only Fans—prostitution. Prostitution is mentioned 36 times in the Old Testament. It is not only prohibited in Levitical law (Leviticus 19:29) and punishable by excommunication but also repeatedly warned against in Proverbs:
For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
but in the end, she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.
Her feet go down to death;
her steps lead straight to the grave. (5:3-5)
Yet the biblical argument goes deeper still. Prostitution is not simply immoral; it is also often used by the prophets as a metaphor for idolatry. The most lurid and obscene passages in the Scriptures on the matter are those of Ezekiel 16 and Ezekiel 23. The first passage tells of a vulnerable baby, despised and discarded, “kicking about in blood,” whom the Lord adopts, cares for, and later marries, adorning her with gold and jewels so that “she became very beautiful and rose to be a queen.” Yet for all the dignity, love, and splendour lavished upon her, this girl trusted in her own beauty and fame and became a prostitute, selling herself to the Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians to satisfy her lusts. Unable to do so, she begins paying her lovers to take her—the “opposite” of prostitution.
Ezekiel 23 rehashes the metaphor, this time using two sisters, and goes into even more graphic detail, specifying:
When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses.
So yes, the Bible can counter the graphicness of OnlyFans, but it does so more profoundly than any content creator ever could, for it tells not only the reality but the end of the tale. And the end is grisly indeed. In a precursor to Romans 1, the prostitute is handed over to her so-called lovers. In the first passage, they raise a mob to stone and hack her to pieces. In the second, her nose and ears are cut off before she is made to drink a cup filled with drunkenness and sorrow, leading to utter desolation and self harm.
The passage is disgusting—it’s meant to be—because idolatry is disgusting, both in its mechanics and spiritual consequences. Ultimately these are passages that deal with Israel’s sin and not before they do modern-day prostitution. But how can one not draw attention to them when faced with a triangle of sordid ambition, disgusting mechanics and gross idolatry.
Putting an end to sordid ambition will be a question I shall address later. But first it is worth addressing the mechanics of these events. Young men, whose libidos are stronger than their logic, are being lured to locations to join a factory line of other males who must pass through passport checks, breathalyzer tests, and lengthy consent forms—managed by Bonnie and Lily’s mothers—before being ushered into a room with one of these girls. In the same way that seeing an abattoir can put someone off their chicken wings, the industrialisation and commodification of sex are causing deep conflict among those who know nothing of God. One of the 101 men who had sex with Lily Phillips was found shaking afterward, incapable of articulating the shame he felt about his actions. Few explained the man's response better than Lois McLatchie Miller, who stated on X “It’s because liberalisation has robbed them of the ability to call out degrading behaviour. “If it’s consensual, it’s great!”. If this is happening now, God only knows how awful the production line will be if they are permitted to attempt their record-breaking feat in January.
However, the man’s inexpressibility speaks of a deeper truth still. In 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses the question of prostitution directly. While Paul could have simply referred to the law and proverbs stated above, he instead chose to make an altogether different argument:
“Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ … You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body.”
Paul’s argument is that when you have sex with someone, you become one with them on a soul level. This is a profound mystery that speaks of Christ and His church, and therefore it is utterly out of place in the context of an OnlyFans live stream.
The spiritual reality is that Bonnie and Lily, along with their male accomplices, are not merely engaging in physical activity, as the adulterous women would have us believe (Proverbs 30:20) but uniting in a way that few can truly articulate. To unite over and over with so many men is to fragment one’s soul into so many pieces that it’s hard to conceive how it can ever be recomposed. Lily has talked about finding her “Mr right” after her sex marathon, but in some senses there will be no Lily left for him. Early this year heavily decorated porn star Kagney Linn Karter was found dead having blown her brains out with a shot gun, aged 36. Her name is added to a list of dozens of porn stars under the age of 40 who died or killed themselves in recent years following their involvement in the adult industry. This is a phenomenon the church is uniquely positioned to explain. It is also something we should not be afraid of legislating about.
“Captured by a better legal framework” doesn’t quite have the ring of Tim Chester’s excellent book, but it is exactly what needs to happen if we are to see an end to these base “sexathons.” Surely, it is not beyond the power of the government to ban OnlyFans on the grounds of “national reputation” or “in the best interests of national marriages.” If that’s too much, surely someone can launch police investigations in England or LA simply to stall the orgy these girls are planning until we can come up with a better plan. As awkward and imperfect as such a law would be, why can’t someone lodge a private member’s bill to put a cap on the number of people sex workers can have sex with in a day? Who knows—it could be used to lessen, if only by an inch, the suffering of the estimated 12,727 slaves, some of them sex slaves, in our country. A new generation of Mary Whitehouses is certainly required, but the sad reality is that the chances of legal change are vanishingly small due to another idol- money.
Perhaps the least taxing piece of research I have done around this sordid piece was on taxation itself. Since 2020, OnlyFans creators have been required to pay VAT at 20%. As annoying as this is for them and their ‘creators’, it amounts to roughly £260 million in the pocket of HMRC each year. How can the state launch an attack on prostitution law when it is benefiting so much from it. Minus an act of God, they can’t and won’t. Which in turns brings be finally to a small piece of legislation in Deuteronomy. In chapter 23:17–18 it states:
“None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult prostitute, and none of the sons of Israel shall be a cult prostitute. You shall not bring the fee of a prostitute or the wages of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in payment for any vow, for both of these are an abomination to the Lord your God.”
As stated elsewhere God’s people should not be involved in prostitution. This includes not just sleeping with OnlyFans creators, but the watching of only fans also. Yet the prohibition goes further still. To use payment received from prostitution in the service of the temple was, according to the old covenant, an abomination. Doesn’t this mean that the money accrued by Bonnie and Lily’s lurid stunt, even if it goes towards schools and roads, is also an abomination? If nothing else the UK should think twice about benefiting from Only fans' money if God is against Onlyfans.
Irrespective of my musings on this particular point, what is clear is God cares about purity. And while sex is great in the context of marriage, Onlyfans are corrupting God’s good design on multiple levels that should not go ignored by individuals, churches and lawmakers alike. This is a zero sum game. If Lily and Bonnie are allowed to proceed, we are all defiled. If they are stopped then harm will be prevented to themselves and others. Surely Christ love compels us to stick an umbrella in the wheels of a town bike when it's gotten out of control.