In 2021, webcam model Elle Stanger filmed a pole dancing video for a long-distance client. Accompaniment song? In Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix, Beyoncé raps the apt lyric, “She might start an OnlyFans.”
“As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘Oh, this is the start of something bigger,'” says Stanger, a sexuality educator and full-time stripper with 17 years of experience. “If Beyoncé made OnlyFans famous…”
Stanger, who creates content for sites like Camsoda and NiteFlirt, was accurate in his predictions. OnlyFans is just starting to rise. Since then, the pay-per-view platform has more than doubled in size, with registered users increasing from 187.9 million in 2021 to 377.5 million by 2025.
Now, that growth is beginning to be reflected in television as well.
In 2026 alone, viewers watched Euphoria’s Sidney Sweeney and Margo’s Got Money Trouble’s Elle Fanning play young women who turn to OnlyFans to make money, while murder thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed opens with Tatiana Maslany sweet-talking a shirtless Brandon Flynn through a webcam.
Luffy Thorpe, who wrote the novel on which Margo’s Got Money Trouble is based, says he modeled his protagonist on OnlyFans because it was “easier to imagine myself doing it” than other forms of sex work. “Selling nudes online doesn’t limit your imagination,” she says. “A normal person would never imagine how easy it is to go to an audition at a strip club.”
Nicole McNichols, a psychology professor at the University of Washington who studies sex, agrees that OnlyFans has some relevance now that it’s become so popular. She caused controversy in November when she invited OnlyFans model Ali Kizza to speak to her students, but she points out that the site has “created a multi-billion dollar industry, and the idea that it should be ignored in a class on human sexuality is so wrong.” “If we’re going to talk about sex in the digital age, we need to talk about how sex is manifesting itself.”
Even for those who don’t use the platform themselves, OnlyFans has become a ubiquitous topic, with strong opinions circulating. That appeal is part of the reason we’re starting to see Kamm’s work appear in fiction.
Bryant Paul, a professor at Indiana University who studies the effects of sexual media, often surveys students about whether they think it’s cheating for a partner to watch porn. In most cases, the answer is “no.” “How about signing up to be an OnlyFans model?” he asks. “No, that’s not acceptable,” they say. “Because the personal connection is part of the cheating.”
“You don’t want to be caught communicating with someone on OnlyFans, but if you’re watching ‘Euphoria,’ it’s acceptable,” Paul explains. There is a stigma attached to actively communicating with sex workers and consuming their content. But just watching Sweeney’s performance on HBO allows viewers to peer into a world of sordid mysteries while feeling like their hands are clean.
However, there is a danger in absorbing these limited information glimpsed in the media as the complete truth.
“Ten years ago, if you asked people, ‘What is online porn like?’ they would probably describe it as something they had heard in a joke on a sitcom, if they had never actually seen it,” says Paul. “When mainstream media starts covering, discussing, and depicting content, people know what’s out there.” Regardless of whether these shows accurately depict the phenomenon they’re discussing, the public often assumes new information is fact.
For example, Sweeney’s Kathy takes provocative photos dressed as a baby and a dog. In fact, pedophilia and bestiality are prohibited on OnlyFans, even in the context of roleplay. Beyond that, sex workers generally “don’t play with animals or play with children,” according to former sex worker and activist AM Davis.
“This is very harmful, and when we have to look at these things, they put us all under duress,” Davis says. “The problem is that people watch movies and TV and forget that it’s not real. They think something similar can happen in real life.”
There are many other things left out of the story. While real-life sex workers can certainly relate to how the characters in Margo’s Got Money Trouble, Euphoria, and Maximum Pleasure Guarantee start coming back for money, getting rich is much harder than TV often makes us believe.
According to McNichols, Kytsya “knows a lot of people in the industry who have thought, ‘Okay, this is a really easy way to make some quick money.'” However, he added, “The average OnlyFans model makes about $1,000 a month. I’ve heard of cases where it’s very lucrative, but for the majority of people, it’s not.”
Still, Paul says most articles featuring webcam work are “feminist media. There’s something more empowering about OnlyFans that people associate with OnlyFans. It’s not as objectifying because the content providers have some power in the process.” That’s reflected in “Euphoria,” which emphasizes Cassie’s control over the explicitness of her content. She has also used her on-camera work to build a career as an influencer and actor.
Cam behavior can take many unexpected forms. In “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”, Margo is paid to criticize a client’s penis. In “Guaranteed Maximum Pleasure,” Flynn’s Trevor functions primarily as a listener, with sex taking a back seat to the dynamic Davis says he always sees in real life. According to McNichols, these depictions of camwork may provide a social benefit by helping people understand their own sexuality.
But she also worries that the normalization of online sex work will come “at the expense of real-life interaction,” citing research that shows Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations. And Paul wonders whether constantly watching people perform erotically on TV has an effect on the human psyche, causing “fear of sexual performance, self-loathing and possible eating disorders.”
Sex workers like Stanger and Davis are generally not fans of how their lives are portrayed on screen. “It’s very painful to see the same stereotypes, tropes, myths played out, violence aimed at shock value,” Stanger says. He is a strong proponent of hiring sex work consultants for shows depicting sex work. “Real life is more interesting than fiction, and there’s no need to be so loudly wrong about sex work.”
In an increasingly digital age, OnlyFans models aren’t going anywhere, and neither are TV shows about them. It creates a cycle. The easier and more attractive the camwork looks, the more likely people are to try it for themselves. But wherever the story goes next, sex workers want to be part of it.
“When you see sex workers portrayed, I want you to think about whether they are portrayed as victims, villains, both, or something else,” Davis says. “Because if they’re primarily portrayed as victims or villains, I don’t trust the ethics or accuracy of the rest of the show.”
