If you’ve been online the past few weeks, you’re at least vaguely aware of Euphoria Season 3. The Zendaya-led HBO series was once lauded as “boundary-pushing” and “authentic,” but as its final season unfolds, creator, director, writer, and executive producer Sam Levinson has lost much of his public favor. Some attribute that to the four-year gap between Seasons 2 and 3. Others blame it on the show’s portrayal of online sex work. 

“I’m so personally frustrated by it,” says Emily Cocea, a Playboy Club content creator and law school student. Her concerns took root when the season’s first trailer dropped, months before the actual premiere. It includes cameos from Cassie Howard, played by Sydney Sweeney, dressed in lingerie (from Sweeney’s brand, SYRN), dog ears, and a tail, which she wags at a woman filming her. Moments later, she’s admonished for being “spread eagle on the Internet” by her fiancé and high school sweetheart, Nate Jacobs, played by Jacob Elordi. It doesn’t take an expert to deduce that Cassie will spend Season 3 in pursuit of an OnlyFans career. “I was certain that Sam Levinson did not have the agility to do an OF storyline well,” Cocea continues. “I was anxious because how OF—and sex work online in general—is portrayed on Euphoria is probably how large swaths of the U.S. population are going to think it works.” 

Cocea says her fears became a reality in the first episode of Season 3. When viewers first see Cassie, she’s in the same canine costume from the trailer, perched on the roof of a doghouse. By Episode 2, she’s filming content dressed as a baby, spreading her legs and wearing a diaper, a pacifier in her mouth. Euphoria has never shied away from extremes, but this particular scenario is inaccurate. As OnlyFans creator Sydney Leathers told Variety, age-play content isn’t even allowed on the platform. 

“That’s not a concern in terms of, ‘People are going to look at me differently,’” says Cocea, who calls the portrayal of sex work in the show “bleak and gross.” “It’s a concern because when young girls are entering this industry, you don’t want to set them up to think some sort of abuse is a necessary feature, or even a likely thing to happen to them. And of course, [Levinson] has gone out of his way to make it seem as though misogyny and submission and humiliation are necessary in order for you to work in any sex-adjacent industry.”

She might be disappointed, but Cocea isn’t surprised by the show’s portrayal of adult content. She cites Euphoria’s previous sex scenes as evidence that violence and humiliation was bound to rear its head in Cassie’s new endeavor. Take the bathroom scene from Season 2, when Nate held Cassie’s mouth shut as she cried, topless and mid-hookup, afraid her best friend, Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), would discover them. “It’s not shocking to me,” Cocea says. Because the show has portrayed sex as “inherently violent and humiliating for women, sex work also has to be violent and humiliating for women,” she says. 

Last year, Cocea told People that she entered the adult content space to pay for her education. Cassie, on the other hand, told Nate she started posting to pay for $50,000 worth of florals at their wedding. Her online presence gained further traction after Maddy introduced her to a famous influencer named Brandon. Cocea takes issue with Cassie’s adult content business involving men at every turn. “That is not at all how this job works,” she says. Instead, it’s a hands-on effort, one that requires creators to be producers, directors, business managers, accountants, and everything in between. Cocea thinks an accurate portrayal of adult content creation would never make the cut on Euphoria, because it’s too “boring” and normal. “Every girl in this industry has hobbies and a life outside of her job,” she says. “The vast majority of her time is not taken up being very sexy. It wasn’t going to be cinematic if [Levinson] had actually done it according to his references.” 

Some viewers might be content to write off Cassie’s story as fiction. But Cocea knows Euphoria’s depiction of the industry could have real consequences for her. When she meets people, Cocea is worried Euphoria’s depiction of sex work will skew their perception of what it involves even further, worsening stigma. 

With three more episodes left to air, there’s no telling where Cassie’s career is headed. As of Episode 5, the season’s latest, she’s successfully landed a small role on fictional TV show L.A. Vice, but viewers have yet to see her engage in anything but an audition—and in endless scenarios around her OF career, including degrading fans to calling liberals “retarded” on a podcast. No matter what comes next, Cocea feels the damage is done, especially for young women who are considering adult content creation. 

“Now that they’ve seen this, they’re going to think that in order to do OnlyFans, they need to degrade themselves in all the ways that Cassie is shown degrading herself,” she says. Instead, Cocea finds joy in her content because it offers her the“freedom to pursue my academics without any pressure, without any financial strain,” she says. “At least for the people I know, and especially for me, this industry changed my life in the most positive way in the world. [The show] has taken all of that happiness out of it in order to feed you fetish content.”