I liked the idea that my primary duty as an Onlyfans charlatan should be to comfort the distressed rather than cajole the sexually frustrated into purchasing expensive “nude and lewd” content. But I balked when the founder suggested I start as his intern, an arrangement he suspected would lead to weeks of unpaid work. I didn’t want to end up like many of my peers on r/OnlyFansChatter, who criticized slackers in angry posts full of all-caps text.
Good news finally arrived in the form of a kind email from an agency representative I’ll call Janko. After confirming that he would be willing to work for $5 an hour plus a 0.5 percent sales commission, Janko had me take a brief test. The most complicated of the three short-answer questions asked me to imagine that he was chatting with a 34-year-old construction inspector, a lonely virgin and a cat owner. If this man were going on and on about how much he hates his job, how could he steer our conversation in a happier direction?
I remembered something that Bel, the Argentinian charlatan, had told me about her way of approaching such situations. A veteran fan fiction writer about the yakuza In addition to being a connoisseur of video games and erotic audio stories, Bel had a great idea of how to get a conversation back on track. “You can say, ‘Oh, I had a really hot dream,'” she said, “or, ‘Oh, I just watched this porn video.’ And you guide the conversation from there.”
I took the first of Bel’s recommended approaches, keeping in mind that my client seemed to be a sensitive soul. I told the subscriber that I had dreamed about him cooking for me in his apartment while I snuggled on the couch with his cat. “And he was watching you in the kitchen making me dinner, except now you were wearing something different: those gray sweatpants that really showed off your body,” I wrote. “I felt very happy at that moment.”
Janko declared himself a fan of my embarrassing work, a small validation that I enjoyed it too much. However, that praise was followed by a rude surprise: he had no job to give me. His agency had vetted me so I could be placed in the recruiting pool of a completely different agency, a firm that manages some of the biggest accounts on Onlyfans. So I couldn’t get to work right away, but instead was admitted to a Discord server along with many other candidates from around the world. It was there that we would receive the training and testing necessary to become conversationalists of the type of superstar models who have over a million followers on Instagram and TikTok.
“We wish you luck and the only advice I have for you is to be free to be greedy and push sales as much as you can,” Janko wrote. “We like the approach you have and have high hopes for you.”
ANIMATION: EMILY LÓPEZ; FAKE IMAGES
there was supposedly Three steps to getting a full-time job at the big agency. The first was to attend a series of tutorials led by one of the company directors, a master conversationalist I’ll call Luka. Then he would have to take yet another test, a longer, more in-depth version of the one he had passed with Janko. If I scored high enough, I would be assigned to shadow some accomplished charlatans as they handled important accounts. Once I had watched some of these professionals operate in real time, I would eventually be assigned an eight-hour shift.
At the beginning of my initial training session, conducted in a Discord voice channel, Luka distributed a link to a Google document containing his collected wisdom on the topic of chat. It included a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, identified as an American president: “Potential is untapped; when dealing with PEOPLE, you may never know what is behind the next conversation.”