In her most popular TikTok video, 50-year-old OnlyFans star Mary Burke straddles a giant plastic barrel wearing a pair of red short-shorts and a grey spaghetti-strap tank. Her chest glistens with sweat in the hot, late-summer sun, her long brunette hair swept to the side in a low pony that just barely grazes her shoulder. In her hand is a drill.
“First thing we gotta do is find the nipple on the bottom of the 55-gallon jug,” she says to the camera. Her own nipples, it should be said, are hard. Once she works her drill into the barrel, there’s a noticeable pop when it makes its way through the plastic, causing Burke — and her breasts — to bounce. According to her caption, it’s a how-to video for a farm animal water jug, but absolutely no one in the comments section can pay attention to that. “I’ve watched this five times and I’ve made a discovery… there’s a barrel in the video,” one person wrote.
This, to be clear, is a rather novel way to promote your Onlyfans. While most performers try to build a presence on Twitter, share their photos on NSFW subreddits or ask other OnlyFans creators to promote their page, Burke has her partner take videos of her lifting 10-foot timber logs out of the rain in a halfway unbuttoned top, perfectly revealing the inner curvature of her cleavage (without a bra on, of course).
So far, her approach has worked — she’s got 71,300 likes on OnlyFans and holds a spot amongst its top .04 percent. She currently charges $9.99 a month for a subscription, and, like on TikTok, she typically posts several times a day. Burke shows it all on OnlyFans, too — she offers everything from playful topless photos to fully-spread masturbation videos to short clips of blowjob scenes.
Burke, a married mother of five who splits her time between St. Petersburg, Florida, and a farm in rural Alabama, has been posting to OnlyFans and TikTok for just over a year. At the suggestion of her husband, she gave camming a try early in the pandemic. “I’ve always been a performer and maybe a little bit of an exhibitionist,” she tells me.
Prior to the pandemic, she had a successful career in finance and used to be in show business, though she prefers to keep the specific details private. After finding camming to be a bit too much work — she had to be online all the time in order to maintain her status as a top performer — she pivoted to OnlyFans, which provided more flexibility. Just as many others did during the pandemic, she took to TikTok, too. She now has three accounts (so there’s always a backup in case TikTok decides to take one down, as they’ve done before), with around 550,000 followers between them.
Most often, Burke makes videos featuring the actual house and yardwork she does around her two properties. In one, she’s trimming hedges. In another, she’s measuring out holes she needs to dig for a bunny coop she’s assembling. Every so often, she posts a TikTok that’s outwardly sexy, moving her hips sensually to a song or trying on form-fitting business-wear. But the videos where she’s lifting logs or drilling holes in barrels in a bikini top or tank are her most popular.
Still, while her content isn’t as sexxed up as many other creators’ on TikTok, it seems her fans simply don’t know what to do with big breasted, middle-aged moms like her. They’re mostly just flabbergasted — people duet themselves sweating profusely after watching her videos, or they leave comments about how they were too distracted by her to understand what she was doing.
At the same time, though, she’s noticed that they want a capable caretaker as well (even if she’s not performing stereotypically feminine labor and is, in fact, more of a lumberjack than a housewife). “The MILF thing is a compliment,” she says. “Everybody wants to be nurtured by their mom. In most cases, their mother took care of them. Mother did everything for them. Mother nursed them. So to me, it’s rather natural.” The instructional aspect of MILF-hood is particularly appealing to her, too. “Even on that barrel video, I had a lot of people say, ‘I had no idea you could do that,’ and ask where they could buy the parts,” she continues. “I just hope I can teach someone something.”
This falls right in line with our current mommy moment. As the recent “Mommy? Sorry, mommy?” trend suggested, TikTokers are desperate to find someone to mother them, particularly during the pandemic, which is when Burke noticed an uptick in MILF and mommy-related thirst. “They’re alone, they’re isolated,” she says of some of her audience. “They want someone to listen to.”
And so, when she offers herself up as an option, demonstrating that she’d care for them just as well as she cares for her property, they’re quick to take her up on the opportunity.
Sure, we love seeing how her nips look through her tank top, but when she lifts that wood in the air, we also know she’d be able to keep us warm whenever it’s nippily outside.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
