Simulationships: The Economics of Human Mating

If you own a business in a given industry and desire to have any longevity, it stands to reason that you should spend some time thinking about what that industry at a macro level is going to look like in the future, so that you can make adjustments in the business based on your projections- and in order to make informed predictions about the future, it’s often useful to look at historical conditions associated with your industry.

This essay is meant to be an explanation of what I believe will be the future of my industry- the OnlyFans management industry- and just as importantly, some of the events that led to its creation and success. Everything I’m about to say is for the purpose of establishing a chain of reasoning for what follows, so although some of these statements may not seem obviously connected, bear with me until the end and it’ll all come together.

For a majority of recorded history, human mating strategies were fairly linear and uncomplicated. Unless you were a male of extraordinarily high status, options for prospective partners were limited to the individuals in your immediate vicinity, and with few exceptions, you adhered to whatever customs regarding pair-bonding applied, typically the ones prescribed by the dominant religious authority in that region at that time. There were tremendous risks associated with sex- childbirth had a terrifying mortality rate, sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis often led to fatal infections, and there was no social safety net for single parents. To have sex outside of wedlock was, without exaggeration, often a death sentence. Furthermore, there was a social cost associated with violating sexual norms. Promiscuity and failure to form successful pair-bonds were grounds for ostracization, because those behaviors were correctly recognized as damaging to the social cohesion of the community.

This is because when left to their own devices, human mating behavior tends to resemble that of most other primates; females will choose the most desirable males in a given community, and those males will aggregate female mates over time, forming harem-like structures. This system works fine for primates, because if a male who is sexually unsuccessful doesn’t like the system, they can challenge it by engaging in a dominance display with a desirable male. The winner of this dominance display will generally be rewarded with a mate or mates with whom they will procreate, and over time this results in that group of primates iteratively developing traits favorable for reproductive fitness. In short, order is enforced, the most fit candidates for reproduction produce offspring, and the cycle repeats each generation.

In humans, this system doesn’t work so well, because humans have more intricate psychologies, more complex hierarchies, and more sophisticated methods of projecting physical power than apes. It’s essential to remember that sexual psychology is inextricable from reproductive psychology, and no matter how many degrees of abstraction, kink and fetish we have enshrined them in, sexual urges are reproductive urges. Sexual rejection is thus the most painful variety of rejection, because to reject someone sexually is to say “your essential, genetic being is unfit to persist into the future”. Commensurately, when large groups of humans are dissatisfied with the prevailing sexual dynamics of our culture, we don’t lock antlers like deer or pound our chests like gorillas. We do things like form terror cells, invent communism, and kill millions in the name of changing that culture to favor those least fit to survive. 

The leaders of early societies understood this essential truth deeply, so they enshrined it into laws and religions, and wouldn’t you know, in nearly all functional cultures that have survived and proliferated over the last 2 millennia or so, sexual activity was prohibited outside of wedlock (or whatever the equivalent of the marriage custom in a given society was), because it was the best known way to ensure a relatively fair and even distribution of successful pair-bonds. 

However, in recent years, the paradigm has shifted. Changes in culture have made sex outside of committed pair-bonds not only permissible, but the default state of sexual relationships. With the advent of technologies like birth control, contraceptives and safe abortions, the costs of undiscerning sexual behavior are hidden. Make no mistake, however- advances in technology do not suddenly remove all of the psychological costs associated with sexual behavior.

Some essential truths about human behavior are lost to time, because of all the things humans are good at, we are perhaps best at lying to ourselves about our nature. We convince ourselves that through technology, we overcome our base nature- but in many ways, technology acts as an accelerant for our baseness. We’ve gradually eschewed religious conventions in favor of secular scientific ones, dismissing the “old ways” as archaic rules invented by so-called inbred desert-dwellers, but in doing so we have thrown out the proverbial baby with the idiomatic bathwater. If an idea- for instance, the idea that sexual contact should be gated behind committed pair-bonding- survives for millenia, it’s worth taking a moment to consider why that might be the case before we discard it.

While the decline of religion and religious morality and its replacement by secular and civic pseudoreligion has been over a century in the making, and the cultural impacts of this decline have been perceived and documented since the early 20th century, the final nail in the coffin of human mating as we’ve known it occurred in September of 2012. Most people have felt or observed its effects, but few have been able to name its cause. 

I’m talking, of course, about the commercial launch of Tinder. You may object- after all, Tinder was not the first online dating platform (in fact, computer-based dating services have existed since 1965, and Match.com launched in 1995). The app Grindr beat Tinder to market, but was designed for and used nearly exclusively by homosexuals. Tinder was thus the first dating application targeting the heterosexual dating market and designed specifically for the devices we now call smartphones, and in my view, the catalyst for a new sexual revolution.

