Buying intimacy: Spending careers and the moral accounting of paying for attention on OnlyFans

Research on OnlyFans has concentrated on the production side of the platform. This article turns to the demand side, drawing on fifteen interviews with paying subscribers in France, Belgium and Switzerland (2025) to analyse subscription as a consumption practice. Its central finding is a moral hierarchy of purchases: within the masculine common sense our interviewees report, buying sex is a legible transaction while buying attention is a failure of masculinity. The hierarchy is consequential, because attention is what the platform actually sells; subscribers therefore cannot name the component of the service they most pay for, and protect the transaction by a wilful ignorance of how the intimacy they buy is produced. A second finding concerns money: subscribers mark expenditure with licit cover meanings, stock investments or a car-repair loan, in an operation we call camouflage earmarking, and bear the cost of that concealment themselves. A third concerns escalation, reported by nine of the fifteen: where it occurs it takes the form of a spending career rather than a psychological slope, its stages recurring in a stable order and each corresponding to a distinct monetisation device. Which subscribers escalate is a question our material cannot settle. The article extends the sociology of the purchase of intimacy to a market in which the consumer knows the relationship is manufactured and pays precisely so as not to have to know more.