Netflix’s How To Build A Sex Room brings kink and sex positivity into the mainstream
How to Build a Sex Room on Netflix follows interior designer Melanie Rose as she uncovers her clients’ sex lives and designs personalized sex rooms based on their wants and needs.
The show focuses on ordinary people from the suburbs who want to explore their sex lives, and clients include singles, queer and straight couples, and a polyamorous family of seven. It combines the popular reality TV genre of DIY with an exploration of kink culture and a dash of sex education. Think The Block meets secretary.
In each episode, host Melanie Rose will meet a couple, find out about their sex life, introduce them to various aspects of kink and sex education as needed, and then create a sex room for them. This ranges from couples who already have experience of kink culture and want to broaden and deepen their experimentation, to couples who need to reinvigorate their sex life or reconnect physically and are looking for a space to do so. While there is open discussion and even demonstrations of tools and techniques, the show remains relatively benign in terms of what they portray on screen.
While the show has been lauded for bringing kink practices to mainstream TV, kink has a long history across cultures. Historical interpretations vary, but elements of the kink can be identified in the worship of the goddess Inanna as far back as ancient Mesopotamia.
Kink is related to and distinct from BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and/or sadism/masochism). Many will be familiar with the writings of the 18th-century Marquis de Sade, who inspired the coining of the word sadism. Modern kink and BDSM have their origins in LGBTQ+ communities, including the leather cultures of the 1960s-1970s. Leather cultures were a way queer people could fight back against social norms and build safe, underground communities to explore sexuality.
In general, kink refers to sexual practices that differ from current sociocultural norms. This can involve consensual power negotiations that characterize BDSM and other activities such as threesomes, orgies, fetish play, and shibari rope play.
Netflix
kink in pop culture
Kink, BDSM, and sex positivity have infiltrated mainstream pop and social media cultures. Films such as 9½ Weeks (1986) and Basic Instinct (1992) depict bondage, impact play, and dominance and submission dynamics, while television series such as Sex and the City and Bonding have explored the complexities of sex, kink, and relationships.
Kinsters and BDSM practitioners can connect on social media platforms like Fetlife (the fetish version of Facebook), and there are many gender-specific meet-up apps like Feeld among others.
The book and later film series 50 Shades of Gray featuring sadomasochism were best sellers worldwide. Pop music icons like Rihanna and Justin Timberlake have had bestselling hits with lyrics about kink. BDSM gear like leather harnesses are all the rage now, and sex toys like whips and paddles have their own section in most online and brick-and-mortar sex shops.
Destigmatizing sex and desire
Incorporating kink and sex-positivity into shows like How to Build a Sex Room is important in destigmatizing various sexual practices and desires. It reminds us that sex doesn’t have to be about procreation and heterosexual marriage. It can and does appear in a variety of romantic and sexual relationships, including gay and polyamorous relationships.
The show tells important stories about sex as forms of play, fun, exploration and intimate connection. It is not surprising that the series has garnered significant social media attention and positive reactions from viewers, particularly given its diverse cast of age, gender, race and sexuality.
Netflix
Reality TV gets an erotic makeover
That diversity doesn’t extend to economic circumstances, however: All of the clients in How to Build a Sex Room appear to be professionals and homeowners. One episode features an RV renovation for a same-sex couple, but most episodes involve the renovation of a room in a spacious suburban home, raising the question of who can afford to create their own sex space.
The show sidesteps class and homeownership issues. Instead, it means all you need to spice up your sex life is a luxurious, bespoke play area with expensive upholstered furniture, an array of (often expensive) sex toys, a tantric chair or sex swing, and a St. Andrews cross.
At play here (pun intended) is a consumerist model of relationship transformation based on access to financial resources and social capital. A twist on the home renovation and renovation genre, the show stages a quick intervention aimed at improving people’s sex lives and improving their intimate relationships, but these interventions are carefully staged and limited in scope.
Read more: Friday’s essay: How the moral panic over “sexual sadists” silenced their victims
vanilla kink
While How to Build a Sex Room has been credited with demystifying kink and normalizing various sexual desires, the show produces kink through a particular lens that does not reflect the broader range of kink practices, desires, and attitudes. The mainstreaming of kink risks normalizing some kink practices while re-stigmatizing others or simply overlooking them.
For example, the show’s emphasis on creating private play spaces overlooks the importance of the kink community and public play. Many kink communities host public play events to share important skills and educate about safe kink practices. Private spaces also limit intimacy to wealthy private homes.
Despite various sexual practices, How to Build a Sex Room paints a fairly simplistic picture of sex as a private act between people in long-term relationships living in affluent homes with a glamorous room decked out solely for sex – a far cry from everyday realities of sex.
Still, shows like this are good ways to introduce mainstream audiences to the world of the kink. A world that can be exciting, lustful and sexy.