Asia News Iran, Art Service:
Behzad Asadi Filmmaker, university lecturer, PhD in Philosophy of Art
Drea de Matteo, the actress from The Sopranos, in 2024, due to financial hardship, joins OnlyFans in exchange for a few dollars from each subscriber. In the media, the reason for this decision is presented as preventing the loss of her home and covering her child’s expenses. Through this platform, she is able to earn a substantial income. This means that the power of capital now knows no boundaries or coordinates; it has crossed all ethical lines.
We are no longer speaking merely of prostitution or pornography as a means of survival. Rather, by presenting oneself as a luxury object—where every part of the body becomes an instrument for absolute luxury consumption—you enter a path of impossible teleology, or absurd annihilation. One should no longer look only at brands such as the Kardashian family in this domain; rather, the theory of the sale of the sexual object, or “Kardashianism,” has spread everywhere through the hyper-version of neoliberalism, engulfing nihilistic individuals across the board.
The real-life example of de Matteo mirrors the narrative of the series Margo Has Money Problems starring Fanning, in which a female student becomes pregnant by her professor and decides to keep the child and give birth. Faced with the burdens of childcare and living expenses, she turns to OnlyFans and the sale of her own nudography (nude imagery). Through a fusion of writing talent, nude photography, and financial hardship, a hollow process of hero-making begins. This is the normalization of something so horrifying in the contemporary world—the normalization of income generation through OnlyFans for today’s society, and most importantly, for the families of countries subordinated to capital.
The easiest, fastest, and most pervasive form of normalization is through media. Cultural, social, and even political issues are shaped with minimal cost via networks and media frameworks. Through ubiquitous platforms such as Netflix, Apple Plus, and others, films and series articulate and normalize the logic of capital. Then smaller and more pervasive media systems work on them further, reinforcing them until no ambiguity or doubt remains in the collective consciousness of the target society.
Micro-media such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all function as rolling mechanisms, pushing and pulling a series of topics left and right. Once a taboo subject is handed over to these media groups, one can see what they do with it—so much so that the outcome itself becomes astonishing. Whether it is the massacre of innocent people anywhere in the world, or the rights of capitalist oligarchies of the “one percent aristocracy,” or even nudography, nudity, and its normalization within the institution of the family—it makes no difference.
In Margo Has Money Problems, the girl’s family also supports her, treating it like a wrestling show or a church spectacle.
In the series Euphoria, the loss of her OnlyFans page for the character Cassie becomes equivalent to death, annihilation, and nothingness—Heidegger’s conception of the fate awaiting Dasein. Heidegger’s view of technology is profoundly critical and pessimistic, as he considers it a danger to Being itself. In this sense, OnlyFans as a so-called “technology of modern pornography” becomes a threat of nihilism for Being, accelerating the transformation of Being into Nothing.
Cassie, as a symbol of wounded Eros, a destroyed and dismembered Persephone-like figure, is dragged into the underworld. Nate’s libidinal intent fully demonstrates the marriage logic of late capitalist modernity. For the sake of capital accumulation, Nate paints and wraps his Eros-bride in blood money and sends her into a realm of hyper-emptiness. In pursuit of greater profit, he spares no encouragement in exploiting this materialized commodity.
But Cassie is no longer woman, nor female, nor even possessing anything of Eros. She is a fully materialized object, presenting herself as the best available commodity, entirely devoid of spirit—a “toy mare” offered to the market of capital and total objectification.
To gain followers and visibility, and subsequently money and capital, she crosses all human taboos. The title Euphoria, while seemingly offering a critical view of youth in American society across high school, college, and adult life, actually rests on two foundations:
(1)easy access, consumption levels, and normalization of drugs among children in that society;
and
(2) prostitution, unbounded sexual relations, and sexual anarchy. Yet this title is deceptively simplistic, as if it reduces a systemic collapse into a mere passage of youth. The true and deeper title should be: “Destruction.”
In societies structured by systems defined for each country, cultural, social, political, economic, and familial foundations are all shaped under a central governing authority. As Kant suggests, everything observed within society is inscribed from the top of political authority and gradually becomes manifest over decades.
