[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Euphoria, Season 3 Episode 6, “Stand Still and See.”]
Bored suburban gal-turned-social media sex worker Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) has to handle some really tough moments during the newest episode of Euphoria. The one that makes her the most emotional, though, is deleting her OnlyFans account. She has to do it to advance her career (her reward for quitting is a big role on the nighttime soap L.A. Nights) but saying goodbye to the fame and attention she gets from the platform clearly tears her up inside.
Cassie’s descent into OnlyFans modeling is just one of the sexually charged narratives swirling in the third season of Euphoria, which also features Rue (Zendaya) helping to manage a strip club called The Silver Slipper and Jules (Hunter Schafer) embracing the sugar baby lifestyle to avoid working retail. Yet it’s become the most discussed element of the series’ return, in part because of Sweeney’s outsized fame, and in part because it fails to really understand the nuances of the world it depicts. Reducing it, unfortunately, to an excuse to put a character in sexy outfits.
What’s striking about Euphoria Season 3 is that although the amount of time and attention spent focusing on sex is immense, the actual amount of explicit nudity is minimal. The girls in particular don’t wear a lot — as just one example, Jules’ idea of a wedding-appropriate dress might best be described as a napkin. That said… Everyone is pretty consistently dressed enough to hit the beach.
This even includes the strippers working at the Silver Slipper; despite the sign up front promising that its girls are “fully nude, always lewd,” the first part of that statement is never true. To the show’s credit, this may be a reflection of reality: California law does not allow strip clubs with fully-nude dancers to serve alcohol. It’s still a far cry from the days of The Sopranos, where the countless topless dancers who worked at the Bada Bing were treated as living set decoration. The most memorable close-up nipples seen at the Silver Slipper belong to a stripper named Angel (Priscilla Delgado), who sprinkles some cocaine on them for one of her paying customers in a back room. Explicit, but relatively tame.
By comparison, Cassie’s online activity is far more risqué. Sweeney does appear nearly topless in the course of her character’s OnlyFans career, but the majority of what’s featured on screen would skate by in a PG-13 movie, thanks to sheer/wet fabric or props like a strategically placed baseball glove. Her most naked moment so far this season comes in the Episode 5 fantasy sequence, in which she blows up to the size of Godzilla thanks to her new viral fame. During her rampage through a charmingly cheap cardboard Los Angeles, her SUV-sized breasts (exposed but clearly CGI) break through the windows of an office building, where a hapless fantasy subject already happens to be masturbating to a video of her.
Euphoria (HBO)
This storyline is infused at every possible step with the assertion that this is meant to be empowering for Cassie. OnlyFans has given her everything she’s ever wanted, and yeah, she doesn’t love the judgement she receives from her family for doing it, but she does take pride in her work. “I am not a sex worker — I am a performer who uses my body to tell stories,” she declares to L.A. Nights showrunner Patricia Lance (Sharon Stone) in Episode 6.
Patricia nods, buying in. “Like a new sort of feminism.”
“That’s debatable,” mutters the nearby Lexi (Maude Apatow), her tone summing up decades worth of actual debate about sex work — a controversial topic within feminism, given the complicated questions it raises about agency and exploitation. So much of the fight for women’s equality involves whether we get to make choices about our own bodies. Is Cassie’s right to dress up like a sexy puppy fundamental to the cause? It’s not a question the show seems interested in exploring with any nuance.
Sweeney’s an adult, and she at least has enough agency in this situation to make sure that when she’s wearing lingerie on screen, it’s lingerie from her own line. However, that doesn’t make Cassie’s arc work any better.
Variety’s Marlow Stern recently spoke with three OnlyFans models about how Euphoria’s portrayal of the platform isn’t working. This includes blatant inaccuracies, like how OnlyFans doesn’t allow content related to age play — which means Cassie could get banned for sharing her baby-in-a-diaper photo shoot.
The creators interviewed also expressed their discomfort over how the show is creating a troubling message for audiences. Said Maitland Ward, it “serves to perpetuate stereotypes that sex workers have no moral compass and that they will do anything for money. 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.”
Euphoria is not the only series this spring to explore the possibility of OnlyFans as an income stream for young women: Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles features its titular protagonist (played by Elle Fanning) turning to the platform after an unplanned pregnancy leaves her (as you might guess from the title) in a financial bind.
In the case of Margo, though, the character finds genuine creative fulfillment in the content she makes, which is far more imaginative than Cassie’s cheesecake Instagram gags. Rather than appear as herself in silly skimpy outfits, Margo creates a whole character for her online persona, a green-skinned alien baffled by the human world. It requires a lot more body paint on Fanning’s part, but it does a much better job of establishing the ways in which Margo is in control over her content and her image.
Sex work along these lines has been a part of Euphoria’s DNA from Season 1, as the underage Kat (Barbie Ferreira) became a cam girl in a pre-OnlyFans age. At least in Kat’s case, the storyline witnessed her becoming a much more sexual but also much more confident young woman — not perhaps the feminist ideal of a coming-of-age story, but at least rooted in a believable character journey.
As mentioned, this season of Euphoria has spent a lot of screen time promoting the message that Cassie becoming an OnlyFans model is meant to be empowering. Here’s the thing: When something is actually empowering, you don’t need to say that it is over and over again. The audience believes it. And very little is believable about Cassie’s storyline… except for the idea that everyone’s dignity has a price tag on it.
New episodes of Euphoria premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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