From ‘Euphoria’ to ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’; Webcam Sex Work is TV’s Newest Career Fixation

In 2021, webcam model Elle Stanger filmed a pole dancing video for a long-distance client. The accompanying song? Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix, which features Beyoncé rapping lyrics that perfectly fit the bill: “She might start an OnlyFans.”

“As soon as I heard that, I just knew: ‘Oh God, this is the start of something even bigger,’” says Stanger, a sexuality educator and full-time stripper with 17 years of experience. “If Beyoncé is name-dropping OnlyFans…”

Stanger – who makes content on sites like Camsoda and NiteFlirt – was accurate in her prediction: OnlyFans was just beginning its ascent. The pay-per-view platform has more than doubled in size since then, growing from 187.9 million registered users in 2021 to 377.5 million by 2025.

Now, that growth has begun to reflect in television.

In 2026 alone, audiences watched Sydney Sweeney in “Euphoria” and Elle Fanning in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” play young women who turn to OnlyFans to make some cash, while murder thriller “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” kicks off with a shirtless Brandon Flynn sweet-talking Tatiana Maslany via webcam.

Rufi Thorpe, who wrote the novel on which “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” is based, says she wrote her protagonist as an OnlyFans model because it was “easier to imagine yourself doing” than other forms of sex work. “Selling nudes online is not as much of an imaginative barrier,” she says. “Going to an audition at the strip club — a regular person can’t imagine themselves doing it quite as easily.”

Nicole McNichols, a psychology professor at the University of Washington who researches sex, agrees that OnlyFans carries a certain relatability now that it’s become so popular. She sparked controversy in November for inviting OnlyFans model Ari Kytsya to speak to her students, but points out that the site has produced “a multi-billion-dollar industry. The idea that you should be ignoring it in a class on human sexuality is so misguided,” she says. “If we’re going to be talking about sex in a digital age, we need to be talking about one of the biggest ways in which it is showing up.”

Even for people who don’t use the platform themselves, OnlyFans has become a ubiquitous subject of conversation — and strong opinions. That fascination is part of why we’re starting to see cam work appear in fiction.

Bryant Paul, an Indiana University professor who studies the effects of sexual media, often surveys his students on whether they consider it cheating for their partner to watch porn. Most answer no. “What about subscribing to an OnlyFans model?” he asks. “No, that’s not acceptable,” they say. “Because the personal connection is the cheating part.”

“You don’t want to be caught communicating with an OnlyFans person. But if you watch ‘Euphoria,’ that’s acceptable,” explains Paul. There’s a stigma associated with actively communicating with a sex worker and consuming their content. But by simply watching Sweeney act on HBO, viewers can peek into salacious mystery world while still feeling like their hands are clean.

But there’s danger in absorbing these limited glimpses in the media as the full truth.

“10 years ago, if you asked people, ‘What does online pornography look like?,’ if they hadn’t seen it themselves, they’d describe what they’d heard in jokes on sitcoms,” says Paul. “When mainstream media starts covering content, discussing and portraying it, it gives people a sense of what’s out there.” Regardless of whether these shows accurately portray the phenomena they’re discussing, the public often assumes the new information is factual.

Take Sweeney’s Cassie, who dresses up as a baby and a dog as she poses for provocative pictures. In reality, pedophilia and bestiality — even in the context of roleplay — are banned on OnlyFans. And beyond that, sex workers generally “don’t do animal play or child play” according to AM Davies, a former sex worker who is now an activist.

“It’s extremely harmful, and they put us all under duress when we have to watch these things,” says Davies. “The problem is that people watch movies and TV and forget that it’s not real. They think something similar could happen in real life.”

There’s a lot more that gets left out of the story. Though real-life sex workers certainly relate to the way characters in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” “Euphoria,” and “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” begin camming for money, it’s much harder to get rich than TV often makes it seem.

According to McNichols, Kytsya “knows a lot of people in the industry who have thought, ‘OK, this will be a really easy way to make money quickly.'” But, she adds, “The average OnlyFans model makes around $1,000 a month. We hear about the cases where it’s extremely lucrative, but for the vast majority, it’s not.”

Still, Paul says stories that feature webcam work are almost a “feminist media. There’s something empowering that people associate with OnlyFans, much more than they do pornography. It’s not as objectifying because the content provider has some power in the process.” That’s reflected in “Euphoria,” which emphasizes that Cassie is in control of how explicit her content is. She also leverages her cam work to build a career as an influencer and and actor.

Cam work can take many unexpected shapes. In “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” Margo gets paid to criticize her clients’ penises. In “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” Flynn’s character Trevor often serves primarily as a listening ear, with sex becoming an afterthought — a dynamic Davies says they see all the time in real life. According to McNichols, these depictions of cam work could offer the societal benefit of helping people understand their own sexual interests.

But she also worries that the normalization of online sex work may come “at the cost of real interactions,” referring to studies that say Gen Z has less sex than previous generations. And Paul questions whether constantly seeing people perform sensuality on TV may affect the human psyche, causing “fear of sexual performance, self-loathing and potentially eating disorders.”

In general, sex workers like Stanger and Davies aren’t fans of how their lives are portrayed on-screen. “It’s so painful to watch the same stereotypes, tropes and myths played out, or to see violence that is intended for shock value,” says Stanger, who is a strong proponent for the hiring of sex work consultants on shows that depicts them. “Real life is more interesting than fiction, and there’s no need to be so loud and wrong about sex work.”

In an increasingly digital age, OnlyFans models aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the TV shows about them. It creates a cycle: The easier and more appealing cam work appears, the more likely people are to try it themselves. But wherever the story goes next, sex workers would like to be part of the narrative.

“I urge people to consider when they watch a sex worker be portrayed, is the sex worker being portrayed as a victim, a villain, both, or something else?” says Davies. “Because if they’re being portrayed primarily as a victim or a villain, I wouldn’t trust the ethics — or the accuracy — of the rest of the program.”