Florida Governor Candidate Proposes 50 Percent Tax on OnlyFans Creator Revenue

"I will not allow a generation of smart and capable young women to sell their bodies online," said Republican gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback.

Politicians proposing extra taxes on pornography purchases or proceeds is nothing new. But Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback's porn tax proposal stands out for the extraordinary paternalism that comes along with it.

"As Florida Governor, I will not allow a generation of smart and capable young women to sell their bodies online," Fishback posted to X on Monday. 

It's standard these days for anti-porn warriors to wring their hands about how porn viewership is corrupting young men and driving up loneliness, or to proclaim to be protecting children, or to claim that all porn performers are victims of human trafficking. So it's almost refreshing to someone crusading against porn on "no hussies allowed" grounds.

At least Fishback, intentionally or not, suggests that online porn creators can be "smart and capable" women who are acting out of their own agency.

He just wants to take that agency away.

Specifically, Fishback is calling for a 50 percent tax on whatever people make via OnlyFans—a platform that has become notorious for connecting sexually explicit content creators with those willing to pay directly for said content, but in fact, creators of all sorts can sell content directly to fans through the platform.

"As Florida governor in year one, I will push for the first of its kind Only Fans Sin Tax," Fishback said in a recent video. "If you are a so-called OnlyFans creator in Florida, you are going to pay 50 percent to the state on whatever you so-called earn on that online degeneracy platform." 

Fishback said the funds collected from his OnlyFans sin tax would be used to fund education, crisis pregnancy centers, and a "mental health czar for men in particular."  

He went on to complain that "toxic masculinity" gets blamed for too many of society's ills when, presumably, everything is the whores' faults. How adorably retro!

"As Florida governor," he continued, "I don't want young women—who could otherwise be mothers raising families, rearing children—I don't want them to be selling their bodies to sick men online."

Well, now I'm confused—are men to blame here or not?

On one level, I don't think we need to take any of this too seriously. Taxing profits from one's legal speech on one platform and not similarly situated platforms is clearly unconstitutional. Florida doesn't even have an income tax, which would at least complicate plans to tax OnlyFans income. And Fishback is a long-shot candidate with some serious baggage.

"A Florida school district 'cut ties' with Fishback, who ran an organization called Incubate Debate, after he 'initiated a romantic relationship' with a 17-year-old student and faced allegations that he harassed her after they broke up, a charge that Fishback has denied," The Spectator reports.

"The odds that Fishback will win the primary are not quite zero, as he's running against Congressman Byron Donalds, who's dogged by insider-trading and proxy-voting scandals," points out the Spectator columnist who goes simply by Cockburn. "Yet Fishback seems to be doing everything he can to lose, generate outrage, or both, calling Donalds, who is black, 'By'rone' on X – as in 'By'rone wants to turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto.'"

So, schlock candidate makes schlock proposal, we all gawk, and that's that, right?

Except I don't think we should be totally dismissive of Fishback's rhetoric, either. After all, there are countless boogey-people he could rail against: critical race theorists; transgender Floridians; proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion; single cat ladies; Planned Parenthood supporters, and so on. Culture warriors, especially in states like Florida, have no shortage of trumped-up villains available to them when they want to make their base salivate.

Fishback's OnlyFans sin tax may never become a reality. But the fact that he's singled out young women who sell sexual content on OnlyFans as a special target of ire—and that he's framing them as the perpetrators of depravity, rather than victims of it—is indicative of a larger shift in the way some segments of the right (and perhaps beyond) have started to talk about sex work and pornography.

After a few decades of people framing sex work as synonymous with sex trafficking, and all sex workers as hapless "survivors," we're beginning to once again see more focus shift to sex workers as vectors of deviance rather than victimhood.

I think one could make a case that this is preferable, from a political standpoint. It is easy to get Democrats and progressives and even people who are broadly libertarian on board with anti-sex and anti-speech regulations or enforcement efforts aimed at saving victims and stopping "sex trafficking." It's easy to get all sorts of normies on board with protecting children from seeing pornography or being solicited for sex. It's much harder to get a broad coalition motivated by the idea that sex workers are sinners and sluts who deserve to be singled out for special punishments until they choose to become trad wives instead.

But from a cultural standpoint, it's not great. It hints at the mainstreaming of a certain sort of sexism, one in which women's lifestyle choices should be public property. It's tied up in the right's increasing comfort with blaming women for falling birth rates and shaming women for failing to live up to vintage ideals of femininity and motherhood.

Fishback may be a fringe candidate, and his 50 percent OnlyFans tax a fringe idea, but the impulses underlying his proposal seem to be getting increasingly less fringe these days.

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