Sweetpea Deserves Better From Industry

The HBO finance drama cares more about the depravity of predatory men who buy sex than the interiority of the young women selling it.

On Industry, sex is money, money is power, and power is sex — a vulgar interplay that the HBO drama drives home by making the financialization of sex work its latest subject. In the first episode of season four, Harper Stern and her deputies at Mostyn Asset Management debate the new Labour government’s proposed Online Safety Act. Putting the onus on platforms to purge harmful online content, it poses a specific threat to porn aggregators and anyone doing business with them.

“I guess you could argue that these porn services are predatory platforms that coerce the vulnerable,” the fund’s trader Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh) says. To emphasize his point, he gestures to his colleague Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche), whose naked videos from a brief OnlyFans stint have been leaked publicly. She’s aghast. This is a mere taste of the grotesque buffet of sexual humiliations rolled out this season.

Dropping at the same time as a renewed interest in the Epstein files, Industry exploits every stomach-churning sexual taboo and relationship dynamic — incest, race play, workplace coercion — to portray a civilization beyond repair. Woke is canceled, the R-word is back, and women are undeniably second-class citizens. A Labour special adviser and Rishi (Sagar Radia), the disgraced trader sent by Harper (Myha’la) to spy on him, bond over the “big naturals” of a porn star the adviser suspects is his female co-worker.

A retired banker, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), neglects his struggling teen daughter for the company of prostitutes not much older. “Human perversion is a hydra,” declares Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn), the shameless CEO of a porn payment processor named Tender whose suspicious rebrand will drive the season. His co-founder, Whitney (Max Minghella), protests that being associated with “squirting videos and ‘Ebony Gelf gets force-bred by black bull’” might damage their financial prospects.

Jonah is unbothered, gleefully replying, “That’s my favorite!” The season’s thesis is encapsulated by a journalist’s scornful remark about the real-life OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue, who monetizes outrage with stunt challenges like having sex with over 1,000 men in one day: “She wasn’t fucking a person, she was fucking a number — her spirit was dominated, well, gang-raped, almost by market logic, essentially.” It’s a judgement that applies broadly; for the characters of Industry, sex is rarely just about pleasure but business strategy.

As if to re-create this metaphorical gang-bang, Industry crams in scene after scene of graphic and questionably consensual sex: Rishi shoving down the head of a coked-up young girl blowing him as he records. Yasmin’s (Marisa Abela) aunt Cordelia (Claire Forlani) blowing Otto Mostyn after alluding to abuse by her brother, Yasmin’s father, who all but certainly abused Yasmin too. Yasmin pushing a resistant Henry, who is appointed Tender’s CEO after Whitney deposes Jonah, into fucking his young assistant, Hayley (Kiernan Shipka), while Yasmin observes and then enters the fray.

And so on, until I started to wonder at what point depicting degradation becomes degrading in itself. By episode five, “Eyes Without a Face,” it felt clear to me that Industry is more interested in emphasizing the depravity of predatory men who buy sex than the interiority of the young women selling it. This is demonstrated by the shallow treatment of Sweetpea, the so-called “stealth MVP” of Industry who has nonetheless remained a secondary character.

Sweetpea was introduced last season as a walking Gen-Z stereotype. She strolled onto Pierpoint’s trading floor in gold hoops and designer clothes, babbling to her iPhone camera. “ABSTBB: Always be securing that bag, bish!” she chirped to her thousands of TikTok followers. Then she pivoted to something like a banking Elle Woods, a frivolous blonde who was also one of Pierpoint’s sharpest economic minds.

“I didn’t know Milton Friedman wore Manolos,” Rishi once snapped at her after she questioned his trade strategy. “Well, that’s because they’re Bottega,” she replied. It was Sweetpea who sounded the alarm that Pierpoint was headed toward the brink of collapse — in a Ginger Spice costume no less — using her faculty for gossip to investigate its investments. Season three ended with her triumphing over Rishi, a foul-mouthed chauvinist who pulled up her OnlyFans at her performance review.

