By Laura Norkin
Cherie DeVille, 48, has been playing “the cougar, the MILF” since the DVD days of porn. She says she’s never made more money — on her own time and terms — than she does on OnlyFans.
She plays a character. Cherie is a louder, hornier version of her at-home self. For simplicity’s sake they share hobbies, like DND, so she can chat smoothly with the fans who pay for her time and consider her a friend. She honed this persona as a film star 16 years ago, working for companies that cast her as a secretary or coach, a “fully adult woman” thanks to the curves and husky voice that kept her out of what she calls the ingénue category. Before there was anywhere else to make a living doing this, she says, the companies “bought and paid for” a fanbase who’d purchase her films and follow her to trade shows hoping for a hug. When digital media lowered the barrier to entry to solopreneur sex work, The Internet’s Stepmom was born.
She says creators like her offer a break from outmoded and oppressive gender norms that “our boys” are desperate for. “What the older-woman fantasy does is alleviate the patriarchal pressure. It says I can be in control, I’ll make the first move. If you don’t know what you’re doing in bed, no problem; I’ll tell you what I want.”
If the celebrities hopping aboard are any indication, this is big business. Everyone from Kate Nash to Cardi B to American Pie’s Shannon Elizabeth joined OnlyFans in the last year. (Elizabeth reportedly made seven figures in her first week.) After receiving high praise on WikiFeet, Lily Allen launched an OF where she gets her nails done on camera. When acting dried up, former teen actress Jessie Cave joined with a hair-brushing niche. She said she made almost $20K on her first day, and felt kind of ashamed.
In May, 52-year-old Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica signed up, telling People she hoped to combat the stigma sexy pics carry and to be the one controlling and benefitting from hers. Baywatch actress Erika Eleniak announced her entry to OF at age 56 in August, telling TMZ “now I’m calling the shots.” Donna Mills, star of the ‘80s soap-drama Knots Landing, joined at age 85, telling US Weekly that everyone can stop asking, she will post videos stomping grapes on her vineyard. Around the same time, TLC’s The Double Lives of Suburban Wives premiered, following six women making “spicy content.” Then a clutch of Colorado-based marmots joined — for money, their handler shamelessly admitted.
What else was going on this summer? Gas prices soared above $70 per tank, and groceries ran the average family more than $1,000 a month. Temperatures hit record highs, as did the cost to cool a home. Gen X workers were increasingly being laid off to never to find work again, while millennials solidified their place as the first generation in American history to be worse-off economically than their parents. It’s not surprising that people are selling feet pics.
It was an unpaid bill that led Evangeline (EV) Parrish (a stage name) to OnlyFans in 2021. “I was working a hellish, demanding job that didn’t pay well and I had a sick cat at the vet. The bill was $1,200, and I didn’t have it,” she says. She told a friend she’d heard of a woman in the UK making thousands per month on OnlyFans, and joked her feet weren’t hideous; he encouraged her to try it. She said she had nothing to lose.
“I posted some awkward, non-nude lingerie photos. The next morning, I had made over $400 in tips.” A busty brunette with Megan Fox coloring, she now calls herself the Southern MILF on several subscription-based sites, and has been in the top 1% of OF earners. She says at almost 60 she’s firmly in the “MILF” category, and happy because it’s so popular. She quit her job, and coyly says she makes enough; “a ton of younger men want to experience an older woman.”
But long days at the body shop aren’t guaranteed to pay the bills. According to independent analytics site OnlyFans Statistics, OnlyFans paid $6.29 billion to creators in 2025 across 5.06 million accounts. Divided evenly, that’s $1,242 per account per year, but it’s not divided evenly. The median model earns closer to $180 per year for her efforts. It’s a pyramid with an astonishingly narrow top; only the top 0.1% make six figures. Cherie DeVille says she was surprised to learn only 5,000 OF creators have ever crossed $1M in total earnings. She doesn’t say if she’s one of them, but she has about 10,000 paying fans.
