A Florida candidate hoping to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed a massive income tax on Floridians who make money from OnlyFans.
James Fishback, a Republican vying for his party’s nomination in the August primary, wants to impose a 50% tax on Florida’s OnlyFans creators, saying that the loss of income would discourage women from using the platform to display adult, graphic content.
“Women used to aspire to be devoted moms, journalists, doctors, lawyers, nurses, and now they feel like the only way they can get by is by selling their bodies online to men in distant lands,” Fishback said in one television interview, using hyperbole that he has repeated.
OnlyFans creators, who are predominantly women, would have to choose between paying Florida half of what they earn, or “quit doing that and do something that is morally righteous,” Fishback said.
The ethics and effectiveness of “sin taxes” is widely debated, even among people of faith. The Rev. Robert A. Sirico, a Catholic priest and co-founder of the Acton Institute, a Michigan think tank, has argued that sin taxes “should be resisted for economic and moral reasons.”
But they have been a tool of governance in America going back to colonial times and have expanded with each subsequent generation to include the latest forms of vice, such as online porn and e-cigarettes.
As the Utah Legislature considers nearly doubling its tax on conventional and e-cigarettes, the idea of obtaining revenue from adult websites such as OnlyFans can be attractive to policymakers. Alabama, for example, passed such a sin tax last year as part of legislation that also included age verification for minors.
Opposition, however, can come from surprising places, such as the anti-porn crusader Gail Dines, who would like to see sites like OnlyFans shut down, but opposes Fishback’s proposal to tax its creators.
What is OnlyFans?
OnlyFans is a subscription-based platform where people can interact with content creators in real time. While not all of the content is sexually explicit, it’s been estimated that more than two-thirds of it is pornographic.
According to one study of the platform’s demographics, “The (sexually explicit content) accessed through subscriptions varies widely based on creators and can include nude, partially nude, and fully clothed photographs and videos that may or may not involve explicit sex acts. Creators may also provide access to written content (e.g., blog posts, poetry, or erotic stories), participate in “Ask Me Anything” discussions, give options for personal chats with subscribers, or allow subscribers to submit special requests for specific photographs, acts, and scenes."
The British author Louise Perry, a prolific critic of OnlyFans, has written that the platform “offers what should best be understood as the ‘girlfriend experience’ of porn.”
“Successful creators sell not just explicit content, but also the impression of authentic personality. Creators are expected to message users privately, and perhaps remember their birthdays, or their children’s names, thus offering the illusion of intimacy,” Perry wrote for “The New Statesman.”
More devastatingly, Perry says young women chasing money on the site — she estimates that around 4% of British women use it — are hurting their future prospects for life. “OnlyFans is to the marriage market what a criminal record is to the job market,” Perry wrote recently for The Spectator.
Journalist Ed Elson ironically dubbed OnlyFans “the company of the year” for 2025, noting a recent analysis that found Americans spend more on OnlyFans than on ChatGPT and The New York Times combined.
Describing OnlyFans as a “Substack for porn,” Elson said the company is capitalizing on loneliness, and that 378 million people use the platform worldwide.
“Few adult platforms — let alone platforms — have achieved this level of success. In fact, OnlyFans is now one of the most revenue-efficient companies in the world, generating ten times more revenue per employee than Nvidia. We’ve seen many big-name brands in the adult industry like Playboy, Hustler, Pornhub, but nothing like this," Elson wrote.
Why go after the women?
Creators are attracted to the site by the prospect of earning money easily from their home. One Florida woman, Sophie Rain, has reported earning $43 million from the site. (She told People magazine in 2024 that she was paid nearly $5 million in one year by one man.)
But Dines, CEO and founder of the Boston-based nonprofit Culture Reframed, said the vast number of OnlyFans creators earn much less than that — on average less than $200 a month, after the company’s 20% commission — and that’s one reason she was repelled by Fishback’s proposal.
Dines noted that unlike the top earners who make headlines, many OnlyFans creators are struggling to get by.
“A lot of the women are really poor, they’re trying to feed and clothe their children, they’re barely making anything,” Dines said, noting that use of the platform skyrocketed during COVID-19 lockdowns.
A sin tax targeting women feeds into the “old trope” about women being the sinful ones, Dines said. “Why aren’t they going after the owner of these platforms financially, and the users? That’s who you should be taxing.”
The owner of OnlyFans, Ukrainian-American Leonid Radvinsky, has been exploring the sale of the company, which at one point had an estimated value of $8 billion.
The case against sin taxes
In an analysis of the economics of sin taxes, Sirico said the system creates a moral hazard in multiple ways: For example, if the state becomes dependent on the income, it is “in the peculiar and contradictory behavior of professing to discourage certain behaviors while relying on their continuance as a source of revenue.”
Moreover, he says, such taxes disproportionately affect the poor, leaving them with less money for rent, food and clothing, and they can create underground markets, even increasing demand, to name a few potential harms.
In an email, Sirico, president emeritus of the Acton Institute, said he had not been familiar with OnlyFans or Fishback’s proposal, but said, “I commend anyone who seeks to oppose objective immorality and in my own ministry have attempted to do much to discourage and expose it when possible. That said, I am dubious of proposals that attempt to use state functions to achieve moral ends.”
Any attempt to do so ends up promoting, “to a greater or lesser degree, the idea of theocracy,” Sirico said, adding, “Such efforts weaken any momentum for a deeper and more radical transformation of society if people begin to think these kinds of things can be resolved by a legislature.
“It also gives the green light to the state and politicians to expand the sphere of their involvement in places where non-mediating institutions like the church, family and neighborhood associations could better take care of matters. These should be the resources of first resort.”
Sirico said that it’s values, not laws, that drive moral behavior.
“What is needed is a deeper transformation society by first transforming the culture. This is the core problem with sites like OnlyFans: Whether or not the law changes, the hearts and values of people remain untouched. It is only their outer behavior that conforms to the law by means of financial or legal penalties. What needs to be restrained first are people’s values and the actions that flow of these. Laws cannot accomplish this.”
‘Florida is OnlyFans Central’
Fishback’s campaign did not respond to a request for an interview, but he has engaged on the topic on social media, sparring with Rain, the 21-year-old OnlyFans star, who told People magazine, “I don’t need a 31-year-old man telling me I can’t sell my body online.”
Rain also said she is a Christian, that “God knows what I am doing, and I know he is happy with me, that’s the only validation I need.”
Rain has previously told People magazine that she had lost a job because of her OnlyFans account. Responding to a viral video of herself as a child saying she wanted to be “doctor and astronaut” when she grew up, she said, “I mean I could become one now if I wanted.”
Culture Reframed, which is holding a webinar March 19 about how porn culture affects women, has also produced a white paper on OnlyFans, titled “OnlyFans is Only Porn.” Dines, the CEO, wants to see OnlyFans and similar platforms shut down — she sees it as prostitution, and a violation of human rights. “Women should not have to take their clothes off in order to survive, and that means changing the economic system so that it works for the poorest, not the richest.”
But she doesn’t see economic pressure on young women who offer content as the solution. On that point, she and Rain are in agreement.
“Why are you taxing the creator, why not the subscriber?” Rain said, per People. “By that logic, this makes no sense. “Florida is OnlyFans central. You are just going to drive them out of the state, then what?”
But Fishback, despite long odds of winning (his primary opponent is endorsed by President Donald Trump), is undeterred, saying on social media, “As Florida governor, I will not allow a generation of smart and capable young women to sell their bodies online.”