He spiraled into gambling debt, leading to his wife’s grisly murder, while she secured the spot Rishi thought was guaranteed his at Harper’s firm. Given season four’s subject, and the indignity Sweetpea is made to endure — we’re led to believe Rishi uploaded her private videos as revenge porn — one would expect her to be the focal point of the show. For the financial elite, money dictates morals, the content of policy and ethics of behavior less important than profit potential.

Yet, this kind of rational business logic is somehow unforgivable when adopted by sex workers, who are accused of false consciousness, being “gang-raped by the market.” Sweetpea is uniquely positioned to speak to the double standard. Industry, though, keeps Sweetpea’s presence modest, valuing her for how she can advance the plot. After being fired from Mostyn Asset Management, Harper reunites with her former mentor Eric Tao to form SternTao, which bets big on Tender’s fraudulence.

Sweetpea provides the grunt work of proving this thesis, wielding her sexual desirability to seduce potential informants. She coos to Jonah over the phone while he’s distracted at the strip club and convinces him to send call logs. Though Harper has the poor judgement to let Rishi into the hotel room that SternTao calls an office, a decision Sweetpea explodes at, the latter is more or less a loyal deputy, unmatched in competence.

Finally, in the middle of the season Sweetpea gets her own episode, “Eyes Without a Face” — one marked by horrifying and gratuitous violence. With Harper’s permission, she flies to Accra to examine Tender’s acquisitions in Africa in person. She schedules a meeting with Tony Day (Stephen Campell Moore), head of Tender’s Africa branch, under the guise of conducting market research. But Day senses her true motive, leaving Sweetpea a threatening phone call while she is relaxing at a beachside bar.

Shortly after, a local thug follows her into the bar bathroom. He pins her by the throat, lewdly runs his tongue over the side of her face, and then when she retaliates, punches her in the nose. Then the man stumbles away, the specter of rape never quite dissipating. This mirrors a dark moment from the first episode, in which Tender’s executive assistant, Hayley, wakes up from her one-night stand to discover the random guy she met at the club is actually the financial journalist Jim (Charlie Heaton) who’s been spamming her email.

He had stalked her to the club, then went home with her, all of the goal of digging dirt on Whitney. Horrified, Hayley brandishes a knife and threatens to sic her boyfriend on him. “He’s big. And he’s Black,” she yells, the implication clear. Sweetpea’s assault happens just outside the view of Kwabana, who was sent to Accra to accompany her, and their dynamic summons unsettling racial tropes — the bestial Black Man, protector and threat, and the delicate white woman, victim — that the show doesn’t quite bother to complicate.

Stumbling back to him from the bathroom, bloodied, Sweetpea interrogates Kwabana into confessing that he’s seen the explicit videos of her and that his ideal porn category is “premium calcium,” or small blonde white women like her. The reveal is grossly predictable, as are their next moves. (The implication of what his fetish means for his relationship with Harper, who he both works for and is sleeping with, is never explored.) Once they return to the hotel, Kwabena escorts Sweetpea back to her hotel room, and she initiates rough sex with him.

“Pull my hair,” she demands, her bruised eyes shut as he penetrates her from behind. “Harder!” Sweetpea deserves better than being used like this. It’s been a decade since Audrey Moore lamented in a Refinery29 essay that sex workers’ “lives are almost always sneered at, or pitied, or used as a symbol of inevitable tragedy” on television. They are treated either as “disposable symbols of violence” or “the butt of the joke.” Industry, sadly, is more of the same.

One and a half seasons since Sweetpea first appeared on the show, we still know virtually nothing about her: her family background and educational upbringing, her social circle in London, her sex and dating history. The most telling moment of “Eyes Without Face” occurs at the beachside bar when Kwabena asks her whether she watches porn. “Like a lot of women brought up on the internet, yeah,” she replies, but the details of what she watches — what turns her on — are never revealed.

The episode ends on her rejecting the concern of Harper, only to crumple to the floor of her apartment, sobbing — a casualty of an exploitative culture but also a Hollywood system that lacks the imagination to see her as a whole person. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.

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