He’s had guys who message him through OnlyFans every day for over two years, guys who tell him they’ve just put their kids to bed, that their wives are in the other room. Sometimes he feels bad for them; knows they’re probably lonely and sad. But that’s the game, right?
CJ gets it, because he does the same thing—the vast majority of his own social interaction is mediated through the internet too. He’s only had one serious girlfriend, and that was long distance. He told me he’s not good at talking to strangers face-to-face. He’s not used to doing it that way. Instead, CJ subscribes to other OnlyFans creators, and sometimes messages with them, even though he knows he’s probably not messaging the actual person.
“I know in the back of my head that I’m talking to some middle-aged man” at a subcontracted agency, CJ told me. But he’s okay with buying into the fantasy. Yes, when he messages these people it’s more for companionship than sex—but in that way, CJ told me, “it’s still porn.”
When CJ was growing up outside Seattle, nothing seemed to come easily to him. His two sisters—one younger, one older—kept their heads down, focused on school, found things they were passionate about. For CJ, life was a lot less clear. He was “super dyslexic” and “super ADHD”—diagnosed in third grade. He practiced dance and jumped rope, and that led to some bullying. He didn’t have many friends. He sucked at school. He would always get into arguments with his parents about having no clear direction in life. Recently, a doctor told him he might have Asperger’s.
CJ grew up in the shadow of the internet’s progenitors. Seattle breeds you to be a computer scientist, he said. Microsoft and Google and Amazon were right there, a few miles away from his childhood home. But CJ struggled to figure out how he’d fit into that culture. And yet, the internet was always there for him, less as a potential employer and more as a friend. CJ was a “gargantuan porn addict” by the age of 12. As he went through high school, and OnlyFans came into being, CJ and his friends would dish about stars they had crushes on.
CJ knew he didn’t want to go to college, but he wasn’t sure what else to do. He thought he might try to become a firefighter. He even took classes to prepare for the test. But then he started making content on TikTok —just silly videos with friends, filled with “edgy” teen humor that might get him canceled now. But people seemed to appreciate it.
“When that first 10,000 views hit, it was like the craziest ego boost of all time,” CJ told me. “It went from feeling like I never had any attention in my life to like, holy shit—10,000 people were seeing me be myself. And they all liked it.”
His mom told him that future employers might see that content, so CJ deleted everything and started over, this time with the focus on growth. When CJ was 17, his parents, after much begging, bought him a motorcycle. CJ began filming his rides. Within a month he went from 10,000 followers on TikTok to a million. And as his following grew, so, too, did the number of comments under each of his posts wondering if CJ would start an OnlyFans as soon as he turned 18. He felt conflicted—if he started posting nudes, that would be it for his dream of being a firefighter (it’s harder to get hired if everyone knows you’re a porn star).