“Most of our money comes from the middle of the country — the red states,” DeVille says, adding that her sexy mommy schtick, “does enough to reverse these gender role identities, in a gentle and non-threatening way.” Empathizing with the 87% of OnlyFans’s 377 million users who are men, she says, when they come to accounts like hers, “there’s this magical older woman who says you don’t have to be great in bed. That is profoundly relaxing, almost more than it is sexy.” Her work is definitively sexy, explicitly so, but it’s far from relaxing for her. It’s more like a marketing job with no time off.
DeVille says she has a team of about 20 people working on her account, from PR to graphic design, film production, and social posting, and she fills her days chatting with fans (she maintains relationships with around 100), filming custom videos, doing private live streams, keeping up with the many social media accounts that keep her name out there, and coming up with spicy new concepts to one-up the content that’s constantly being leaked “It is as busy as you can tolerate. It will take as much as you are willing to give it,” she says, noting she has fans in every time zone she doesn’t want to lose. “There is no finish point for any day, which is hard for the type A in me — I love a sense of completion.”
An evangelist for the platform, DeVille says, “Onlyfans is like Etsy in that it’s not any one thing.” She shouts out The Jellyfilled Girls, who do sapphic married-couple content, and says you can find anything you’re interested in on social media then decide if you want to subscribe. Her advice to aspiring models and makers is to start with social media, too — your TikTok, YouTube, reddit — saying wherever you build a following, you’ll be able to convert. “If you would like to sell sex, great. If you would like to sell crosstitch, fine. If you would like to sell poems, have at it, my beautiful girlfriends.” She used to be a physical therapist and has a real “if I can do it so can you” ethos, but she lives in LA where celebrity is never just a concept, and her sharp cheekbones and glossy hair suggest she would always be famous.
So why not dip a toe in?
Going public can come at a cost, and it’s not always possible to side-hustle in secret. Parrish started that way to save her cat and when someone spilled, she says she was socially ostracized and left with “zero friends.” DeVille says most of her friends in the business have had to remove an acquaintance (a high school teacher or ex-boyfriend) from their subs.
Sexual harassment, stalking, threats, and vile, dehumanizing comments are commonplace. The platform is also rife with childlike models and videos that look like (or are) CSAM; as with any sex work, trafficking and exploitation are concerns. Models who’ve made it suggest building up your social presence to earn fans, but Instagram bans OnlyFans links and content — Parrish recently lost an account with over 100K followers and had to start from scratch. For the few who manage to make money on OnlyFans, many banks won’t take it. Venmo and Paypal are out.
There’s danger, or at least drama, in the performer-fan relationship. Did you see Sydney Sweeney’s chaotic OnlyFans arc on Euphoria? How about Margot’s Got Money Troubles, or Apple TV’s Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, where a divorced mom gets dangerously over-invested in her relationship with a camboy? DeVille shared the story of one connection with a woman that she felt became unfair to both of them. “I had to get honest about what a realistic relationship is for us. We will not meet in person — I’m not going to lie, we will not. We both need to realize this is a paid, parasocial relationship,” she says bluntly. She tears up remembering a longtime fan who suddenly vanished. Through a friend’s internet sleuthing she learned he’d died; they didn’t know how to mourn. “It’s fantasy in a space that has a foot in reality. And when that gets blurry I don’t think it’s emotionally safe for me or my fans.”
As for the yes, mother moment we find ourselves in, DeVille says it has an expiration date. “I don’t think the MILF trope is going to be relevant in 10 years for positive reasons. What I’m seeing with my new little Gen Z colleagues is that age and gender aren’t that important, and women’s value doesn’t end with menopause, doesn’t end when we get crow’s feet or at the end of child-bearing years.” As a result, she says, there will just be more older women in all kinds of porn. “And just as we as a society have always found older men hot, as we see misogyny decrease, women will be silver foxes as well.”