‘I don’t want to kink-shame him. But he’s, like, into urine,” says finance worker Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) in the third season of Industry – the HBO drama that explores the lives of a group of power-hungry financiers at the fictional bank Pierpoint & Co. She is oversharing with her colleague Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) about the sexual mores of a character in the Industry-verse, Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Muck is a tantrum-prone aristocrat who has rebranded himself as the messianic CEO of clean energy company Lumi, which is about to go public on the London stock exchange.
At the end of episode two, alleged urine-lover Henry invites Yasmin to a fancy dinner spot to seduce her. Instead, she marches him into the bathroom, where she demeans him in the mirror and insists it’s “never going to happen”. Then, she sits in the toilet cubicle and urinates, tempting him with the trickling sound. “In that moment, she’s saying: ‘If you want to pursue this, you can, but know that I’m the one who has the power,’” explains Konrad Kay, co-creator of Industry. “You’re subordinate to me, but game on.’”
In Industry, the characters often engage in this type of sexual power-play, usually as a way of exploring varying degrees of mummy and daddy issues. (Pierpoint must be every HR manager’s worst nightmare.) Looking more widely, rich people are often portrayed as pretty kinky in cultural representations. If “eat the rich!” TV shows are to be believed, money is far from the only thing the 1% fantasise about.
In the third season of Industry, Yasmin is on a downward spiral. Her publishing magnate father, Charles Hanani, has suddenly disappeared amid a decades-long embezzlement and sexual abuse scandal. The rumours are that Charles (a former member of the Bullingdon Club, should you require any further insight into his character), fled his yacht in the Mediterranean to avoid the authorities. Up to this point, Yasmin has spent most of her life being coddled. Now, she’s being followed everywhere by paparazzi. The tabloids are churning out endless clickbait articles about her, and she has no power to stop them.
Enter Muck, the heir to his uncle’s media empire, which includes the Sun and the Daily Mail. When he and Yasmin first meet for dinner, Henry uses his connections to get a salacious article about her wiped from the internet, giving Yasmin a glimpse of the protection she’s been craving. Soon, they’re having sex on his private jet. (And eventually, while taking a shower together, Yasmin gives him … a different type of shower.)
This is not the first time we’ve seen Yasmin toy with men. In the first season, she ordered her colleague Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) to masturbate in front of her in the office toilets, then eat the results off the mirror. At this point, she was being sexually harassed by a senior colleague, Kenny. “She was being made to feel worthless,” says Kay. “And all of that was being sublimated into: ‘How can I get this person to worship me?’”
Yasmin uses her dominant sexual side to reclaim the power taken from her when men underestimate or objectify her. She later describes these “games” as a defence mechanism. “It’s just my first instinct whenever I feel anything like love or care,” she tells Robert. “I just want to make it ugly as quickly as I possibly can. Turn it into sex, turn it into something else.” Yasmin’s sleazy, corrupt father seems to be the root of most of her problems. In his absence, she gravitates towards Henry – a man who embodies many of her own father’s worst qualities.
But Yasmin isn’t the only character who uses sex as a coping mechanism. At the start of the season, so-called “sad boy” Robert turns up at the door of one of his wealthy clients, Nicole, and has sex with her on the kitchen island behind his girlfriend’s back. Nicole is a maternal figure for Robert, and from a similarly working-class background, so can address his mummy issues and class-inferiority complex. The pair find comfort in each other, knowing they will never be fully accepted by the “toffs” who surround them.
Then there is Eric Tao (Ken Leung), who seems to be trapped in a midlife crisis, terrified that his best days are behind him. In the midst of a bitter divorce, he is portrayed as an absent father to his young daughters, while using alcohol and sex to claw back his youth. “Do I fuck like a young man?”, he tentatively asks a sex worker who charges him $20,000 for the night at a climate conference in Switzerland. As Yasmin’s boss, Eric becomes the latest man to pose as a mentor to her, before drunkenly harassing her. (After she rejects him, he masturbates alone in a toilet cubicle, before firing her later that evening.)
Other TV shows featuring the kinky rich include Billions, about handsome hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), the New York attorney general Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) has a sadomasochism addiction. (The show opens with a dominatrix walking over his body in heels.) In Succession, we were subjected to several of the colourful roleplay fantasies of Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin, and in season four, Swedish billionaire tech CEO Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) had a thing for sending women bags of his blood.
Last year, the fourth season of You (Netflix) – a slightly ridiculous addition to the “eat the rich!” sub-genre – featured a rich kid (Lukas Gage) who was into golden showers. And in relation to cultural synergy between money and kink, all roads lead back to Fifty Shades of Grey, in which billionaire Christian Grey and his famous “red room” took BDSM mainstream. (The EL James franchise was criticised by some BDSM groups, though, which claimed that it conflated the practice with financial abuse).
What drives the link between money and kink? Kay thinks it comes down to one of our most primal biological urges – sex – colliding with the cultural incentive that most of our lives revolve around – money. “We’re animals that are moved by incentive, either biologically or socially. Money is the strongest incentive that society has ever created to make people do things,” he says. “There is a fraternity between the two, that’s why they’re so linked in people’s heads.”
Some of Industry’s sex scenes make for uncomfortable viewing. Mickey Down, the show’s co-creator and co-writer, says this wasn’t always intentional. “I don’t think they are necessarily unsexy, but they are sometimes quite clinical,” he says. “There are scenes where it feels like someone’s just left the camera there and allowed two people to get off … There’s lots of squelchy noises and the visual exchanging of fluids.”
Down explains that most of the sex scenes are about “transfers of power” – a phrase that gets right to the heart of what Industry is about. The show ostensibly revolves around money, but it’s really about class and familial trauma. These themes are difficult to untangle, partly because power imbalances are so central to both, whether it’s the inherited dominance of the ruling class over the “little people,” or the power disparity between parent and child that never fully goes away, even after death.
Money is our culture’s most mainstream fetish, which is reflected in how most of Industry’s characters behave: they consume and own each other, treating people and relationships like assets to be traded. It reminds me of a quote that’s commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” If money and sex are both means to achieving the ultimate goal – power – then Industry was destined to be one of the kinkiest shows on TV.
• Season three of Industry is on BBC iPlayer now.
