You clicked on this article fast. You looked at that question and responded with something to do with gender, feminism, sexuality, biological essentialism and you were about to write a brutal comment, weren’t you?
This is not a question, however, posed by me. It is in fact the first ever question asked by Ms. Caroline Bradshaw on the pilot episode of the somewhat dated, widely berated, and yet somehow still the bible of all popular TV shows, books, and articles about relationships: Sex and The City. And I have been appointed by Vogue—very Carrie—to re-answer this sacred set of questions for today because, there I was on a call with my editor, twenty-four years since the show first aired, after a particularly strange date and I couldn’t help but wonder: Has anything changed? It doesn’t feel so different. We’re all still obsessed with love and sex and relationships. We still have completely unhinged boundaries (well, my date did). We’re still spending way over our means.
So. Let’s start at the beginning. Should women have sex like men? The question was, in 1998, a synonym for a sort of late third-wave mentality where sex meant “power,” and where “men” meant “devoid of feeling, emotion, and care.” In a 2022 world, gender, and sex look a lot different. Conversations around sex and gender, have become more about pleasure and equality—about how women deserve pleasure, and how men have emotions. The fundamental categories of gender have shifted too, and with a growing knowledge and presence of queerness in mainstream culture, plus all of us they/thems knocking about, it seems an answer is impossible, because the question simply doesn’t apply.
And so the question — with gender removed and cultural context applied — becomes “should we have emotionless sex for power?”
The question is a hard one to ask, and to answer. There is nothing wrong with having emotionless sex as a power trade, provided everyone involved is consenting as actively as is possible, and both parties are aware of what it is they are trading. Money for sex, absolutely! Decriminalize it. Power for sex: if it works, and everyone is in the know, why not? But, for the most part, after Me Too, we have tried to untangle sex from a certain kind of professional power by rightly taking power away from those who exploited it.
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