Sofia Vergara’s Depressing ‘Griselda’ Sex Scene Highlights the Cartel Queen’s Ice Cold Heart

Netflix‘s latest cocaine-fueled drama Griselda attempts to transform the notorious eponymous cartel queen into a sort of feminist folk hero. The show happily dramatizes Griselda Blanco’s (Sofia Vergara) violent rise to power in ’70s and ’80s Miami as the triumph of a badass single mother outwitting the sexist assholes around her. Indeed, Blanco’s gender is constantly used as an insult. If she’s not being called a “slut,” she’s reduced to a mere “housewife.” Her worth is supposed to be limited to the confines of what the straight men around her want to use her for. Because of this, Griselda has a bleak relationship to sex. Cocaine might be the product Blanco is moving, but she frames it as a gateway to miraculous things; the conduit by which people can reclaim a spark in their boring, insignificant lives. Sex, on the other hand, seems to only be reluctantly doled out to men behind closed doors in exchange for payment, be it money, drugs, or position. Griselda might have a Sofia Vergara sex scene, Karol G as a sex worker, and Vergara’s Griselda Blanco eventually enjoying some sapphic smooches, but it’s definitely not a sexy show.

Nowhere is Griselda‘s depressing take on sex more evident than in Griselda Blanco’s own fictionalized romantic life. Griselda opens in late 1970s Medallín, Colombia. A frantic Griselda stumbles into a beautifully appointed house to patch a wound up with a maxi pad. She then spirits her three sons to Miami, where they crash with an old friend from “New York,” who has no idea that Griselda has also smuggled a brick of cocaine into her quaint guest room.

We eventually learn that Griselda is in Miami because she murdered her second husband, Alberto Bravo (Alberto Ammann), after he had the audacity to pimp her out to his powerful older brother. Griselda’s fury is hard for the Bravo brothers to understand. Not only did she dig her husband out of trouble, but didn’t she used to be a sex worker anyway? And Griselda’s shame occurs off-screen, behind closed doors. This is sex as punishment, as insult, as payment for another’s debt.

Sex barely gets more glamorous than that in Griselda. When we finally do see Griselda take a lover, hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold Dario (Alberto Guerra), the sex only happens off-screen or in in the shadows. Vergara’s single, scant sex scene is rather depressing. It doesn’t illustrate Griselda finding joy or release, but mechanically going through the motions. Even if Vergara is topless for a few seconds in Griselda, what’s really stripped down is Griselda Blanco’s own disturbing detachment from her own humanity. After all, the place where she and Dario do illustrate their devotion to each other is in shared acts of violence. The sex was only foreplay for asking him to murder an innocent man.

As Griselda executes one massacre after another to move up the ranks of Miami’s drug trade, the emotional gulf between her and her inner circle grows exponentially. Griselda’s impulse is to kill anyone she can’t trust and she doesn’t trust anybody! The one person Griselda bizarrely holds onto as a gal pal is the always-high cartel princess Marta Ochoa (Julieth Restrepo). Marta offers Griselda crack to calm down or a girl to enjoy like a boss. Griselda kisses the sex worker and later orders her to sleep with another random party guest at gun point. Griselda isn’t getting off on physical intimacy, but the power she wields.

Griselda‘s approach to sexuality only further illuminates Griselda Blanco’s twisted desires. Even in the throes of romance, sex is not what gives the crime lord passionate release. That euphoria comes from the thrill of hearing she’s being called the Godmother or the intoxication of lording over an army of devoted Marielitos. Her character might take drugs to party, but the real high Griselda gets off cocaine is its power to grant her power.

Sex is one of the most precious conduits for humans to connect with one another. It’s an almost universal experience, binding us physically and emotionally. However, sex is basically nothing in Griselda. That’s because Griselda is a show about a woman who pushes the people who love her away to chase a darker high, the buzz won by bloodshed and bodies of enemies left strewn on the ground.