A young woman who was “depressed and broken” after joining OnlyFans as an 18-year-old has warned teenagers that there is nothing “empowering” about pornography.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Charlotte Divine explained it was the lure of money that first tempted her to share explicit photos of herself on the platform and that she was soon earning up to £15,000 a month. Although she ‘brainwashed’ herself to think it was okay, it led to a drug addiction in an attempt to escape her unhappiness.
Now, after quitting drugs and leaving pornography behind, she struggles knowing that her videos have been uploaded to websites where she can never remove them.
‘Disgusting’
Charlotte warned that due to “the kind of content they’re being fed, young girls today might think – as I did – that their looks and sexual currency are the most important things about them, which is a dangerous lie”.
She said pornography is “warping what young men expect from relationships”, and “there’s nothing empowering about spending all your time messaging hundreds of men aged 40 to 50, men who are old enough to be your father.
“You get messages from men who are telling you directly that they’re cheating on their wives and they’ve got two kids, and you never feel OK with that. You’ll get creepy men who say ‘you remind me of my daughter’. What’s empowering about that? It’s disgusting.”
‘All a lie’
Charlotte said: “The person who I want to hear my story is the girl who is thinking about signing up to OnlyFans. It’s all a lie.”
She warned that OnlyFans influencers “deliberately promote an aspirational lifestyle on other platforms, like TikTok,” evading restrictions on inappropriate content, leading teenagers to be potentially “sucked into making pornographic content, as I was”.
“The shadow of the past three years will stretch far into my future. I want a husband someday, and I’ll have to tell him and, potentially, his family.
“I wanted to be a teacher, but now I can’t. I know I can’t really get any sort of proper job – I have a three-and-a-half-year gap on my CV, so I don’t know what I’d say to an employer.
“But I’m grateful I found the strength to shut down my OnlyFans page and delete my social media”.
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