Your bag is empty.
With Euphoria’s third and final season in the rearview mirror, creator Sam Levinson opened up about one of its most talked-about storylines involving Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) becoming an OnlyFans content creator to finance her wedding to Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). The show received a fairly sizeable backlash for the storyline, including from OnlyFans creators who pointed out that the show’s depiction of the platform was not analogous to reality.
While appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, Levinson defended the show’s portrayal of the online platform, essentially using a “slippery slope” argument to discuss the potential ramifications.
“If you look at OnlyFans, it is making as much money as Hollywood. I mean, essentially it’s on par,” he said to Maher, per Deadline. “If you’re young, you’re going, ‘I don’t want to go work in a 9-to-5 at this place or that thing. Well, maybe I can just start taking photos of myself.’”
He continued, “The question is, what are the long-term consequences of that? What happens when you know, as a young person, you’re on Instagram and these things, and you’re told that you’re the product, you’re the brand, and now you’re 18 years old, and you’re going well, ‘How do I make money?’ And I just thought chasing that desire, that kind of fast cash, was an interesting thing to kind of explore.”
Levinson also partially addressed the backlash, but said that he was wary of showing OnlyFans in a positive light.
“There’s a part of me that wonders, if the show kind of affirmed this life and how empowering it was, whether we would get the same criticism. You know, we take a fairly critical look at it. It hollows out the individual. You know, you’re constantly just depending on the likes and external validation.”
Of course, Levinson’s characterization of sex work reduces Cassie — and other sex workers — purely to the sexual part of their job, ignoring the fact that many sex workers are indpendent business owners, money managers, videographers and more. And of course, for many sex workers, the sex is not what can make some aspects of the job degrading; people in the sex work industry deal with stigma, whorephobia, discrimination from financial institutions that make their hard-earned money difficult to access and more.
Emily Cocea, a Playboy Club content creator and law school student, pushed back against Levinson’s characterization of OnlyFans content creators as being hollowed out in a statement to Playboy.
“Sam Levinson is incapable of viewing women as full-bodied beings so he hollows out all motivation or introspective traits in his female characters in order to present digestible, paper-thin versions of them,” Cocea said. “There is nothing to his characters except exactly what you can see on the surface because he lacks the talent to write a woman who’s more than one personality trait. Cassie is left just a slut, Rue just an addict, Jules just a love interest. Women in his work are made simplistic because he clearly thinks they are.”
Cocea has previously criticized the show’s portrayal of sex work shortly after the episodes featuring Cassie’s budding OnlyFans career aired.
“I’m so personally frustrated by it,” she said. “I was certain that Sam Levinson did not have the agility to do an OF storyline well.” She continued, “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.”
Many sex workers criticized Euphoria not only for flattening its portrayal of sex work, but for engaging in extreme sexual fetishes that often wouldn’t even be allowed on the platform, including Cassie dressed as a baby with a pacifier corked into her mouth.
“There’s just a lot that’s ridiculous and cartoonish about it,” Sydney Leathers, an OnlyFans creator since 2017, told Variety. “There’s so much that they have her doing that is not even allowed on OnlyFans, and that alone is infuriating: the age-play stuff where she’s dressed as a baby in a diaper, for example. Credit card processors have very strict rules that you have to abide by, and the rules are getting stricter all the time.”
Cocea previously called these scenes “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,” she said. “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.”
Maitland Ward, an actress who is also an OnlyFans content creator, was similarly critical of Levinson’s writing of the Cassie storyline. She specifically took umbrage with the slight against sex workers’ morality.
“In the climate we’re in, that they dressed her up as a baby to make pornographic OnlyFans content was beyond troubling and again serves to perpetuate stereotypes that sex workers have no moral compass and that they will do anything for money,” Ward told Variety. “And there’s always this untrue stigma that somehow sex work is synonymous with sex trafficking and abuse. And they just said, let’s make a joke of it. That is so funny. I’m not laughing.”
Chloe Cherry, an actress who played Faye Valentine on Euphoria and has previously worked in studio porn and done OnlyFans, also weighed in on the show’s depiction of sex work. But Cherry, whose character has also been subject to some gross and cruel storylines, seemed to land more firmly on Levinson’s side.
“People have the weirdest, ideas and like fantasies of sex work being so empowering and we’ve seen all these news stories where they’re like, oh, OnlyFans models makes $700 billion in a month, and everyone’s like, ‘whoa,’” she told Refinery29. “I literally just think that these things are a bit of smoke and mirrors, actually, and I don’t even really understand what it means to be on OnlyFans. Honestly, I don’t even really know what people are doing on there. It’s really hard to say if it would give her any power.”
She added it seemed “crazy as fuck” that Cassie would engage in sex work. “It’s like, holy shit, that’s where we’re at in society? I really think that OnlyFans is a crazy, weird phenomenon of the 2020s that we will look back on and be very confused by.”
