For years, the actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne has been the personified example of the term “chaotic queer,” who is out there living her best life, popping up at every fancy event and stealing the spotlight wherever she goes. Her popularity skyrocketed during the 2010s from her appearances on runways and on the silver screen in hit studio blockbusters such as Suicide Squad and Paper Towns—and on our Twitter feeds as Megan Thee Stallion’s hype woman at the Billboard Music Awards or the proud owner of a vagina tunnel.
Delevingne, who openly identifies as bisexual, pansexual and genderqueer, continues to be one of the prominent out LGBTQ2S+ figures operating in the entertainment and fashion industries, slaying it like she did in her big red dress at the past weekend’s Oscar ceremony. Now she’s taking her self-described “privileged western white woman” status to explore the many facets of sex in various communities with her scattered yet insightful docuseries Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne.
The six-part BBC Film–produced docuseries, which recently released on Hulu in the U.S. last month and will drop on Amazon Prime Video in Canada later this year, follows the 30-year-old Brit as she treks across the globe to dive into the various aspects of human sexual identities from a diverse array of female and LGBTQ2S+ people. Hopping between America, Spain, Japan and more, Delevingne highlights both the freedom and restrictiveness of sexual and LGBTQ2S+ cultural landscapes. As she dives further down the rabbit hole of the human conditions regarding sex and gender, she also relays her lessons back to her personal experiences. The series examines topics such as gender fluidity, international Pride traditions, the wide gap between cis men and female sexual pleasure and the evolution of pornography in today’s media.
To the benefit of Planet Sex’s producers and Delevingne herself, the docuseries prospers from the inclusive nature of the subjects highlighted across each topic. Planet Sex emphasizes its title for good measure, delivering sex-positive visibility to various underrepresented communities on an international scale. Notable people highlighted vary from an Arabian entrepreneur who creates vibrators for the women within their community, a white female porn filmmaker trying to change the landscape of the pornography industry and a Hispanic intersex filmmaker who brings underseen visibility to the medium, to name a few. When Delevingne and her producers shine the spotlight on influential professionals of marginalized groups wanting to destigmatize topics relating to sex and gender identities and showing how they let their freak flag fly, it’s a genuinely informative and inspiring time.
Love her or hate her, Planet Sex is full Cara Delevingne on display, including unnecessarily cringe narration that breaks the immersion of her travels. The voiceover often feels forced, and it’s not the only area of artificiality that plagues the docuseries. In each episode, Delevingne tries her darndest to connect the new insights she receives back to her personal experiences within her upbringing and career via on-couch confessionals. While these are perfect opportunities for the queer icon to present raw, intimate details about herself, a fact that the show claims to pride itself on, she provides only vague details. The only time when there is a vulnerability to her discussions about her identity is during the series’ best episode, “The Gender Agenda,” where she talks about her gender fluidity.
Each episode varies in quality, but the first, “No Such Thing as Straight,” which follows Delevingne exploring the significance of Pride, was the roughest jumping-off point. The structureless navigation of the topic leaves much to be desired. As the series progresses into more enticing subjects, it eventually finds footing in insightfulness, but the consistency varies.
Undoubtedly, the most entertaining aspects of Delevingne’s adventures are the scenarios she puts in for the sake of science or highlighting sex-positive groups, and how her upbeat personality carries the show. She attends sex parties, donates her blood for science via masturbation and puts on a VR headset to see herself reflected back as a man. But despite its ambitiously wide scope, the material presented doesn’t crack the surface. Oftentimes, the star will be interviewing someone, sharing natural chemistry with them, but right on the verge of an insightful observation, the episode shifts to another part of the world. The potential for greatness is present, but many areas are all either surface-level or scatterbrained, giving the essence of a prolonged live-action segment within an animated PBS Kids show.Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne offers an entertaining yet average approach to the humanistic qualities of female and LGBTQ2S+ sexualities and identities. Thanks to its enthusiastic inclusion of ethnically diverse subjects who elevate the informal aspects, Planet Sex rises to be an above-average viewing that at times feels essential while also serving as a bit of a vanity project for Delevingne herself.
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