The third (and last?) season of “Euphoria,” HBO’s crushingly bleak portrait of wayward youths in Southern California, sees its coterie of high school friends navigate the seventh circle of hell — which, in the eyes of its creator, Sam Levinson, means entering the world of sex work.
Rue (Zendaya) goes “Maria Full of Grace,” smuggling fentanyl from Mexico to America in her body and working as an assistant manager at a seedy strip club to work off her substantial debt to Laurie; Jules (Hunter Schafer) is raking in big bucks as a high-end sugar baby to a plastic surgeon who enjoys mummifying her in Saran wrap; Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) starts an OnlyFans to pay for the $50,000 in wedding flowers she apparently needs to marry Nate (Jacob Elordi); and Maddy (Alexa Demie) reluctantly becomes her ex-friend Cassie’s manager, intent on transforming her into the next Sophie Rain.
Cassie’s OnlyFans journey begins with her making content posing as a dog, replete with dog ears, collar, leash, wrist cuffs, tail, and a satin corset from Sweeney’s lingerie line SYRN, bending over and lapping up water from a bowl on the ground. She further dresses up as a baby, spread eagle on the couch in a sheer pink shirt, her hair in pigtails and a rattle in her mouth. Cassie and Nate’s housekeeper, Juana (played by Minerva Garcia), has been tasked with snapping photos of Cassie in these revealing costumes for her OnlyFans (she deserves a serious raise).
The show’s depiction of OnlyFans models via Cassie has, however, rankled real-life OnlyFans creators, who already find themselves subject to enough mockery and scorn due to their line of work.
“There’s just a lot that’s ridiculous and cartoonish about it,” Sydney Leathers, an OnlyFans creator since 2017, tells 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.”
Indeed, any age-play content involving a real or simulated minor is expressly not permitted by the OnlyFans under its “Acceptable Use Policy” in its Terms of Service, and may result in “deactivation of your Content and/or your account,” including:
Illegal activity including actual, claimed, or role-played: exploitation, abuse, or harm of individuals under the age of 18; incest; bestiality; necrophilia; rape or sexual assault; and any content or conduct that promotes terrorism.
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Maitland Ward, a top OnlyFans creator and adult actress who rakes in six figures a month on the platform — and, prior to her foray into sex work, starred on the sitcom “Boy Meets World” and the comedy film “White Chicks” — found the baby costume particularly damaging to the already-skewed perception of real-life workers on OnlyFans.
“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,” explains Ward. “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.”
Levinson, for his part, explained Cassie’s OnlyFans arc thusly:
“[Cassie] has got her dog house and her little dog ears and the nose, and that has its own humor, but what makes the scene is the fact that her housekeeper is the one filming it,” Levinson told The Hollywood Reporter. “What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion — the gag is to jump out, to break the wall.”
When it comes to how they lit the OnlyFans sequences, Levinson explained, “Some of these scenes we only lit with these ring lights that she would use. When you’re inside, it’s a beautiful, glowing front light, but then you jump out of it and it’s just a pool of light and everything surrounding it is dark. It’s just gnarly and jarring… We wanted to capture what she’s trying to show the audience and be inside of it, but then also pull back wider and see how depressing it is.”
But his comments about Cassie’s OnlyFans arc did little to dispel the notion that it’s all a big ol’ joke that OnlyFans creators are the butt of, according to Ward.
“That speaks volumes to me about why this OnlyFans storyline is being represented in the way that it is. It’s not being taken seriously,” says Ward. “It reminds me of when I pranced around in lingerie on ‘Boy Meets World.’ It’s just the guys in the writer’s room coming up with their fantasies. To take someone so traditionally blonde and beautiful with the biggest boobs and dress her up as a dog and baby is really bizarre, but at the same time so expected in Hollywood.”
HBO
One quasi-realistic portion of Cassie’s story is the way she attempts to make a name for herself on social media. At the urging of Maddy, Cassie visits a raucous mansion party hosted by a popular online influencer in the hopes of going viral. She dances on a platform and makes out with another hot girl, as a horde of creators livestream it to their considerable followings, and then allows the aforementioned hypebeast to do cocaine off her navel just before Maddy bursts into the room with a videographer to snag content of the two in a compromising position.
“When Cassie goes to the influencer’s house to get video, coming from a marketing background myself, I thought, ‘OK, that’s fuckin’ smart. That’s a great formula,’” offers Alix Lynx, a popular OnlyFans creator and adult actress. “On the other hand, it’s portrayed that if you just dress up and do crazy shit, you’ll instantly make money, or you just have to be hot and have big boobs and you’ll instantly cash out, and it doesn’t work like that. You have to really grow and nurture a fan base.”
Indeed, to all three OnlyFans creators Variety spoke with, Cassie’s OF odyssey is inverted — in reality, they say it’s essential to amass a large online following before launching on OnlyFans, otherwise you’ll be facing a near-impossible task of building a dedicated army of subscribers.
More than anything, though, “Euphoria’s” portrayal of an OnlyFans creator feeds into reductive stereotypes surrounding sex workers, and serves as yet another example of Hollywood showing them in an unflattering light.
“Sex workers in general, myself included, tend to be hyper-sensitive about the way Hollywood portrays us because it’s almost never nice,” says Leathers. “It’s always absurd or depressing and rarely ever on point. When you’re part of a marginalized community, it’s easy to get upset about certain portrayals of it.”
From Variety US