OnlyFans is everywhere right now. Both HBO (Euphoria) and AppleTV (Margo’s Got Money Troubles) aired shows with OnlyFans as a major plot point this year. The platform has gained enough cache in the fashion industry thanks to its vertical that a French menswear designer can debut a capsule collection through it at Paris Fashion Week and have it make complete sense. The creator economy is bigger than ever, and OnlyFans is its most recognizable address. 

But here’s what the think pieces and prestige drama storylines tend to skip: none of this came from nowhere. The infrastructure, the stigma, the business models, and the fight for the right to exist stretch back decades before the first OnlyFans account was created. And right now, two very different cultural artifacts are making that case simultaneously: an HBO documentary about a woman in a crochet bikini who built an empire on public access television and a novel set in the San Fernando Valley at the exact moment the modern pornography industry was being born. 

Allie Rowbottom’s second novel, Lovers XXX, follows two young women, A teenage runaway turned exotic dancer and a juvenile delinquent turned aspiring artist, as their lives spiral in the burgeoning porn industry of the 1970s. More specifically, the story takes place in the San Fernando Valley, which quickly became the capital of American adult entertainment. It’s where the business of filmed sex was professionalized, industrialized, and ultimately, digitized into everything that followed. Rowbottom sets her novel at the moment of one technological shift (film to VHS) and ends it just before the pivot to OnlyFans and creator-led content. That decision was intentional: “That moment needs its own treatment,” she said in a recent interview. 

What Rowbottom is doing in Lovers XXX is the same thing the best cultural criticism does: tracing the line between then and now without pretending the line is straight or simple. Her characters are aspiring artists who end up in porn not because of moral failure but because of structural forces like limited options and access to systems that determine whose labor is valued and whose is consumed. “With each technological shift, each new outlet for selling sex and women’s bodies, a new crop of people got rich, most of them men,” one character observes in the novel. While there has been progress since then, especially given that the CEO of OnlyFans is a woman (Keily Blair), it may not be enough, as adult content creators are still fighting to remain uncensored and fairly compensated. 

While the Valley featured in the novel may have given the adult industry its first real infrastructure, Robin Byrd gave it a human face and political conscience. Unlike Lovers XXX, the story of Robin Byrd is real and is being featured in an HBO documentary, Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story, produced by Sarah Jessica Parker. The documentary highlights Byrd’s historic career running The Robin Byrd Show on Manhattan Public Access Television from 1977 to 1998. The iconic show featured content that had never been seen on television before, including interviews with strippers, sex workers, and queer New Yorkers. She ran phone sex lines and essentially built a direct monetization platform decades before OnlyFans came into existence. 

What Rowbottom’s novel and Byrd’s documentary share, and what the prestige television shows largely miss, is structural honesty. Both ask not “what does this say about the moral character of women who do this work” but “what conditions created this work, who profits from it, and who has always been left holding the consequences.” Those are the harder questions, and they require understanding that the rise of the porn industry, the fight for uncensored content, and OnlyFans are all part of the same story. 

Rowbottom put it plainly: rather than indict another woman for her choices, she asks why that choice was the most profitable or least perilous option available. That reframe from moral judgment to structural analysis is exactly what the current cultural conversation about OnlyFans needs more of.