The Secret Hotwife
'Are we ethical sluts?' The question Carrie Bradshaw would be asking in 2026
“Nobody marries the ‘up-the-butt’ girl!” Charlotte exclaims tearfully in a moment of pure Charlotte-gold.
Yes they do, Charlotte. They really, really do.
As a teenager growing up in the 90s, I was utterly obsessed with Sex and the City. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha strutted onto our screens in six-inch Manola Blahniks, clutching their Cosmopolitans, and we all somehow knew the world would never be the same again. TV hadn’t seen women like them before: spunky, sharp, unapologetically modern and daring. Why? Because they talked about sex. Because they were women who made no secret of the fact that they enjoyed sex.
Imagine that.
Over the course of its six-year run, the show filled column inches and dinner-party conversations alike as its leading ladies tackled everything from blow jobs and masturbation to dirty talk and slut-shaming. It felt scandalous. Taboo. Vibrator sales famously soared after the ‘Rabbit’ episode, which tells you everything you need to know about how starved women of the nineties were for that kind of open, honest sexual outlook. And that’s why, less than thirty years later, it’s almost surreal to look back and see just how far we’ve come. Because make no mistake - Sex and the City was very much a product of its time.
Take Charlotte, who spent much of the series barely able to utter the word “sex” without clutching her pearls. “Nobody wants to marry a whore,” she exclaims tearfully after being called “a fucking whore” by her date at the moment of ejaculation. “Nobody marries the ‘up-the-butt’ girl!” is another moment of pure Charlotte-gold.
Yes they do, Charlotte. They really, really do.
And Carrie - for a sex columnist - often came across as astonishingly sheltered, to the point that, whilst rewatching it recently, I found myself genuinely baffled as to how she ever managed to land the gig. This is, after all, the woman who describes bisexuality as merely a “layover on the way to Gay Town,” who loses sleep - and risks dehydration - for an entire episode because a boyfriend asks whether she might consider peeing on him, and who refers to a man known for his love of going down on women as “so cute to be so nasty...”
We even see her flee a party after a game of Spin the Bottle ends with her very first kiss - a mere peck, at that - with a woman. “I was in Alice-in-Confused-Sexuality Land,” her voiceover explains. “I had a choice. I could stand up, walk out, and prove I was an old fart, or I could fall down the rabbit hole.”
She walked out.
The truth is, if Sex and the City were created today, nobody would bat an eyelid at Samantha’s sexual appetite, and Miranda and Steve would almost certainly be exploring polyamory, probably with Che Diaz. Charlotte would be a secret hotwife (buttoned-up mummy and gallery owner by day, exhibitionist slut by night) cheered on by voyeur husband Harry. Carrie’s column would be a wildly popular TikTok series, and at least one of the foursome would be quietly making an absolute killing on OnlyFans.
What a difference three decades makes.
And yet, its 90s incarnation mattered, it was right for the time. That show cracked something open. It got women talking about sex - with their girlfriends, with their husbands - often for the very first time. And the shift was measurable. In the 1990s, only 42% of Americans believed premarital sex was immoral. Fast-forward just a few years into the post-SATC world, and that figure dropped, rather deliciously, to 16%.
Not bad for a show about shoes, friendships, and women daring to admit they liked to fuck.
And that’s exactly why pop culture moments like this matter. They move the conversation along, giving us language for things we feel but haven’t yet quite worked out how to articulate. In the 1940s, shows like Bewitched and The Brady Bunch caused a stir for daring to show a married couple sharing a bed - not in flagrante you understand, but in striped pyjamas, full-length nightgowns, and with a polite peck before lights out. Groundbreaking stuff at the time, but its appearance on national TV helped to normalise it.
The past century of film and television is littered with these stand-out cultural moments: the first on-screen kiss, the first gay sex scene, the first depictions of masturbation or cunnilingus. More recently, we watched, transfixed, as hopeful daters sized each other up by inspecting each other's genitals on C4’s Naked Attraction. By season two, the nudity - along with the shock - was barely registering anymore. We then watched as couples climbed into the Sex Box to get it on in front of a live studio audience, before facing a panel of self-proclaimed sex experts to have a frank and honest discussion about their relationship.
And then came shows like Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, which nudged things further again. This time, ‘swinging’ wasn’t presented as a punchline, a midlife crisis, or a scandal waiting to implode. Instead, non-monogamy was framed as something intentional, something negotiated; something that, if done right, could push a relationship to grow in a wonderful direction. And in doing this, it gave couples everywhere - blushing in the dark, but perhaps bolstered by a glass of wine on a Friday night - the courage and permission to open up a conversation. To ask the question: Could we?
And they already are. Large surveys over the past decade suggest that around one-in-five people in the UK and US have engaged in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their lives, even if they never used the label. That’s no longer a fringe group of people; chances are that at least one of the people you've discussed the latest episode of Traitors with over the water-cooler at work is getting way more action than you think they are... Even more interestingly, the data tells us women are just as likely as men, and in some cases more likely, to initiate conversations about opening a relationship up sexually, particularly within long-term partnerships.
This isn’t something being done to women. It’s being chosen by them.
Among millennials and Gen Z, attitudes towards exclusivity are more fluid still. It isn’t that monogamy is being rejected by the younger generations, it’s simply no longer assumed. And if that sounds like a subtle shift, it isn’t. What was once considered not just the norm, but the only, is now being rewritten. That may scare some people, and I can understand why. Monogamy as a socially-imposed norm has been around for thousands of years, and in a relatively short space of time, we’ve seen it loosen its grip. But that loosening doesn’t signal loss of love, breakdown of commitment, or a sexual free-for-all. If anything, it demands more thought, more communication, and more honesty than simply inheriting a script and reading along. It’s about rejecting default settings, and choosing relationships - open or otherwise - purposefully.
As someone who started firmly in one camp and now writes with passion and conviction from the other, I promise there’s nothing to fear.
We know that our relationships - with sex, with love, and with one another - look different to the way they looked in the 1960s, the 1990s, or even the 2010s. We’re no longer arguing about whether women are allowed to want sex. That battle’s been won. Somewhere along the way, we reclaimed the word “slut,” and so now the more interesting question is ‘what kind of sluts do we want to be?’ Because desire without structure, honesty, and communication isn’t liberation, it’s pure chaos - and not at all what we’re talking about here.
Enter the ethical slut - someone who knows what they want, communicates it clearly, takes responsibility for the impact of their choices, and refuses to be shamed for any of it. That's me, I'm raising my hand now - and if you're reading this, maybe you are too.
Women can be ethical sluts. Men can be ethical sluts. Couples can be ethical sluts together. Ethical sluttiness isn’t about how much sex you have or the number of people you sleep with; it’s about approaching your enjoyment of and appetite for sex consciously, and with care for the people involved, whatever your dynamic.
Which is probably the column we’d find Carrie Bradshaw writing in 2026. Not “Is it okay for women to want sex?” But “What happens when we all stop apologising for wanting sex - and start being open and honest about how we go after it?”
To me, that feels like a far more interesting rabbit hole to fall into.
See you next week
- The Secret Hotwife
