The Social Pornography Complex

On Rufi Thorpe’s 'Margo’s Got Money Troubles'

Vincent Van Gogh, Angel After Rembrandt, 1889, Oil on canvas

Margo’s Got Money Troubles appears on the jacket to be a book about motherhood and pornography, but it’s really about the internet. But wait, according to internet discourse, the internet novel doesn’t exist. Actually it does exist but can never succeed. Actually it should really be called “the social media novel.” There are many opinions about what an “internet novel” is and whether or not it can be good, yet many have converged around the idea that the internet novel should carry its reader through the feeling of the internet, of being “online,” and it’s not surprising that such novels that invoke this feeling tend to conclude, at least implicitly: social media is bad. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts: Social media is fake and, by the way, it turned my boyfriend evil. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, specifically the story “The Feminist”: Social media turned me evil. Honor Levy’s My First Book: Social media has ruined my brain. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This: It’s ruined mine, too, and did you know, social media is fake? These books aren’t necessarily bad — Patricia Lockwood’s writing is a highlight, her language is a delight, and it glorifies the fun of it all — but they all carry a similar message: Log off. By now, we all understand social media can have harmful effects, yet here we are anyway. Social media is not only not going away, it will continue to have an increasing impact on our inner and outer lives. So what do we do about it?

It is, in fact, possible to write a novel about social media that doesn’t collapse into ephemeral, disjointed fragments yet maintains the classic form of a novel, this tried-and-true form that has persisted for hundreds — arguably thousands — of years. Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles is one of these novels. And yet it is not social media-brained and not at all cynical.

The novel begins in a predictable manner. At age nineteen, Margo has an affair with her married junior college English teacher and gets pregnant. Everyone wants her to get an abortion — especially the teacher, who immediately distances himself from her — but she refuses, has the kid, and realizes: This is really hard.

The story gets interesting when her own father, a famous pro-wrestler named Jinx, moves in, agreeing to help with childcare while she looks for a new job (she lost her waitressing job because she didn’t plan far enough in advance to secure childcare). The topic of OnlyFans (a subscription-based creator website mostly known for sexual content) comes up in conversation, which Margo thinks seems a more compelling way to make money than waitressing — or at least less soul-sucking. With milk-swollen breasts, she gives it a shot. It’s challenging at first but she asks her father for advice from his pro-wrestling days and he has helpful things to say about what it takes to break through and become famous, which includes, of course, crafting a false persona. His guidance and her fortitude leads her on a journey to social media success — and plenty of money to take care of her child.

While reading, this novel feels like it is building. Things are happening, growing, expanding. Margo reconnects with her father and bonds with her cosplaying roommate. The OnlyFans work is a project worth exploring. She approaches social media fame clinically, working with TikTok and Instagram and Linktree when necessary, and taking in relevant advice from her father (who at first struggles with the idea of his daughter being on OnlyFans, then concludes that it’s not so different from pro-wrestling, where one essentially sells one’s body for decades, a point made by his own chronic back pain issues, which will matter for the plot later). Margo experiments with different offerings, and, taking her father’s advice to “make friends” aka collaborate, she decides to team up with two experienced OnlyFans creators and write bizarre story lines involving robots and aliens (a little kitschy, but it makes sense that she would find a niche and roll with it). Importantly, she always seems to keep her OnlyFans work at a distance from her own sense of self. Most social media stories make you feel like this technology is wearing you down, pulling you deeper into its maws. Yet Margo doesn’t fall into cynicism or despair. It doesn’t seem to affect her psyche at all. Her narration remains strong and sure. Why?

Blame the baby.

This is what saves her — and the narrative — from falling into fragmentary social media brain-mode. The child. Throughout her ventures into online worlds, there is a tiny creature who very much needs her, every minute of the day, to stay alive. The demands of early motherhood already have the effect of stealing someone’s brain and leaving the rest exhausted and fragmented. What’s one more thing?

But wait, doesn’t this mean the book is more about motherhood than it is about social media? No. Let’s look at the motherhood plot. Woman has sex, gets pregnant, has baby, faces challenges, overcomes these challenges. This is a plot but not really a story — the child feels a little tangential, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not saying anything new about motherhood, except, maybe, a comparison between how becoming a mother makes her dissociate from her body in ways that help her on OnlyFans. But again, that’s not the main thrust of the novel, she doesn’t come to some big realization about how she feels about her body, she feels pretty much the same way about creating content for OnlyFans throughout the novel, which is, This seems fine, it makes me money and I need money.

