From local beauty contests to a digital erotic empire

From miss bikini contests to the reign of OnlyFans: what has changed?

A video of a miss bikini contest in 1990s deep-south America has reignited the debate about how erotic entertainment has evolved. In the footage, a young woman parades before a panel of judges taking notes at ping-pong tables; the crowd claps and whistles. The grainy tape shows fluorescent colors, big hair and not a single tattoo. Thirty years later, the same display of the body has moved to TikTok, Instagram and OnlyFans, but the social narrative has taken a 180-degree turn.

The contrast with the digital era

What in the 90s would have earned her the scarlet letter of "the town slut" has become a global business. While the model in the video probably went back to her farm to mend fences, today's content creators monetize their image from their living rooms. A well-known anecdote from the thread: a relative who emigrated to the US in the 80s set up strip clubs in several states; his children ended up becoming billionaires. Eroticism, once a local and almost artisanal phenomenon, has become industrialized.

The absence of tattoos and piercings is another notable difference. In the video, the contestant wears a garish bikini and nothing else; commenters point out that "there isn't a single doodle on her." Today, the aesthetic of digital platforms is associated with a profusion of tattoos and an infantilization of the image, according to critics. Nostalgia for an era when "all it took was being a real woman" mixes with the irony that those contests were also heteropatriarchal, as was noted.

Nostalgia or hypocrisy?

Some argue that the girl in the video, with her tough look and her promise to go back to the farm, represents a lost authenticity. "She was going off to fix the fences afterwards," they joke. Others point to the hypocrisy of idealizing a past in which the very same practices carried a social stigma they no longer have today. The adult entertainment industry in the US moves billions, but the debate reveals an underlying tension: the commodification of the body is accepted as long as it is dressed up as modernity.

In the end, the video is not just a piece of old celluloid. It is a mirror reflecting the contradictions of a society that has gone from whistling at a fair to swiping on a screen. And while the old judges took notes with a pen, algorithms now decide who wins. The ironies of pogre.