While I don’t think anecdotes make for a compelling argument, I’m going to take a brief aside here, as those in my age bracket are uniquely positioned to comment on how significant this event was. Tinder launched around the time I came of legal age to take advantage of it, so I and many like me have a very distinct perception of what our romantic and sexual opportunities were immediately before and immediately after its’ launch.

Before Tinder, I rarely found myself in social situations that did not involve my immediate circle of friends and family. I was, accordingly, not what one would consider sexually successful. I am reclusive by nature and rarely found myself at bars, parties, clubs, or other environments where one might encounter the opposite sex. This means that my options for prospective mates were limited to committed relationships, friends (which carried a high risk of damaging interpersonal relationships), school acquaintances, and if I was particularly daring, women I worked with. Accordingly, sex was a relatively rare occurrence, and I had few partners.

After Tinder, my options expanded from these narrow slices of my social milieu to “every human female within a 50 mile radius”. Nearly overnight, I went from finding a partner perhaps once every other month to a new partner every other day with remarkable consistency and very little effort. This is not a brag- I’m not particularly good looking or charming- it was just that easy. It’s worth noting that the Tinder of 2012 was very different from the Tinder of today- it was completely free, if you got a match you were nearly guaranteed to talk to them, and there was a much more even distribution of males to females on the platform due to its novelty. Unless you were hideously deformed or incredibly socially inept, you were going to find someone or someones within a week of downloading the application.

However, over time, Tinder correctly assessed that creating a free dating game where everyone wins, while a phenomenal customer experience, is a terrible business. Accordingly, the design philosophy of the app became oriented around two things: 

First, users should NOT be incentivized form successful pair-bonds- after all, every long term relationship Tinder creates necessarily means the loss of two customers. This means that ideally, you want to serve all users a high number of matches that are appealing enough to keep them coming back, but with low long-term compatibility. Luckily Tinder is not optimized for compatibility at all- the only information you have about other users is their name, age, and a short bio.

Second, users should have as many incentives as possible to spend money on the platform.

Tinder migrated from a fully free model to a “freemium” or “pay to win” model by implementing features like limiting the number of profiles you can see in a day for free accounts. Simultaneously, they added paid features like Boosts, Priority Likes and Super Likes, all of which do fundamentally the same thing- increase the likelihood that other users see, and thus swipe, on your profile. 

This isn’t a complaint- things are the way they are. I’m not the type of person who thinks that women preferring to have sex with more desirable men is some grave moral offense that will lead to the collapse of Western civilization, or calling for some puritanical Return to Tradition. Reproductive psychology is necessarily brutal and unfair, and there will always be haves and have-nots. The die has already been cast, and culture does not generally go backwards. As a civilization, we will adapt to the new sexual paradigm or die. It’s convenient and socially popular to condemn women for exercising their newfound powers of selection because it is unpleasant and unfavorable for most men, but realistically if the circumstances were reversed, if men were 14 times more able to have a series of endless one night stands with highly desirable women than they were to enter a long term relationship with a stinky unemployed anime enthusiast, I assure you we would be picking the former every time.

Women having the upper hand in sexual selection is hardly a new phenomenon- they’ve just never had quite this many options to select FROM. The dynamic playing out as a result of this paradigm is that a small minority of sexually competent men have near-unlimited access to sex. Women who would historically be in monogamous relationships with someone of similar social status now have unmitigated access to highly sexually desirable males with very few perceived consequences. Tinder is in part responsible for the proliferation of this new type of sexual dalliance- which in contemporary parlance is called: the situationship.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, a reminder of where this essay started- throughout nearly all of history, female sexual desire has been artificially suppressed through laws and religious mandates in the hopes of avoiding this exact outcome, because, realistically, the historical consequence of a majority of sexually unsatisfied women is capped at them being disappointed and unhappy, and the potential consequence of a majority of men being excluded from the sexual marketplace is capped somewhere around global thermonuclear holocaust.

As a result of everything we’ve discussed so far, men are having less sex and fewer relationships than ever- and there is an acute and painful awareness of this fact, especially among the less fortunate. We’ve even developed a culturally ubiquitous term for the phenomenon- involuntary celibacy, or incel for short. Inceldom has become a subculture, even spawning new subcultures oriented around self-pleasure like “gooning”, “edging”, et cetera. When men are sexually unsuccessful, that impulse for intimacy does not just disappear. It manifests elsewhere, often as maladaptive sexual behaviors. Remember, we’re talking about sex, and thus by extension reproduction- in this context, maladaptive behavior means anything which might convince the brain into believing that the reproductive impulse is being fulfilled, even though it is not. The brain does not know if you’re copulating with a fertile partner or a silicone replica of one- it only recognizes the flood of neurotransmitters associated with release.