But what is it saying about social media?

The book begins with a quick second-person warning that book beginnings are always challenging, because you, the reader, have to “learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know.” It then delves straight into Margo’s baby shower, initially using third person before switching to first person later. This back-and-forth continues throughout the novel because, as she writes, writing in third person makes it “easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did.” I thought these self-referential digressions were unnecessary at first, but later changed my mind — there’s something nice about the uber-sincerity of it. The story really is about the narratives we all craft about our lives and the distance and intersections between those narratives and reality, which is what we do on social media every day. Of course, there is often overlap between the two. Take what Margo’s father says is the number one rule about pro-wrestling: One must never ask if it is “real.” The fantasy is important to maintain and, either way, it becomes real: A wrestling career has very real impacts on the body and mind. Many pro-wrestlers, her father admits, die young, and he himself suffers with debilitating pain and opioid addiction. There is also a romantic subplot when Margo begins a sweet messaging relationship with one of her “clients,” which begins based on lies — she gives a fake name and fake details to protect her identity for understandable self-protection reasons, but the relationship begins to feel “real,” and she struggles with what to share and what to keep private. One particular lie harms the relationship, but is worked through. The author reiterates in the final words of her acknowledgments how deeply this book is about lying, thanking the reader for “allowing me to relentlessly, anguished-ly, excitedly lie to you.”

The social media story is a story about ourselves and about other people and the huge gulf between us, as well as the gulf between our narrative and ourselves. It is about this distance and explores this distance. This distance has always existed, but now it is more prominent, more all-encompassing — and yet this does not have to be a bad thing. We read novels because we want to understand other people, because, in the end, we hope this can help us understand ourselves. Self-awareness isn’t something that can be taught on a WikiHow page. You learn through experience, through trial and error, through thought and the limitations thereof. This is why we read novels: to put ourselves in the heads of other people and feel their thoughts. The fragmented social media novel gives us just a limited peek but keeps us at a distance. Margo’s Got Money Troubles explores this distance in a way that invites us in.

But then it switches from being a social media novel to a pornography novel.

By this, I don’t mean sexual content (though there is a small amount of that, tastefully done). I mean it becomes a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Margo, you learn as the story goes on, is perfect. The trouble she encounters is never of her own volition but due to others not realizing how perfect she is. The story only ever complicates when things happen that have nothing to do with Margo but with those around her. Her father secretly relapses into his opioid addiction and in his drug-addled haze, calls and threatens Mark, the father of Margo’s child, leading Mark to sue for full parental rights, partially due to the phone threat and partially due to the fact that he coincidentally just got a divorce and was feeling lonely. There is a scare with Child Protective Services, after Margo’s mother calls them on her at the urging of her new conservative Christian husband, but the CPS representative egregiously and very illegally lies to force her way in, and this illegality makes the whole affair disappear when Margo’s lawyer gets involved. By the way, Margo having an affair with her teacher wasn’t her fault either, it just sort of happened, probably — she thinks later — due to some inherent power dynamic thing. So, Margo either is actively harmed by nefarious actors, or rewrites her story to declaim responsibility, and in both cases, she doesn’t have to change; she just has to convince everyone else that she’s perfect — including that OnlyFans is actually a very respectable profession — and she succeeds. (Except with her mother, but that’s only because she’s under the thumb of her Christian husband, and these days contemporary literature paints Christianity as irredeemable, but that’s a topic for a different essay.)

Then there is the ending. The relationship I mentioned goes through ebbs and flows. JB, her beau, flies out to Los Angeles and they have a perfect day together, but then the CPS fiasco happens so she ends things, saying that she needs to focus on her baby but also, is it possible to have a relationship while also selling oneself on OnlyFans? She assumes the answer is no. JB is heartbroken but then, in the book’s final pages, he arrives unannounced in LA and asks to meet for lunch. He shows up with a huge bag of Runts candy, which is in the story’s logic a deeply romantic gesture, and yet, he is not there for romance. “I have a business proposition for you,” he says. You see, he happens to have been working in something about data analysis, and Margo is good at writing, so therefore the two of them should consult for OnlyFans creators, creating story lines for them while carrying out things like “demographic feedback, post-performance analysis, ad placement,” and so on.

