On Being Open.

to life, to sex, to change, to self-love, on TV + in Life.

This week I have watched two shows on streaming services. One I loved and the other, well, I had thoughts. I should admit that I’m not entirely over-joyed by the genre of movies/shows around women in their 40’s and 50’s tanking their lives so they can achieve a life-altering orgasm with someone new.

Don’t get me wrong: I want people to leave bad or spent relationships, if they can. The ones that can’t be fixed and shouldn’t be fixed. I want people to have great sex. Find their fulfillment. Be who they are meant to be. That’s not the problem.

It’s more about how these subjects get handled on TV. The mid-life crisis. Or more accurately, the Third Life crisis, which is usually about an aging woman, unfulfilled sexually and otherwise, that requires breaking her life apart and finding the answers through sex with strangers.

Where books about this subject tend to get intimate and delve into the full-throttle lives of women facing down existential crisis in a political climate trying to stifle us (Thinking of

lyz

Lenz’s excellent This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, which is smart, well-researched and intimate as hell, which I much preferred, over Miranda July’s provocative, but detached, All Fours about mid-life adultery.) But books often can do what movies and TV cannot. They have the room to go hard into recesses of the mind, to dig out the muck and release the characters in the details. On TV, there more constraints with time and script formatting. TV shows and movies can easily turn into vehicles for the most supeficial parts of sexual transformation, focusing on the visual, the sexiness, the nudity, at the expense of the innder life that drives these things. This is where the “sex sells” addage is born.

Divorce, separation and breaking up relationships is hard messy stuff. But in movies like Babygirl the detached part is the point. And this is where it goes off the rails for me.

In Babygirl. Nicole Kidman, taut and rigid, literally and figuratively, tries to unravel herself with her young male intern. In the first scene, we hear her before we even see her. She moans and heavy breathes. She seems to orgam like a porn star with her husband, played by Antonio Banderas (who, in the movie, is ironically directing the play Hedda Gabbler, about a bored, rich lady, trapped in a marriage she despises - so trangressive) but then we see Nicole’s character masturbating and climaxing to porn right after. She is apparently so great at turning herself on, she has to clasp her own mouth to keep from screaming out loud and waking the whole house.

She is disconnected from her husband and father of her kids, who wants to fuck her, wants to love her, he adores her. But it isn’t enough. She is a 57-year-old who has the libido of a teenager, as if the shifts from menopause have never besmirched her. She is glass in a museum.

They have been together for 19 years, and she has never orgasmed. He has no idea. When she leaves his opening night party (for a hotel room tryst with her intern lover) he is devastated that she is choosing “work” over him. In the hotel room, we see Nicole’s character on her stomach, lying flat on the floor, and the intern is hovering over her ass in the muted background, manipulating her with his fingers until she makes the open-mouthed, sea bass faces and we know she is cumming. The whole scene is akin to a dying fish on a carpet having an orgasm. Then she falls into the intern’s arms and sobs, as if this one sexual experience has changed the course of her whole life.

There is some allusion to BDSM in the movie. They talk about safe words and we see him show her how he can put his fingers down her throat in subdued lighting against the smooth rhythm of George Michaels’ Father Figure. (He’s younger, but he is guiding her, like a dad, get it?) But again, because all the sex is cut into montages, it is far away, not real. It’s low-lit perfection. There is no grit. It’s too soft, too dry, too tepid to be BDSM. I am not even sure the intern and Nicole like each other.

There are other issues with the film, but the ones I’m concerned with here are about how the movie fails to adequately root around in the cellar of our deepest, most silent ugly, shame-filled thoughts. Isn’t that the kind of work required to transform your life? To make yourself happy? Isn’t that the road from lack of fulfillment to fulfillment? Does anyone really think you can fuck the intern, throw in some safe words, walk around hot and naked, and change your life?

Ugh. Babygirl left me cold. Dying fish orgasming cold.

Because of my drab Babygirl experience, I was not entirely excited to watch Michelle Williams in Dying for Sex. On the surface of the limited series, Molly, played by Williams, leaves her husband, with whom she has never had an orgasm, after being told her breast cancer has metastasized and she is now stage IV and on borrowed time.

