Who Knew a Kinky Sex Party With Cara Delevingne Could Be So Boring?

If you were an adolescent with occasional bouts of insomnia in the early 2000s, you probably grew up watching Real Sex, the groundbreaking HBO series that aired in the wee hours before softcore time-travel movies and re-airings of Problem Child 3. Real Sex was truly revolutionary: it was frank, straightforward, and replete with the types of dimpled bodies of various hues and shades that are sorely absent from our TV screens and Instagram feeds. Perhaps most importantly, however, it didn’t take itself too seriously, imbuing its subject matter with the silliness that it deserves. One episode featured a Tantric sex workshop where participants pretended to be dolphins; another, an erotic musical number where a woman pretended to be a strawberry with a spanking fetish. Real Sex treated its subjects with dignity and respect, while simultaneously acknowledging that the act of human beings rutting up against each other to the point of climax is inherently ridiculous, a delicate balance that few seeking to chronicle the experience of human sexuality have successfully achieved. 

Fast-forward to 2023, and there’s been shockingly few spiritual successors to shows like Real Sex, even though, with the state of U.S. sex education woefully bereft and anti-LGBTQ legislation being rolled out en masse in red states, there’s arguably never been a greater need for one. One potential contender, however, has emerged: Planet Sex, a sex-positive new Hulu docuseries produced by British model, actor, and socialite Cara Delevingne. 

A former member of Taylor Swift’s short-lived girl squad and occasional actor and model, Delevingne is most recently perhaps best known for her serial relationships with a string of B-list starlets and doing things like this. As a celebrity who has garnered immense public interest in her own sexuality, Delevingne is, in some ways, an obvious choice to host a docuseries about sex, even though she is frank right off the bat about her shortcomings in the role. (“Model. Check. Actor. Check. Privileged Western white woman. Check check check,” she says in the premiere episode.) As host of Planet Sex, she serves as a proxy for the open-minded yet slightly prudish viewer at home navigating the complexities of human sexuality, evincing a wide-eyed, bashful gaze at events ranging from a group masturbation class to an all-female sex party on the outskirts of Los Angeles. 

Sadly, Delevingne is not all that convincing in the role of sexual naif tour guide (at one point, she purports to be attending her first Pride event, which, considering your most homophobic boomer relative has probably at the very least attended a drag brunch, seemed somewhat less than believable). Yet Delevingne seems curious and game for anything, from making vulva molds with a Japanese artist imprisoned for obscenity, to visiting a sex lab where she allows a researcher to hook her up to a machine measuring blood flow to her genitals while she watches porn (“Can I ask a question? Can you read my mind through my vagina?,” she asks the researcher at one point). 

When not struggling through dry and didactic segments, such as a perfunctory game of flash cards defining terms like “bisexual” and “pansexual” (did we not learn anything from the cancellation of Ali Wong’s character on Big Mouth?), she comes off winsome and devilish, more like a hyperactive 12-year-old boy than a Hollywood Cool Girl going through the motions of her streamer vanity project. Yet Planet Sex would much rather serve as a primer for Park Slope moms anxious about their kids self-identifying as nonbinary than as a vehicle for Delevingne’s winsome and hyperactive charm.

Throughout Planet Sex, one also gets the sense that, despite its ostensibly broad-minded approach toward sex and sexuality, there are those who are not being afforded a seat at the table. In the three episodes made available to press, Planet Sex features little discussion of sex workers, for instance, despite such topics as social media censorship, the omnipresence of Pornhub, and the rise of subscription-based platforms like OnlyFans making headlines on a daily basis. Though there is lip service devoted to the experiences of BIPOC and gender nonconforming people, a scene at Skirt Club, an all-female sex party at a tastefully appointed Beverly Hills home, makes it clear that sexual liberation is often being viewed through a very specific lens: “This is a case of what women can get up to when they let go of shame, leave their inhibitions behind and feel free to explore their sexuality,” Delevingne narrates as a bevy of largely white, largely hot women cavort around in bustiers, tiaras, and body glitter. 

There are aspects of Planet Sex that are genuinely fun and compelling. The series does take pains to showcase the perspectives of non-Western people with nonconforming gender and sexual identities, such as a queer activist from Syria, a group of anonymous Lebanese activists, or a muxe (third-gender person) hairdresser in Oaxaca, Mexico. There are also a handful of fascinating moments where Delevingne sharply questions her own gender journey, such as when she discusses having traditionally male interests at an early age: “If I hadn’t become famous, would it have been different?” she muses. “If I wasn’t a model, would it have been different?” 

The tension between Delevingne’s self-presentation as a conventionally beautiful cisgender white woman and her own struggles with gender expression is a genuinely fascinating one, particularly considering Delevingne’s status as an omnipresent tabloid staple and fixture of the queer celebrity circuit. Yet Planet Sex fails to probe too deeply into questions of Delevingne’s relationship to her own sexuality or gender presentation or its significance to popular culture at large, preferring instead to splice scenes of group masturbation classes (complete with an adorable plush vulva puppet) with footage of her tooling around in a classic red sports car, perfectly ombréd tresses blowing in the breeze. 

Ultimately, Planet Sex fails in providing a comprehensive birds-eye view of contemporary gender and sexuality issues; it’s more interesting for the questions it raises about what sexual infotainment can and should be. In a world where most young people are learning about sex via xHamster and TikTok videos that use cutesy terminology like “mascara” for penis, it’s clear that there is still a tremendous need for entertainment about sex that is accurate and informative. But it’s difficult to envision what that could actually look like in a way that isn’t either dry or didactic, cheesy or hyper-sanitized. Despite flashes of silliness and fun, Planet Sex manages to be neither. If your sole exposure to queer culture is Target Pride Month crop tops and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, Planet Sex may very well be revelatory. For many of us, however, it’s something of a joyless slog through a subject that should very much be the opposite.