The recent approval of the Valditara bill on informed consent regarding “sexual-affective education” has triggered ferocious reactions. As will be remembered, the law desired by the Minister of Education obtained the final approval from the Senate in early June, after being approved in the Chamber in December 2025. The text prohibits any teaching of sexuality in nursery and primary schools and provides, in middle and high schools, that any activity on eroticism, affection or gender identity can only start with the written and prior consent of parents.
This is, as we know, a topic particularly dear to the political left and even more so to the intellectual left. Which, in fact, has gone on a war footing. Among the many reactions, one format seems to be repeated often: that according to which, once sexual-affective education has been scaled back, the “lesson” to children will be porn, a repository of chauvinism and oppression. «Dear boys and girls», the former director of Repubblica, Carlo Verdelli, wrote for example on So go back to your smartphones, YouPorn will take care of sexual-affective education.”
The same reasoning was expressed in the note by the dem deputies Irene Manzi and Sara Ferrari: «This law condemns a generation to relational illiteracy, abandoning it to the violent and toxic models of social media and online pornography». Social media is full of comments like this. The dichotomy appears clear: either the courses on affectivity or online porn. Where the first would be a path of conscious, tolerant and feminist discovery; the second an abyss of oppression, depravity and patriarchy.
However, there are various things that don’t work in this rhetorical device. The first has to do with the typical overestimation of the progressive brand educational institution. As if, in the mind of the teenager, the hour of education in affectivity could undermine Valentina Nappi. Of course, none of this will happen, any more than anti-drug commercials overshadowed the influence of Keith Richards in previous generations. Nothing is less effective for young people than this bureaucratic, hypocritical and orthopedic approach, especially in relation to an area, sexuality, which has to do with instinctual and animal dimensions.
Every teacher likes to imagine himself as Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, molder of free minds who stand up against the oppressive institution. For children, however, with notable but very rare exceptions, the teacher is part of the institution itself, a segment of that world of adults and rules which is – at best – irrelevant and – at worst – an obstacle to the agencies of meaning that really count at that age, i.e. their peers.
But there is another aspect that must be highlighted. Drawing from a reservoir of clichés, Verdelli cites YouPorn which, however, ceased to be the hardcore site par excellence as early as 2010, overtaken by other similar portals. But, above all, he and all those who comment along the same lines seem to overlook the advent of OnlyFans, which has totally changed the cards on the table.
The false alternative “sexual education or porn” is based on an idea of hardcore as a world managed by men for men, in which women play the role of exploited and humiliated workers in order to perpetuate stereotypes of submission and male power. Assuming that this reading was ever true, it certainly is not today, in an era in which the ideological parable of feminism and that of pornography end up overlapping. With the result that what young people go looking for on red light sites and what they are told by feminist prof-activists come asymptotically close together.
We don’t say that OnlyFans represents a feminist turning point in porn. In an interview published just over a year ago on La 27ª ora, the women’s blog of Corriere della Sera, the cultural anthropologist Sara Esposito explained that OnlyFans “perfectly embodies our struggle to accept that female sexuality can be exposed, narrated and even monetized without losing dignity”. According to the scholar, the creators “show themselves differently from how patriarchal dogma would like: they are, for the most part, women who work in a totally independent and autonomous way, and who use their bodies to offer a sexual service in exchange for a payment which, in some cases, can be very high”. In short, Esposito is telling us that the most advanced frontier of pornography represents an anti-patriarchal phenomenon. We all remember, after all, that period in which the mainstream press told the story every day of an ordinary woman who became very rich overnight thanks to the opening of a profile on the site for explicit content, all represented as an innocent moment of female empowerment.
The media is full of onlyfans who exploit this rhetoric. «Working on OnlyFans does not conflict with being a feminist», Martina Mencucci, a freelance model and content creator, told Firenze Today, as «feminism is for the self-determination of bodies in general». Even Elena Maraga, the teacher who was fired because she was caught on the adult platform, explained that choosing that path was for her a form of feminism, as “perhaps we have finally managed to ensure that a woman can do what she wants with her own body” (which, as is known, in the patriarchal Middle Ages before Onlyfans was prohibited in the West).
The creator Matilde Manucci – one of the first in Italy for earnings on Of – has a specific page on her website dedicated to the theme of OnlyFans and female emancipation, in which we read: “It is not just a platform, but a revolution in which women write the rules of their own game” and this is because “many of them on OnlyFans manage to build six-figure incomes and obtain financial freedom which represents a true personal revenge”. For Manucci «it is a process of re-appropriation of one’s body and one’s image, without intermediaries or external impositions. Here there is no director or company that imposes guidelines: the women who use Of are autonomous entrepreneurs.”
And, moreover, in a 2025 study published in Gender, Work & Organization, based on interviews with German onlyfansers, we read that the participants in the survey emphasized aspects of their work such as “feminist self-determination, financial autonomy, personal pleasure, creative freedom, the definition of one’s own limits and authenticity”. But isn’t this exactly what should be told in the infamous sexual-affection courses? The deconstruction of the patriarchal gaze and power, the exit of women from a presumed condition of minority in view of economic and sexual self-affirmation and so on…
Conversely, what remains of the male in the era of platforms? No more oppressive patriarchs, no more dominant stallions like Rocco Siffredi: they are pathetic chickens to be plucked, often lonely men who sell themselves out to have fantasies of domination in exchange, to be privately insulted, to receive a Joi (Jerk-Off Instruction, i.e. a video in which the user is guided verbally, often in authoritarian tones) or to live a “girlfriend experience”, i.e. a fake romantic relationship with the creator made up of intimacy and private messages, obviously paid for with hard cash.
This is what really happens in the less visible recesses of the Web, while in broad daylight a completely imaginary patriarchy is still being hunted, defeated by the Iban of the scantily clad young ladies of Onlyfans long before the belligerent processions of Non una di meno.
