'Euphoria' sees OnlyFans as easy money. The truth is complex. | Opinion

My friends and I always joke about selling feet pics online.

As economically strained youth, online sex work seems like a low-effort way to earn some pocket change or even gain financial freedom. We’re not alone.

OnlyFans is an online subscription service that became a hub for adult entertainers after lifting its pornography ban in 2017. Creator accounts grew by 13% in 2024. OnlyFans hosts 4.63 million creators globally and is supported by 377.5 million users as of 2024, with fans spending more than $7 billion on OnlyFans that year.

Through its proliferation of online sex work, OnlyFans has cemented its place as an era-defining part of our digital landscape. It was only a matter of time until it made its way to popular television. The latest season of HBO’s “Euphoria” and Apple TV+’s new show “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” take varying approaches to exploring the innards of the OnlyFans model. While “Euphoria” is sensationalist and voyeuristic, “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” is grounded and honest.

Differences aside, both shows understand what it’s like to exist in 2026, where an unforgiving job market makes stripping for the camera seem like a path to easy money.

Depiction or demonization?

The first shot we see of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) in Season 3 of "Euphoria" is a close-up of her bare buttocks in a dog costume. As the shot widens, we see Cassie, adorned with dog ears and a tight corset, bending over and lapping up water from a bowl on the ground. We later see her dressed up as a baby with a rattle in her mouth and pigtails in her hair, holding her legs open on the couch in a sheer pink shirt.

This is all content for her OnlyFans account.

"Euphoria" director and writer Sam Levinson drew ire from real-life content creators for his fetishistic and downright derogatory depiction of OnlyFans.

OnlyFans model Maitland Ward called the depiction "beyond troubling" and said it perpetuates "stereotypes that sex workers have no moral compass and that they will do anything for money."

Levinson’s Cassie is written with a shallow interiority. Her only desire is to get as rich and famous as possible, and she’s willing to degrade herself to get there. Cassie’s capitulation to regressive, patriarchal standards would make sense if she were acting out of desperation – but she’s not. Cassie doesn’t pursue sex work as a means of survival; she does it to fund vanity projects: namely, a $50,000 flower bouquet for her wedding with fiancé Nate (Jacob Elordi), much to his dismay. 

Against all odds, Cassie succeeds, making her experience on OnlyFans a rather idyllic one. She makes enough to afford the ludicrously expensive flowers and fully fund a life for herself outside in Los Angeles, completely independent of Nate, who now fully accepts her career choice and exploits it to escape his precarious financial situation. She outgrew her homely, suburban past both literally and figuratively – mostly from the comfort of her home.

Cassie isn’t the only character who finds lucrative success on OnlyFans. Her ex-bestfriend-turned-manager, Maddy (Alexa Demie), briefly managed Katelyn, a woman of the same breed as Cassie – suburban, White, thin, blonde – who found success to the tune of $700,000.

'Margo' shows OnlyFans success comes with losses

But few OnlyFans models achieve this level of success. In real life, the average creator earns $131 per month after platform fees and the top 1% of OnlyFans creators earn about $49,000 annually.

“Margo’s Got Money Troubles” understands this reality. The titular main character (Elle Fanning) joins OnlyFans, donning the persona of a sexy extraterrestrial named "Hungry Ghost," as a means of survival after getting pregnant by her married college professor and fired from her waitressing job.

Although she sees some financial success from the platform, it’s surely not enough to escape the social repercussions. Her friends and family judge her occupation, particularly her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), who was once a Hooters waitress – ironically enough. Margo is doxxed despite attempts to conceal her identity. And, most shocking of all, the father of her child leverages her OnlyFans presence in an attempt to gain full custody.

“Margo’s Got Money Troubles" offers a nuanced exploration of OnlyFans and highlights the harsh reality many of its millions of users face, despite the money they earn. As of 2023, 84% of OnlyFans creators are women, and 87% of its users are men. Our patriarchal, sex-negative society looks down upon women who engage with online sex work and leaves many of them victims of exploitation, abuse and social isolation.

Shows like “Euphoria” certainly don’t help.

Levinson clearly views OnlyFans as a passive, get-rich-quick scheme and belittles anyone who dares engage with it. (Cassie’s most salacious content wouldn't even be allowed on the platform.) Levinson told The Hollywood Reporter that the show aimed to highlight a “layer of absurdity” in Cassie’s OnlyFans journey.

This “absurdity,” though, exposes nothing but Levinson's preoccupation with showing his female characters in the most undignified and hypersexualized manner possible. The hollowness of his style-over-substance filmmaking isn’t nearly as passable when the “style” in question is an unscrupulous degradation of the show’s female characters.

The gritty reality of sex work

The OnlyFans plots in “Euphoria” are better observed in juxtaposition to the girls at the “Silver Slipper” strip club scenes in the show.

One by one, girls either die or disappear from the club. First, a stripper named Tish (Emma Kotos) dies of a fentanyl overdose. Overwhelmed with grief, another stripper named Angel (Priscilla Delgado) is sent to rehab to recover, but rumors begin to circulate that she ran away. In a particularly traumatic sequence, we see a new dancer named Kitty visibly shaken after performing services for a group of men.

Later, Maddy takes on some of the girls as OnlyFans clients. What seems like a saving grace is really them being passed from one handler to the next, tasked with exploiting their bodies to make others rich.

For most, the platform is not a means of endless income, but real, hard work – the benefits of which few models get to fully reap.

Young people have lost faith in our system. The accessibility of OnlyFans makes it seem like a worthwhile endeavor to ease economic pressure. Depictions of OnlyFans in popular media, however varied, reflect an uncomfortable truth about modern American life: traditional paths toward upward mobility have become so nebulous that many would rather turn to unregulated, potentially dangerous means to achieve it.

Kofi Mframa is a columnist and a digital producer for USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network.