Golden Showers in Netflix’ You Season 4 Are a Hot, Wet Take on Class Anxiety

Netflix You is back with a vengeance – and significantly fewer fingers on Joe’s hands – and is armed with his infamously provocative sex scenes. In previous seasons, this featured an encounter between Love and Joe within moments of hitting and locking up a couple they had just been having a foursome with, and of course several clips of Joe masturbating in his car. And in this first half of season 4, We’re almost immediately treated to a golden rain subplot that offers a surprisingly succinct class analysis.

Since the events of last season, Joe has moved to London and renamed himself a literature professor named Jonathan Moore, where he encounters and is infiltrated with a group of aristocratic, predictably obnoxious enemies. This new circle includes socialite and influencer Lady Phoebe and her boyfriend, an American named Adam Pratt. While both are wealthy, Phoebe is significantly wealthier, leaving Adam more or less dependent on her financially. This doesn’t seem to bother Adam – until we (and Joe) see Adam doing it with a servant whom Adam orders to urinate on him.

In episode 5 we learn – along with Phoebe – that class anxiety is the reason for Adam’s pee kink. When Phoebe offers to pee on Adam shortly after the couple gets engaged, he stops her, explaining that wanting to be peed on is about “having the person under him.” [him]” status-wise. For him, piss play is an outlet to vent and channel his frustration at the economic inequalities of their relationship. And while Adam insists this isn’t “a big deal,” Phoebe replies, “You know where kinks come from? The deepest parts of your mind. And the deepest part of you is telling us exactly what we need to know: we are not equal in this relationship. We’re not real life partners.” Then she drops him without further ado.

dr Liz Powell, a sex educator and therapist who has helped many clients navigate humiliation games, said exploring power imbalances in relationships through piss kinks like these is more common than you might think in the real world.

“So much kink is about playing with power,” Powell told Jezebel, highlighting the “classic kink stereotype” of a senior businessman who wants to be submissive in the bedroom. When “you get the orders,” she said, “it can feel like a really big relief” for someone who otherwise has a lot of responsibility in their day-to-day life.

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Powell noted that it’s “nearly impossible for either party in a relationship to be completely equal in strength,” creating situations like Adam and Phoebe’s. In such cases, Powell said that many clients and other professionals she has worked with “use kink to explore the societal axes of oppression and the humiliation game in particular.” Specifically, many “people in the kink scene are very keen to explicitly incorporate elements of class and financial status into their game,” sometimes as a safe outlet to “dub out things that might cause conflict in their relationship.” For example, if you’re dating someone who makes significantly more money than you — which creates “really complicated situations” for the relationship — kink can be a more convenient or comfortable way for some to understand mixed feelings, Powell said.

Piss games in particular can help couples and sexual partners have fun with power-based fears: “There’s the age-old metaphor of men calling themselves alphas and wolves marking their territories by peeing,” Powell said. “And in that very primal or animal sense, urinating on something can be an act of possessiveness and create a strict, sexually satisfying hierarchy.”

You has never been afraid to poke fun at the extraordinary: Beck and her elite friend Peach in Season 1; Love’s Hippie crime family in Season 2; and all of Love and Joe’s cereal mom and venture capitalist neighbors in Season 3. This season, Joe’s new “friends” are patently more horrid than ever, whether they casually abuse waiters at Phoebe’s country home; gloating over the oligarchy and demise of democracy between lines of cocaine; or even laughing at the murders of their own friends.

Phoebe and Adam are both extremely wealthy, but Phoebe’s higher status is (apparently) so threatening and uncomfortable that Adam is forced to seek out others to urinate on him to relieve himself. This subplot certainly comments on the greed of the ultra-rich and their inability to feel satisfied or sufficient. But there’s also something that’s universally understandable: relationships, and the power dynamics that belie them, are often tricky and often difficult to talk about. And without words, urine speaks volumes.