One only needs to look at the condition of contemporary sexual culture and the frequency of anomalous behavior to see that this is true. Since 2012, the number of individuals who self-identify as LGBTQ has over doubled. The incidence of transsexuals went from “I was not able to find any cited scientific studies on the rate of transexualism in the US 2012”** to as many as 1.6 million, or about half a percent of the population in 2024. I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with these behaviors- but it goes without saying that if the objective of all living things is to survive and reproduce, behaviors that guarantee that individuals don’t  reproduce are by definition maladaptive.

However, these particular maladaptive behaviors aren’t the ones I’m interested in- at least until I figure out how to exploit them for profit.

We’re finally at the part where this is relevant to my business- the OnlyFans business. If Tinder gave birth to the situationship, OnlyFans has given birth to a new strata of human mating behavior- the simulationship.

OnlyFans is, at it’s core, the best available tool for extracting value from the sexually unsuccessful. The reason for the explosive growth of the fanpage industry is in no small part due to this rising sexual frustration and subsequent retreat from “real” sex. Due to the raw intensity and urgency of the reproductive urge, besides money, sex is the only commodity for which there is an inexhaustible demand, and those with the skills, knowledge and moral flexibility to provide the best proxy for sex- in this case, the simulationship- are well-positioned to take advantage of this gold rush.

We’re only at the beginning of this revolution- OnlyFans has been around for less than a decade, and is already a multi-billion dollar company. Right now, the standard business model employed by management agencies and content creators is to develop tailored marketing strategies designed to capture audiences across specific sexual and social media niches, then use various forms of social media and dating apps like Tinder and Bumble as funnels for prospective customers to a model’s OnlyFans page. Once there, the prospect, excited for a chance to develop what they believe is a legitimate interpersonal relationship with their favorite microcelebrity, subscribes and is greeted by the model. The objective is to then develop unique parasocial relationships with each customer, understand their desires, and extract as much value from them as possible over the course of their subscription.

However, in the near future, pending more sophisticated generative AI models, human creators won’t be a necessary part of the loop anymore. Even today, I believe that at some level, the customer knows he is being sold a false bill of goods, that the experience he is paying for is not the one he is receiving. At that point, why bother even pretending the girl is real? Wouldn’t having a curated artificial intelligence- a simulated sentient agent who has plumbed every dark recess of your labyrinthine sexual depravity, anticipates your every need before you do, and can take on whatever appearance you desire- be a MORE authentic experience? By disjointing humans from human intimacy altogether, a superior product to the current human model-based system can be achieved at a lower cost to both the producer and the consumer. If you’re not capable of obtaining intimacy from a real woman in real life OR from a model on the internet, why not fully embrace a simulationship with a simulacrum? 

Luckily for humanity, sexual applications of AI are not yet sophisticated enough to create that experience convincingly- but it’s important to be aware of and prepared for this future, because the implications of an entire generation lost to AI girlfriends are much broader and darker than simply lining the pockets of people like me. Imagine the fentanyl epidemic, except instead of junkies, the potential victim pool is every male who owns a smartphone and doesn’t know how to get laid. 

As a final thought exercise, just for a moment, return to the present and put yourself in the shoes of the average or below-average man in the US. You’re 5 foot 9, overweight, work 40 hours a week at a job with few opportunities for advancement and have five figures in debt, which you are unlikely to extricate yourself from. You’re lonely, and you want human companionship, but you don’t have the skills, experience, physical appearance or financial stability to find it. You could spend hours swiping hopelessly on Tinder, competing with thousands of other men for scraps of attention from someone you’re likely not even attracted to- or, you could fire up OnlyFans, subscribe to a model that checks all of your boxes- likely hyperspecific due to overexposure to pornography- and spend the night chatting with her into the wee hours, paying for the privilege of her time, the illusion of intimacy, and a little bit of naughty content.

When you understand that these are the options available to a majority of men, the simulationship doesn’t even sound like that bad of an alternative. Why pay for $40 a month for Tinder Platinum to fight tooth and nail for a date with an overweight single mom when you can pay a fraction of that for a guaranteed online relationship with the girl of your dreams? 

Of course, the relationship with your dream girl is a fabrication, and you’re probably talking to a 40-year-old Pakistani man. But they don’t say ignorance is bliss for nothing.

**I didn’t include this in the video for censorship reasons, but alarmingly, the incidence of forcible rape increased from 27.1 in 100,000 to 36.4 in 100,000 from 2012 to 2013- a 34% increase- and continued to climb steeply to 44.8 in 100,000 as of 2018, where it has declined only nominally since.