I actually like this plan, even if it sounds so boring I could cry. Because really, what about the future? Margo briefly entertains the idea of becoming a real estate agent, then decides that’s stupid and she hates it. But one cannot be an OnlyFans creator forever. And does she not realize that there are other jobs she can do from home? She studied writing, for god’s sake! It makes sense that she would switch into something more behind-the-scenes and use her storytelling skills to go bigger. But why did it have to come out of the blue from some unreal, other human? JB is too perfect. She lied to him,then broke up with him and he sat around thinking, what if I just wait it out? What if I move to LA and start a business with her instead? And then we’ll maybe end up together someday, but only when she’s ready? JB is not real. Real people don’t sit around, scorned, wondering how they can save the lives of their scorners. He is wish-fulfillment; he is porn.

One of the key distinctions between pornography and literature that involves sex lies in their goals. Pornography is intended to get your rocks off, while literature, supposedly, does something deeper and more fulfilling. Porn has sex for sex’s sake, unconnected to the character or story. And in porn, sex happens easily, without any buildup or real work. Sally Rooney writes about sex very well, making each sex scene move the story forward. Sally Rooney, perhaps relatedly, also writes about social media well in both Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You, both of which include social media as a key way for the characters to understand more about each other, or at least try to.

Social media and pornography are, in a sense, aiming for the same thing: a quick hit of social connection. Both can be dangerous when they become addictive, and I think this is what most social media novels try to relate: the grueling impact of such strange addiction on the mind. But they can also be dangerous when their users confuse fantasy for reality: when horny men start wondering why all the pizza delivery girls aren’t taking off their clothes immediately upon arrival, and why insecure preteen girls wonder why a $500 Sephora haul doesn’t make them popular and immediately admired.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles is close to being great. But in the end I wonder what lessons she learned other than to be honest and be kind, which she already was. Is it more about the world changing around her? Becoming more accepting? Then what? What about her own future? If JB hadn’t stepped in with his magical business idea, what would she have done? Maybe learn more hard lessons later, of a different kind. Early in the story, she is forced to take responsibility. I said Margo was perfect; this isn’t exactly true: she very clearly does not prepare for the financial aspect of life with a baby. She doesn’t sign up for the daycares that have months-long waiting lists, which makes her unable to work. I’d hope she would have learned to look ahead so that she wouldn’t be forced into another situation where she is left jobless and hopeless. Without JB, maybe she would.

It comes down to the question: How does Margo craft her life differently now? Presumably the act of writing through all this should have brought the narrator to some conclusion. Yet it ends like this: “That’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.” How cynical is that? What about the many people who already love her and surround her? It ends sadly, on this gulf, without any self-awareness whatsoever.

Yet where does the gulf between oneself and the other disappear most truly if not through motherhood? She creates a child and realizes — before the awful ending — that love comes from inside her. “And Bodhi, Bodhi glowed gold, drinking and drinking the love that flowed out of my body, using it to make himself strong and happy, using it to grow, his cells doubling and redoubling, his bones assembling themselves with time-lapse speed like a miracle.”

Yes, this child’s name is Bodhi, short for Bodhisattva, the Buddhist term for an enlightened being. Buddhist cosmology comes up again when she names her OnlyFans persona “Hungry Ghost,” a term for a being tormented by insatiable desire and craving.

Sounds a lot like addiction!

But wait: In Buddhist art, these hungry ghosts have small mouths and swollen bellies.

Sounds a lot like a baby!

If only this book were more about motherhood, maybe it could have been saved. A baby is not simply the closing of the gap between one person and another. In fact, this gap grows and grows as the baby becomes a child, who becomes an adult. Distance is not the issue. It is a lack of awareness. We have compassion for babies, even when they cry and bite and need so very much, because they embody limitless potential. They will one day learn how to use words and construct their own narrative. We are less compassionate towards a grown man who cries and bites and needs without thought. We are aware that the baby will grow up and achieve self-awareness and understanding, and in this awareness, we feel hope.

See what more “the internet novel” could be if it really tried? This technology has shaped and will continue to shape our culture; it is a fact of life, with all its good and bad qualities. Most of all, it gives us unprecedented opportunities for connection. We don’t need another book telling us to log off. We need literature showing us how to craft our lives with care, how to understand and even love the new distances we’re creating between one another, how to work with our internet dependencies to create new potentialities. We are born into an increasingly digital world, and yet we still have mothers, and we still can become mothers, in many meanings of the term. Besides, no matter how many people tell you to log off, you won’t. Now what?

Denise S. Robbins is the author of The Unmapping, a speculative climate fiction novel published in June 2025. Her stories and interviews have been published in The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Review of Books, and many more. Find her on Substack at denisesrobbins.substack.com.