Ari Kytsya has been posting some fire collabs lately. Urban Decay. Playboy. Every cutesy reel with her golden retriever rapper boyfriend, Yung Gravy.
We’re thrilled to see an OF creator’s star rise on mainstream vanilla collabs. Of course, Ari isn’t known only for her makeup looks and cheeky Instagram content. As she loves to remind us: “I’m a bop, I’m a mattress actress.”
Her latest collab on OnlyFans stars none other than Bop House’s Camilla Araujo. The many teaser reels leading up to the release of the collab suggested a steamy girl-girl interaction that leaves both of them breathless and sweaty with their eyelashes falling off. To add even more intrigue, the video is narrated by none other than Yung Gravy, who features in all the promo content on social media.
I didn’t mince my words about Ari’s collab with Girthmasterr. And so when I got wind of this collab, I wasn’t exactly ready to pay to unlock the DM. Once teased, twice shy.
Fellow OF creator Unashamed Ash did the Lord’s work so we don’t have to. And she took to TikTok to critique the video, which is 8 minutes long and costs $45. In her words: They sold us champagne and served sparkling water. In a subsequent video, Ash backed down on her critique as she shot her shot to be Ari’s next collab – we’ll see.
Creators have the right to set their own pricing and determine what they will and won’t do. We’re not saying anything otherwise, and that’s not the point. We want to support our favorite creators, but we don’t want to feel gaslit, misled, or duped when their self-directed product doesn’t live up to their self-directed marketing. Our expectations don’t come from nowhere; they come from the creator’s own content. And when a single piece of content is priced much higher than access to an entire premium porn site for a whole month, it’s understandable that viewers would have buyer’s remorse.
Although “OnlyFans” is cultural shorthand for amateur porn, it’s understood that not everything on the platform is pornographic in nature – but Ari Kytsya brands herself that way. For a “mattress actress” whose Reels mention things like riding the jet ski with Yung Gravy while he’s fully inserted and the Pantone color of her pussy, it’s fair to suggest that fans expect that her most premium (read: expensive) content will be explicit. Her fake-surprise at the backlash seems to be another marketing tactic: make yourself look like the victim, and get the girlies in the comments to tell you to “charge your worth and ignore the haters.”
Is Ari really worth the price she claims she is, or is she trying to make sure she can still flaunt the luxury lifestyle she flashes around on social media? Ari makes no bones about showing off everything she purchases for herself with the money coming in from her subscribers, but then turns around and consistently produces content that, to be frank, isn’t worth giving up two week’s worth of Starbucks orders.
There’s something else that rubs me wrong about Ari that I couldn’t put my finger on until I had that interaction with an acquaintance from high school. You know the one. Some girl you haven’t spoken to since the night of graduation who slides into your DMs with a “hey girl, I saw you were having a rough time, hope you’re ok! Anyhow, do you want to be your own boss? I have a great business opportunity for you!” and then regales you (willing listener or no) with tales of how much money she’s earned selling essential oils/nail wraps/fish eyelashes. Ari does the same thing, except what she’s hawking isn’t supplements. She’s selling other women — often teens— on the lifestyle that her OnlyFans is bankrolling, and she’s trying to make it look easy. Her target market? Women her age or younger. She’s only 24, and makeup tutorials are her thing, so her following is packed with impressionable teenagers. Teens are still forming their idea of what it means to be a human in the world. They haven’t lived long enough to understand that the internet is forever, and that an attempted career in adult content creation is something that will never go away. When they see this person whose makeup tutorials they love flaunting the lifestyle that they’ve funded from being a “mattress actress,” is it any wonder that so many teens are eagerly counting down the days until their 18th birthdays thinking they’ll make bank on day one?
To be clear, there is NOTHING WRONG with being an adult content creator. However, the decision to become one shouldn’t be presented as THE THING to do for easy money to young’ins whose brains are still being built in 3rd period geometry class.
We’re not in 2018 anymore, Ari. You can only cry “what do you expect, I’m an amateur!” after charging premium pricing for lackluster content so many times, while also trying to recruit minors who will join the moment they blow out the candles on their 18th birthday. Either put the work in to create content that is worth the price tag you’re putting on it, or the audience you were counting on bankrolling your career and lifestyle is going to bounce.