Molly is on a deadline. Knowing that death and further disability is looming, she has months to do the things she hasn’t been able to do. It creates a pressure in her and she upends her life. Again, her husband loves her and has cared for her but he can’t fuck her. A blow job leaves him sobbing. I think there is a larger conversation here about the detritis left behind by abandoning people, but she needs to excise her role in their relationship as the fragile patient. She discards the sick person persona, like a cicada discarding its exo-skeleton.

Like in Babygirl, BDSM is a part of this. But this portrayal of BDSM is one of the most beautiful I have seen on TV. Maybe ever.

If I am being open, I would even say that for the first time, I saw how deeply loving and giving BDSM can be for people who participate. It has not been my thing, but I found myself deeply drawn to Robby Hoffman and Esco Jouley’s character’s teaching, guiding and pulling Molly through the deep work of finding out what she likes in a life where she has never asked herself to define those things.

Imagine facing the end - as we all do - and not know what makes us happy, and not be able to ask for it, demand it, accept it. Why hasn’t she been able to orgasm with anyone else? And why does it matter?

Molly speaks about sex so casually in her cancer groups, she brings everyone around, improbably, into her journey. Sex is both serious business and also the butt of her jokes, the source of how absurd life can be. Openness is contagion in Dying for Sex. And I know that it operates this way in real life, too: This week, after I published The State of the Orgasm, I spent a good deal of talking to real life people, readers who live in Vegas, about their orgasms, their sex, their desire, while pumping gas at 7-11, while standing around eating pork belly at a food event, while cruising for books at a book shop. There is something about being open that begets openness. And hiding, pretending, obfuscating that closes us off to ourselves and our needs. Where Molly shares her orgasm journey with friends and strangers, as if she is sharing a grilled cheese, Nicole Kidman’s Romy hides, lies and is never truly released.

Molly finds that BDSM is a way to have some control when her body is out of control. She is rooting through the recesses of her darkest childhood trauma to make peace with herself, her hurt, and her relationship with her mother. She is basking in female friendship with it’s depth of connection, it’s gut-wrenching real talk, it’s full focus on seeing each other, right up close.

It is serious business where we are also all in on the joke. Coming to the end of our lives could do that.

The series, which originally aired on FX and is now streaming on Disney+ is based on a true-enough story of Molly Kochan and her BFF Nikki Boyer, who blogged and podcasted about Molly’s sexual quest, until her death in 2019. Liberties have been taken in the script and these changes work. After spending several dates ordering around an adorable young man dressed in a dog suit and making him fetch, and jump, and come, we find them cuddled up together.

“You checked me for ticks,” he says, happy and tired, head on her shoulder. “How did you think of that?”

And then, basking in the warm attention he has received, he says softly, “I felt so taken care of.”

In the end, this is what all people are looking for when they leave relationships and upend their lives. It’s not dead fish orgasming. It’s about being cared for - cared for in whatever way that means. By your life. By your own hand. By your lovers and your partner. By your family and friends.

(spoiler alert - jump this paragraph) At the end of Babygirl, we know there will be no real discovery around the quest. Nicole’s character folds her fantasties into her marriage, but in a way that still divides her relationship. Her husband cannot give her what she wants, but she loves him. He forgives her for cheating and then, improbably imitates the sex she had with the intern to please her. She orgasms thinking about him, not her husband. It’s the best she can do. It is her big compromise. It’s how she will do the least damage.

And really, this is the most any of us can do if we stay at the surface.

But in Dying for Sex, the looming end-of-life deadline sets us up for a more urgent, deeply thoughtful examination of what makes us who we are and what drives us to need certain things from ourselves and other people. I think that is the kind of exploration that serves us well in this Third Life phase. (It’s hardly mid-life, let’s be real.) We are facing our own deadlines.

This is the time to do that.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

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END NOTES:

If you are in Vegas (or another city in the world where it is playing) I urge you to check out David’s show: The Empire Strips Back, which opens here in Vegas, of course, on May the 4th. (May the Force be with you!). Super proud of my guy. This is a terrific, funny, sexy show and the perfect night of entertainment. Get tix here.