Sam Levinson Has No Idea What He’s Watching
JUN–23–2026
Euphoria Season 3 puts sex work everywhere and understands it nowhere.
Sex workers are often the most qualified critics of how sex work, desire, and intimacy are represented in culture—and they are almost never the ones asked to do the reviewing. What's Wrong, Honey? is art criticism written from inside the economy of desire: dissecting cultural objects from the perspective of someone who has actually done erotic labor. Not someone adjacent to it. Not someone who researched it from a distance. Monique has built the performance in real time, negotiated the terms, read the room. She carries a form of knowledge that culture constantly draws from while refusing to credit.
Words by: Monique J. Johnson
Euphoria Season 3 puts sex work everywhere and understands it nowhere.
To survive and thrive in this industry, a woman must be an expert psychologist, a risk manager, a financial strategist, and a master of emotional performance. You are constantly reading a room, calculating margins, protecting your physical safety, and maintaining rigid boundaries—all while making a client believe he is the center of the universe. There is an entire, hyper-vigilant interior life behind every transaction. It is a space of cold calculation that the male consumer never sees and, frankly, lacks the emotional maturity to deserve.
That invisibility—the rigorous strategy behind the skin—is where the real human story lives.
But Sam Levinson has never been interested in women as human beings; he is interested in them as props for his own baroque visual fantasies.
The Great Levinsonian Time Jump: A Syllabus of Male Entertainment
Season 3 of Euphoria arrives after a four-year hiatus with a five-year time jump baked in. The former teenagers of East Highland are now adults, theoretically capable of navigating adult complexity. What Levinson chooses to do with this newfound narrative freedom is as predictable as it is lazy.
Nearly every major female character has been funneled into the sex industry:
- Cassie is running an OnlyFans to finance a delusion.
- Jules is a sugar baby trading domestic compliance for rent.
- Maddy is managing a stable of digital creators.
- Rue has defaulted to a strip club.
The lone exception to this rule is Lexi, who spends the season fetching coffee as a low-level Hollywood assistant.
The structural implication here is glaring: in Levinson’s cinematic universe, a woman can either chase the crumbs of institutional patriarchy or sell her body directly to it. There is no alternative economy. This isn’t a reflection of modern late-stage capitalism; it is the projection of a limited male imagination that cannot conceive of a woman existing outside the parameters of male consumption.
The Caricature of Degradation: Cassie’s OnlyFans Arc
Let me clarify what this critique is not. I am not arguing that sex work is inherently degrading and should therefore be sanitized or scrubbed from television. I am arguing the exact opposite: sex work is actual labor, governed by specific economic and behavioral rules. Levinson is strip-mining its aesthetics while discarding its reality. He is entirely incapable of portraying a woman navigating this industry with dignity, agency, or profit-driven self-possession.
Consider Cassie. Her storyline dictates that she must raise 50,000 dollars for wedding flowers to marry Nate Jacobs—a man whose entire personality is a walking advertisement for criminal prosecution. To get the cash, she turns to OnlyFans.
But Levinson doesn’t show us a digital creator optimizing algorithms or managing subscribers. Instead, he treats us to a series of bizarre, humiliating vignettes: Cassie posing as a dog on a leash lapping water from a bowl, and later, dressed as an infant, spread-eagle on a sofa with a rattle in her mouth.
This isn't an exploration of digital erotic commerce; it’s a male director's private search history masquerading as prestige television. Real-world creators immediately called out the absurdity:
"The baby scenario was beyond troubling and again serves to perpetuate stereotypes that sex workers have no moral compass and that they will do anything for money."
— Maitland Ward, Adult Film Star and Top-Earning OnlyFans Creator (Variety)
"[The arc is] ridiculous and cartoonish... infuriating. Content like that wouldn't even be permitted on the platform's strict terms of service."
— Sydney Leathers, Digital Creator
The inaccuracy is the entire point. These scenes aren’t designed to illuminate the grueling realities of survival in the gig economy. They are engineered to evoke a very specific, deeply patriarchal response: titillation heavily layered with contempt. The camera isn't documenting a woman working; it is actively participating in her humiliation, ensuring the audience looks down on her even as they consume her.
The Plastic-Wrapped Fantasy: Jules as an Aesthetic Object
Then we have Jules. Having dropped out of art school, she has transitioned into sugar dating—specifically, exchanging sex with a wealthy, married man in exchange for lodging in his empty apartment.
Because Levinson operates entirely within the realm of fetishistic voyeurism, the arrangement is stripped of any economic or interpersonal tension. Instead, we are treated to a sequence where her benefactor literally mummifies her in Saran wrap.
There is no psychological excavation here. We learn nothing about Jules’s boundaries, her financial anxieties, or the power dynamics at play. The fetish detail exists purely as texture—part of the signature Euphoria brand of "beautiful women in bizarre predicaments." Jules is reduced to an exquisite piece of meat wrapped in cellophane, and the camera lingers on her with a distinct, self-satisfied smugness.
The Complete Denial of Female Interiority
Euphoria has always relied on the visceral exploitation of the human body to tell its stories. The show has never claimed to be gentle, and it has occasionally handled trauma with genuine weight. But there is a specific, deeply telling discrepancy in how Levinson handles sex work compared to other forms of crisis.
When exploring Rue’s drug addiction, the narrative grants her absolute humanity. We are given:
- Intimate childhood flashbacks explaining her grief.
- Protracted, agonizing monologues detailing her internal war.
- Spiritual crises and nuanced dialogues with her sponsor, Ali.
We are firmly rooted inside Rue's mind. We respect her suffering because we are allowed to experience it with her.
By contrast, the women engaged in erotic labor are completely denied an interior life. They do not get monologues; they get montages. They do not have strategic breakthroughs; they have aesthetic breakdowns. They are not subjects navigating a hostile capitalist landscape; they are objects arranged to satisfy a specific gaze.
Chloe Cherry, who joined the cast as Faye and brought actual lived experience from the adult film industry to the set, contextualized the broader cultural reality perfectly:
"OnlyFans and sex work have become more normalized, but it's literally only because of capitalism and the economy getting worse. It has nothing to do with empowerment or power or anything."
Levinson completely ignores this material truth. Cassie isn't selling content because wages are stagnant and a marriage to a volatile legacy-wealth sociopath like Nate offers zero genuine financial security. She is on OnlyFans because it gives a male director a socially acceptable excuse to put her body on display at scale.
The View from the Outside
The fundamental flaw of Euphoria Season 3 is not the volume of its adult themes, but the staggering laziness of its execution. Sex work has become a convenient narrative container into which Levinson pours his most indulgent, cinematic fantasies. By slapping the label of "gritty realism" on the cover, the show attempts to pass off standard male gaze erotica as profound social commentary.
Anyone who has ever actually collected a check in this industry can tell you that the most potent weapon a sex worker possesses isn't her physical form. It is her mind. It is the sharp, unyielding consciousness that calculates the risk, sets the price, defines the boundaries, and walks away with the money.
That mind is entirely absent from Euphoria. Levinson’s camera remains entirely on the outside, peering through the keyhole, desperately validating the very men who view women as transactional commodities.
In the end, Euphoria doesn't invite us to understand the realities of erotic labor. It invites us to sit next to Sam Levinson and watch women degrade themselves for his amusement. And frankly, darling, the view is pathetic.
What's Wrong, Honey? is a recurring column of art criticism written from inside the economy of desire. Each installment takes a single cultural object and examines what it gets right, what it gets wrong, and what it would look like if the women who do the work were the ones holding the red pen.