Following criticism of Euphoria‘s final season and its depiction of OnlyFans creators, Sam Levinson has addressed the backlash.

The creator of the HBO series admitted he took a “fairly critical look” at OnlyFans culture, explaining on Real Time with Bill Maher why he didn’t “affirm this life and how empowering” it can.

“If you look at OnlyFans, it is making as much money as Hollywood. I mean, essentially it’s on par,” he explained to Maher. “It’s not a niche business, it is a massive enterprise. And so if you’re young, you’re going, ‘I don’t want to go work in a 9-to-5 at this place or that thing. Well, maybe I can just start taking photos of myself.’

“The question is, what are the long-term consequences of that? What happens when you know, as a young person, you’re on Instagram and these things, and you’re told that you’re the product, you’re the brand, and now you’re 18 years old, and you’re going well, ‘How do I make money?’ And I just thought chasing that desire, that kind of fast cash, was an interesting thing to kind of explore.”

Levinson continued, “Also, at the same time, we caught a lot of criticism for it, but there’s a part of me that wonders, if the show kind of affirmed this life and how empowering it was, whether we would get the same criticism. You know, we take a fairly critical look at it. It hollows out the individual. You know, you’re constantly just depending on the likes and external validation.”

As Maher praised Cassie’s frenemy/manager Maddy (Alexa Demie) as the season’s “moral center,” Levinson noted, “She was managing the girls, which is an all new industry. It’s sort of light pimping.”

In the third and final season of Euphoria, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) joins OnlyFans to pay for her $50,000 wedding to Nate (Jacob Elordi).

Many OnlyFans creators took issue with the harmful stereotypes used in Levinson’s depiction of their field, including one scene with Cassie posing spread-eagle in a diaper, with a pacifier in her mouth. As many have noted, age-play is strictly forbidden on the platform.

Chloe Cherry, who was an adult film actress and OnlyFans star herself before she began playing Faye Valentine in Season 2 of Euphoria, called Cassie’s arc “crazy as fuck,” given her privileged life.

“It’s really hard to say if it would give her any power. Obviously Cassie is extremely attractive, so it probably would lead to her making a lot of money,” said Cherry. “But it just feels crazy as fuck to see somebody living like Cassie turn to sex work. It’s like, holy shit, that’s where we’re at in society? I really think that OnlyFans is a crazy, weird phenomenon of the 2020s that we will look back on and be very confused by.”

Cherry added that sex work is being embraced by the mainstream “only because of capitalism and the economy getting worse,” noting it “has nothing to do with empowerment or power or anything.”