After passing through drugs and sexual relations, one arrives at a “safe point” visible across all characters. The first safe point is “death”—meaning that within this neon society, across high school, college, and career trajectories, one reaches non-being, absence, and death. This can appear as a relatively safe and stable point, since at least there is no longer nihilism or the suffering of this destructive euphoria.
The second safe point is the one reached by those who escape death: enduring suffering and forced adaptation to this terrifying environment, finding a path of survival in the jungle of neoliberal freedom.
One secure point that director Sam Levinson only vaguely gestures toward is the family. The fundamentally destroyed, distorted, and collapsed institution of the family produces this social trauma and fragmentation in youth, leading them toward those two endpoints.
Parents who are divorced and abandon their children, fathers with sexual deviations, alcoholic single mothers with daughters of different destinies—all contribute to this collapse. Or in the case of the poor “Rue Bennett” family, the exhausted mother tries to save her child from a violent, abandoned society but fails to separate her from her environment, friends, and influences. Eventually, she dies in a neon haze of addiction.
This is the image the filmmaker presents of contemporary American society and its structural counterparts elsewhere: from adolescence to university to the workplace, employment, and family formation—everything appears dark, bitter, and painful. This can be understood as part of a postmodern cinematic-media chain that continuously casts light onto the wounded zones of the contemporary human condition.
In the final dialogue, Cassie’s sister Lexi says:
“Even the Bible is still scary, and it was still in my room on the shelf watching me. It was so scary I wanted to throw it away but was afraid it would bring bad luck. You think it’s nonsense, but there is so much violence and sex in it. I read it—it was confusing but also fascinating. Then I realized many things were not my fault. In the Bible, people keep dying for different reasons and just continue their paths. That’s the whole point—you just have to keep going.”
This becomes a misguided prescription of neoliberal logic: “keep going.” It gives society a false address—suggesting that whatever happens, however destructive, if you pass the first safe point of death, you should simply continue. This is a distortion that shifts responsibility onto Christianity and the Bible, while ignoring neo-Kantian and Frankfurt School critiques.
Religion—whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism—originally functioned as a message of peace and ethical guidance, keeping the human subject within a moral framework. Yet politicians, by instrumentalizing religion, transformed it into a deadly weapon—religion as ideology—destroying the human being.
The question remains: did Christ ever prescribe this kind of carefree existence, or the commodification of sexuality on social platforms? Did he instruct the consumption of drugs or the commercialization of the body? These claims are absurd and devoid of rational foundation.
Ultimately, what we witness is a system that, through a seemingly critical narrative, produces a counter-message that becomes absorbed back into neoliberal normalization. Even when partially portraying moral consciousness, it remains a surface layer meant to displace responsibility.
Beauty, in Kant’s sense, as a judgment without purpose, or in Hegel’s sense as the synthesis of spirit and form, no longer holds meaning today. In the contemporary global system, beauty has become a form of absolute luxury consumption: the more expensive, the more beautiful; the more beautiful, the more expensive.
Thus, beauty is enclosed within capital and power. One of the most important commodities of this market is the human body itself, presented as a luxury object for consumption—openly or covertly—under the discourse of “transparency,” in order to maximize capital accumulation.
Gian Shuqin, a Chinese geopolitical analyst, argues that social networks were designed at the request of the U.S. military system. The reason companies such as X, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Apple are among the wealthiest in the world is not necessarily genius or intelligence, but because they provide vast, comprehensive data to the U.S. military and state apparatus.
If users were directly asked to hand over their most important data, they would refuse. Yet through social media platforms and algorithmic architectures of engagement and persuasion, people voluntarily and unconsciously surrender detailed information about their lives.
Elsewhere, in the normalization of OnlyFans in the series Beef, the character Josh (Oscar Isaac), after years of marriage, becomes addicted to OnlyFans and can no longer maintain intimacy with his wife, leading their life toward collapse. Yet the underlying systemic cause is never addressed.
Instead, responsibility is placed on the individual male subject, framed as sexually addicted and excessive. The resolution arrives through a sentimental narrative of sacrifice and forgiveness, thereby normalizing a systemic issue at the level of common perception.
In this way, everything is absorbed into capitalist logic: love, life, family, and loyalty all acquire meaning only within the capitalist subsystem. Everything outside capital becomes meaningless. This is the totalizing reading of the system—where even classical capitalism is redefined under neoliberal governance.