Bridget J. Crawford (Pace), OnlyFans, More Than Taxpayers: Toward a Compliance Aesthetic in the Gig Economy:
This Article examines how creators on the subscription-based platform OnlyFans understand and navigate their federal tax obligations, with particular attention to peer-to-peer advice shared in publicly accessible online forums. As independent contractors, OnlyFans creators must track income, manage expenses, and comply with complex self-employment tax rules. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to how these creators talk about taxation or how tax compliance figures into their understanding of their work. This Article argues that tax discourse among OnlyFans creators reflects a distinctive rhetorical and cultural orientation that frames compliance not as a burdensome imposition, but as a meaningful component of professional identity. I call this phenomenon the compliance aesthetic: a self-conscious performance of legitimacy in which adherence to tax and legal norms operates as a claim to moral credibility and economic seriousness in a stigmatized line of work.
Drawing on qualitative analysis of posts from Reddit and the TurboTax Community, the Article shows that creators overwhelmingly seek to comply with tax law. Their discourse is procedural and entrepreneurial rather than resistant, centering on forms, deductions, recordkeeping, and long-term planning. Legitimacy is rarely asserted directly; instead, it is enacted through routine compliance talk that treats taxation as an ordinary feature of running a business. Although stigma and disclosure concerns arise—particularly in relation to family members, financial institutions, and software interfaces—creators navigate these risks strategically rather than retreating from compliance. Across both platforms, creators themselves, not tax professionals, perform the primary interpretive labor, sharing heuristics and normalizing compliance as part of adult economic participation.
The Article proceeds in five parts. Part I provides background on OnlyFans and its economic model. Part II situates the study within literature on gig workers, whose tax discourse often emphasizes confusion or resistance. Part III describes the research design and methodology. Part IV presents the findings through the lens of labor identity and legitimacy. Part V offers normative recommendations for the Internal Revenue Service and tax professionals, arguing that platform-aware guidance should recognize creators as proactive legal actors. In doing so, the Article repositions tax reporting as a site of identity formation, economic self-assertion, and cultural meaning-making among nontraditional workers.
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