This piece contains spoilers for the A24 film Babygirl.
This year, pop culture’s leading lady was a walking HR violation. She could be spotted bending over the conference table, getting railed on company time. She scurried around with cleavage “accidentally” peeking through button-up blouses and shapely thighs exposed by bunching pencil skirts. Her hair? A mess. Her behavior? Unacceptable. Flopping at her boring job, she found a new calling: freak-i-fying corporate America.
Almost everywhere you looked in pop culture, you could see pervert professionals sexing up the workplace. HBO devoted its prime Sunday-evening slot to Industry, in which degenerate investment bankers play psychosexual mind games and fuck around with the global economy. TikTokers hunted for a “man in finance” and styled themselves “office sirens,” taking notes from a bespectacled Bella Hadid and Gisele Bündchen in The Devil Wears Prada. Geek glasses were the “It”-girl accessory. Music’s downtown Lothario, the Dare, inspired imitators to stagger around town in rumpled suits, while FKA Twigs led a corporate rebellion for her new album cycle. And to cap this all off, the director who brought bisexual MMF threesomes to the forefront of public consciousness is now remaking American Psycho.
What’s going on here? The predictable hypothesis is that we’re wilting away in our crumb-littered apartments, craving the stability and socializing of the office. Remote work isn’t cutting it. We want defined business hours, watercooler chitchat, and temporary escapes from our own mess. Could be, but that’s the crafty CEO perspective. WFH peaked in 2020, and the offices now capturing our cultural imagination are not today’s open-space playgrounds. They’re purgatorial and gray — no MacBooks, chic Scandinavian furniture, and fast-casual salads. The vibe: loser pedant bosses haranguing you the moment you even think of a typo, brown-bag lunches, sweaty co-workers, generic 12-cup coffee machines. Shaking down a jammed vending machine for stale Bugles and thwacking your clunker of a computer because it’s bugging again. And paperwork — so much paperwork.
Those are the offices of yesteryear, obsolete fictions ridiculed in turn-of-the-millennium films like Office Space and The Matrix. The ’90s ushered in a new age of connectivity with the web, creating a rising class of information workers boxed into cubicles to stare at their computers. It’s a flavor of corporate culture distant enough for a new generation to romanticize, a vacant set for colorful fantasies. In her “Eusexua” music video, FKA Twigs plays a drab employee at a company called “CroneCorp” who’s spammed with pop-up notifications and bureaucratic nonsense. “Have you seen the new comments?” her boss asks. “I … haven’t. Were they on GroupSpace?” “No, TeamZone Chat.” Seconds later, she and her hot colleagues are half-naked, dancing.
Looking back on the ’90s, surveillance seemed more obvious: It was the big guy stooping over your desk, not the faceless algorithms scouring your search history or tracking your mouse movements. The rules were clear. Your boss told you to do something, and you did it. Work was clearly a means to a salaried end. Your nine-to-five might have felt meaningless, but there wasn’t the foreboding sense, like now, that your clicks might be contributing to mass destruction in a faraway country, which may have been just a matter of naïveté at the time. You still lived mostly in the physical world, with sticky notes and pencils and janky appliances you could smash if you were really mad. (Nowadays, you have to shell out money for a rage room.) You had the privilege of being bored. And at the end of the day, you went home.
The office (orderly, exposed) wouldn’t be so alluring without an opposite space (messy, private) with which to miss it; what keeps the fantasy alive is the dream of separation between work and life. Julio Torres’s 2023 film Problemista and subsequent HBO series Fantasmas depict the fate of urban creatives trying to make it without a regular nine-to-five. Problemista’s protagonist Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer, lives in constant anxiety coddling a batty, mercurial art critic (Tilda Swinton) in the hopes of obtaining a visa. Spiritually and erotically depleted, he only engages with sex as a financial necessity; even if he wanted to bring someone home, he couldn’t because he’s rented his shitty Bushwick bedroom as an Airbnb. It’s a stressful existence he could escape by taking a desk job offered to him by his generous immigration lawyer, but he turns it down, because this is a movie with a guaranteed happy ending.
Still, Torres questions this: Is it worth trying to be an individual in an extractive system that mines creativity for profit? What if your artistic integrity is better preserved with a corporate job? In Fantasmas, necessity forces Torres (playing an idiosyncratic dreamer also named Julio) to prostitute himself to megacorporations who want a flattened version of his story for “diversity.” Meanwhile, his agent Vanesja, the series’ “office siren,” clacks around in high heels and seduces her dumb, handsome clients, fancying herself a performance artist pulling off a grand stunt. Better to be an intriguing square than yet another artistic nobody, in her logic. “I think what we’re trying to unlock here is charisma and mystery,” the writer Emily Sundberg hypothesized earlier this year. “So few people can actually make big money, of course we’re paying attention to the people who dress like they do.”
Vanesja knows that any sterile setting can be eroticized. Proximity turns dud co-workers into tens; minute actions — stolen glances, passing remarks — take on outsize magnitude. Shrink down the world to a small enough frame, and even the most minor characters appear to exert great power. Fantasmas’s most arresting character is a despotic customer-service rep named Becca (Alexa Demie) who relishes in the potential for cruelty within her limited authority. She doms her “valued customers,” until later, when another customer-service rep (Ziwe) doms her too. In 2002’s Secretary, the much better precursor to 50 Shades of Grey, the mousy Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) insists, “I want to be bored,” in a job interview. She and her new boss, the reclusive attorney E. Edward Grey (James Spader), soon enter a BDSM relationship charged by the terms of the employer-employee dynamic, which dictates that she must obey him and he must notice her. Lee frazzles and entices Grey, forcing his irritation with typos and pranks. She controls him too.
There is something alarming about the idea of young women, post–Me Too, idealizing office trysts involving stark power dynamics, fancying themselves the meek secretary chosen by a suave, powerful boss. “The idea of employing sexuality in a workplace is not exactly the act of authority that many young people think it is,” Vogue writer Hannah Jackson observed earlier about the “office siren” trend. The A24 movie Babygirl flips the script, reimagining the office romance for the girlboss. Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a robotics CEO having an affair with a younger male intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson). For her, submission to him is a kind of freedom. Her company is the type of tech-y, humanistic workplace that infantilizes its employees, and as CEO — a “nurturer and collaborator,” she says — she must perform excess emotional labor to retain them. She must also manage her family at home. The power she wields doesn’t feel like power at all. “Hurt me? I could make one call and you lose everything,” Samuel scoffs when Romy hesitates over their affair.
There is no way Romy can have it all. In the end, she loses Samuel and retreats to her monogamous marriage, with the consolation of better pleasuring from her husband and stricter boundaries at the office. A boss in title, she starts to become one in attitude. For other women, attitude is all they’ve got. With no real security, their only option is to approximate power through costume.
Related “sexy professional” pop-culture moments to check out:
• Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior (1988)
• Garielle Lutz’s short story “Sororally” (1996)
• Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002)
• Slavoj Žižek’s ad for Abercrombie & Fitch’s back-to-school campaign (2003)
• Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016)
• Caroline Polachek’s “Dang” (2023)
• Miu Miu’s F23 Ready-to-Wear collection (2023)
• YSEULT’s “Bitch You Could Never” (2024)
• Levi Coralynn and William Conrad’s I.am.Gia campaign (2024)