“After I began to get dressed, I’d realized that I’d done it. I’d just had sex like a man. I left feeling powerful, potent, and incredibly alive. I felt like I owned this city—nothing and no one could get in my way.”
— Carrie Bradshaw (Season 1, Episode 3: “Bay of Married Pigs” Sex and the City)
The television show Sex in the City popularises the cultural idea that sex is detached from commitment. Ideas have consequences, and this view has had significant legal and relational consequences.
Sex and the City was a television series that ran through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across 94 episodes, it followed the lives of career-minded women in New York as they pursued career and sexual freedom. Sex and the City was a biographical retelling of Candace Bushnell’s relationship journey (disguised so her parents would not realise that it was her personal story).
The series promoted an idea that sex was a transactional encounter between consenting adults. In decades to come, it formed the mindset behind apps such as Tinder, where sexual intimacy could be pursued with minimal expectation of permanence.
Sex, detached from covenant, consequence and commitment.
Over the last couple of weeks, the concept of transactional sex without consequences has been played out in every tabloid newspaper across Australia. Five footballers now referred to as the ‘Pullman Five’ invited ‘Exotic Dancers’ into their hotel room. Allegations of sexual assault have stemmed from that night, and the Pullman Five have been stood down for the remainder of the season. Pictures of the distraught fiancés and girlfriends of the Pullman Five soon followed.
In 2025 Lachie Neale admitted that he had an affair with his wife’s best friend. This week his shattered wife gave a tell-all podcast. Her now estranged best friend then gave her own response on a separate podcast show, thereby escalating the sad affair.
How much pain and grief have stemmed from liaisons of these young men who seemingly had it all. Private pain has had a public fallout, and the sexual consequences of five men have had consequences far beyond the short private moment of the liaison.
There is a dreadful fallout to the notion that sexual freedom is cost-free. Sex is not free.
I have seen that fallout closely in legal practice. Over the past nine years, I have represented abused girls, accused men and institutions affected by sexual offending, false allegations and relational breakdown.
One does not easily forget walking down to the cells to meet a young man whose sexual liaison has landed him in a police station. The terror in his eyes asks the same question each time: how did it come to this?
One does not forget sitting with a young woman who has been violated and is then required to recount her trauma to another person in a moment by moment analysis.
One does not forget the relief when an accused person proves before a jury that he did not commit an offence and was the subject of a false complaint.
One does not forget the stress and anxiety an institution suffers when a non-consensual sexual incident occurs on its premises.
One does not forget a sobbing wife standing in the lobby of your office having discovered that her husband had left her.
There is horrific fallout when sex is non-consensual, as there should be. But what has also staggered me is the significant fallout that can occur when consensual sex takes place outside its proper bounds, the commitment of a marriage relationship. Family law regularly encounters the wreckage of affairs, new relationships and broken trust. Parties spend enormous sums contesting property settlements or parenting arrangements driven often by the grief, humiliation and betrayal of a sexual affair.
There are relationships in which abuse makes separation necessary, and nothing in this essay should be read as minimising that reality.
The point of this article is narrower: our culture is often surprised by the depth of the fallout that follows sexual conduct, but it ought not be. Sex and commitment reveal that there is a moral reality in this world to which all are beholden.
Consider this thought experiment. If a man approaches a woman and puts his finger in her ear, he will be regarded as a creep or an idiot, a delinquent, but the incident will soon pass. But if a man approaches a woman and engages in a sexual act towards her, the consequences will almost inevitably be severe. If the act is non-consensual, criminal consequences will follow with certain jail time. If it is consensual, the consequences will still be profound: a marriage may end, relationships with children will be impacted, and families will be estranged and parties out of pocket tens of thousands of dollars.
Having sex like a man, i.e. having multiple relationships, simply does not work and culture knows this.
How much pain will society have to take before we realise that the message of Sex in the City was flawed?
The law has developed elaborate frameworks for dealing with the fallout of broken relationships. In Australia, the Family Law Act requires property settlements to be just and equitable, a principle confirmed by the High Court in Stanford v Stanford. In parenting matters, section 60CA of the Family Law Act provides that the best interests of the child are the paramount consideration. In England, a similar concern for fairness can be seen in White v White, where the Court discussed the “yardstick of equality” in financial division.
These doctrines are not merely technical rules. They are a cultural admission that intimate choices of two parties create obligations the law must later attempt to order, and it is complicated to unwrap this.
The very complexity of these legal principles challenges the notion that love is simply free. If sex were merely physical, recreational or transactional, the law would not need to devote so much energy to untangling its consequences as it presently does.
Family law, criminal law and institutional liability all testify, in different ways, that sex is never only private.
Private acts have public consequences.
Sex has consequences because it is the most intimate of acts. Sex is imbued with moral meaning.
The grief on the face of the betrayed spouse tells us as much.
The guilt on the face of the unfaithful partner tells us as much
Sex is shaped by love and grounded in the commitment two people give to one another. It is therefore a moral act. Sex, therefore, carries a sense of permanence. Spouses and partners become the moral centre of public stories when sexual betrayal is exposed. As a society, we instinctively recognise that sexual betrayal is not morally neutral. We are not usually drawn to the cheater; we are drawn to the wronged party.
Christianity does not treat the body as disposable or the sexual act as morally weightless. It sees the human person as embodied, relational and accountable before God. That account may sound strange in a culture that prizes autonomy, but it explains why sexual decisions so often outlast the moment in which they are made.
I have spent too many hours in a professional context dealing with the fallout of misplaced sexual liaisons, and so I keep returning to the question: why? This article is borne of the fact that too many people in my nine years of practice have spent too much money because of one act that simply didn’t need to occur.
Sex is not unique to human beings, but the moral and relational consequences of illicit sex are uniquely human. Sexual misconduct can produce scandal, betrayal, litigation, estrangement and lasting grief.
The law can manage consequences, but it cannot finally explain why those consequences cut so deeply. A Christian understanding of the human person can. We live not in a moral vacuum, but in a moral universe in which sex touches the body, the conscience, the family, the community and, ultimately, the soul. That is why sexual betrayal wounds, why sexual abuse devastates, and why even consensual sex outside commitment can leave damage far beyond what the language of private choice is able to describe.
The cultural promise was that sex could be liberated from consequence. The legal record suggests otherwise. The Christian claim goes further: sex has consequences because sex has meaning, and its meaning is bound up with love, covenant and the eternal dignity of the human person.
That is why Sex in The City remains such a powerful cultural image. It promises freedom without permanence, intimacy without covenant and pleasure without moral cost.
Sex in its proper place tells a truer story. Sex belongs within a moral order that law can only partly perceive.
Sex reveals there is a moral order.
Embrace the moral order; stay committed to your partner. Grow old together. Stay married. You will save money on lawyers.
