Abstract

Georg Simmel is one of the most intriguing theorists of modernity and the metropolis. In this paper I critically reconstruct and reflect on Simmel’s analysis relating the metropolis, money, and modern sex. Simmel had a deeply ambiguous attitude towards the new positive sexual possibilities metropolitan city life offered to its denizens. I argue that, although he is definitely one of the most stimulating analysts of modernity, he himself, however, might never even have been ”modern’ - as concerns sex. Simmel makes a stern distinction between sex that is firmly located within personal relationships, and sex located outside this loving relationship. He presents prostitution-sex as an example of this second type of sex. Prostitution-sex does not exhaust the ”loveless-sex’ category, but Simmel condemns it by default, because of his normative views on proper sex. Conspicuously absent from his discussion is what we nowadays would label ”casual sex’ - ”citysex’ par example.