Cassie is following her dreams. From the comfort of her bedroom, she films foot fetish videos, purrs into a microphone, personalizes panties and test drives sex toys until she passes out.
“I am not a sex worker,” she later tells a Hollywood director. “I’m a performer who uses my body to tell stories.” This is, she insists, empowering.
Cassie, a heroine of HBO’s lurid, high-style melodrama “Euphoria” who’s played by Sydney Sweeney, has reinvented herself in the show’s third season, which wraps up on Sunday, as an OnlyFans creator. She’s not alone: While varieties of web modeling and virtual sex work have furnished episode arcs in past series as varied as “Broad City,” “Giri/Haji” and “The Good Fight,” this year TV’s cam aperture has expanded.
Significant characters on multiple high-profile shows engage in on-camera sex work. Joining Cassie are performers in two recent Apple TV dramas: Margo (Elle Fanning), a teen single mother who turns to cam work for diaper money in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”; and Trevor (Brandon Flynn), a rakish cam boy who draws a frazzled client (Tatiana Maslany) into a murder mystery in “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”
In the fourth season of HBO’s raunchy finance drama “Industry,” which premiered in January, an ongoing subplot concerns a character’s camming past. Even the ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary” had fun, in its April season finale, with the sweetheart second-grade teacher Janine (Quinta Brunson) briefly considering a side hustle on a site called Mostly Fans. And “Cam Boy,” a Canadian dramedy, continues a multi-season run on OUTtv.
Sex work of all kinds is already a staple of contemporary television. It was the main thrust of prestige shows like “The Deuce,” “P-Valley,” “The Girlfriend Experience” and “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” some of which explored the relationship between sex and technology.
That relationship is long. Nearly every new medium — from photography, to film, to video, to the internet, to livestreaming and video calls — has birthed new ways to sell sex. OnlyFans, which hosts many kinds of content but is best known for pornography, now counts more than 4.6 million creators and nearly 400 million registered fans. Given that proliferation, the migration of cam work to popular culture feels inevitable.
These stories give TV creators a chance to fuse titillation with social commentary about economic hardship, evolving morality and technological codependency. They juxtapose extreme intimacy and necessary distance, capturing both the loneliness and convenience of online life, our screens a source of isolation and its brief remedy.
“You pay a fee, you get a little tenderness,” said David J. Rosen, the creator of “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”
A job’s a job
Whether or not tenderness is what’s for sale, sex work is big business.
OnlyFans alone earned more than $7 billion last year, even as the average creator takes home only $131 per month. By taking this business seriously, if salaciously, these series are also showing at least a little of the work part — the grind of brand management and fan cultivation, even as these more mundane tasks are often relegated to the background. (Even “Abbott Elementary” gestured toward this, with Janine declaring, “The gig economy is hard work! I can’t hack it.”)
“Each show is pulling back the curtain on the labor of content creation,” said Lynn Comella, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Gracie Canaan, an OnlyFans creator and the co-host of OnlyFantasy, an Audible podcast that explores the platform, wishes that these series would pull harder.
“Cassie, that’s what people think OnlyFans is,” she said. “Like, I’m buying lingerie, I’m building a small set, I’m finding my sexuality.” But most working hours are consumed by paperwork.
“You’re looking at your Google calendar like any other job,” she said.
These shows suggest it may be quite a good job, at least for characters who may not have many other choices.
Cammers can pick their own hours, be their own bosses, choose their own work environments and clients and, for the most part, control the online use of their images and identities. As with any job, there are trade-offs. Lauren Kirshner, the author of “Sex Work in Popular Culture,” detailed a few: “Things like always having to be on, grueling hours, the emotional exhaustion of performing, the emotional labor of looking for clients all the time.”
And yet on these shows, camming is rendered as no more exploitative than most gig work and on a continuum with other aspects of online life, like social media. Cassie crawling around in a sexy puppy costume? That was for her Insta. The more overtly pornographic work she does is arguably less degrading.
Or maybe it’s all at least a little degrading, suggested Flynn, who plays the cam boy in “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”
“There’s definitely a conversation there about the times we live in,” he said. “How far does capitalism push us, that we start giving up parts of ourselves?”
Less sensational but still stigmatized
In years past, camming plot lines were typically brief, portrayed as a quick hustle or a way for characters to explore their sexuality.
In Season 2 of “Riverdale,” Betty (Lili Reinhart) put on a dark wig and turned her camera on. In Season 1 of “Euphoria,” Kat (Barbie Ferreira) briefly reinvented herself as KittenKween. But those characters gave up camming when they were paired with appropriate boyfriends, which painted their web adventures as aberrant.
“Now that she’s back with her boyfriend, that’s a lot healthier of an option in exploring her sexuality,” Reinhart told Vulture at the time.
Recent depictions are less sensational and more sympathetic, though a sense of risk and thrill remains. Even as camming is portrayed as more socially acceptable, a threat of exposure persists, which reflects reality.
“With one screenshot, you can find someone’s identity,” Kirshner said.
“Margo’s Got Money Troubles” makes good on that threat in a harrowing late-season episode. Comella described that stigmatizing as “very, very real, which is why performers have stage names to protect themselves from some of those repercussions.”
“Which aren’t just the loss of friendships or family contact,” she continued, “but the loss of custody arrangements and jobs.”
All the characters on current shows distance what they do from strict pornography, at least at first, suggesting that a taboo persists. “This is about building a brand,” Margo insists.
“No,” her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) tells her. “This is about giving people everything they need to decide you’re a piece of trash.”
Margo is eventually confronted by sex worker friends for what one calls her “whorephobia,” and she is made to acknowledge that her work is sex work, even as she celebrates it as a space for creativity and art making. The question of whether or not camming should be treated as pornography remains tricky even for some actual performers, like Canaan.
“I’m not a porn star,” she said, jokingly. “I am a digital hooker.”
But if these shows sometimes skew dark, the characters face no real repercussions, beyond social stigma, for their sex work. (Flynn’s Trevor gets into trouble — big trouble — because he isn’t content with only camming.) And each series depicts web modeling as an opportunity for remunerative hustle and successful self-making.
Mindful of the work of actual creators, Canaan hopes that young viewers, especially young women, won’t confuse these shows with reality. Is a job that for most people will barely pay the internet bill really that empowering?
“I’m wary of any media,” she said, “that shows it as a risk-free, get-out-of-jail free card and an overnight success.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
The post On ‘Euphoria’ and Elsewhere, TV Is Having a Sex Cam Spring appeared first on New York Times.
