Babygirl and “The Right to Sex”
This week’s blog post is a review and discussion of the new film Babygirl, drawing on thoughts from the book “The Right to Sex” by Amia Srinivasan.
If your algorithm is anything like mine, you’ll have seen lots of headlines and teasers for Babygirl, the new film directed by Halina Reijn. The reviews are very mixed, with outrage ranging from it being too raunchy (“It’s basically porn!”) to it not having enough sex.
The film, starring Nicole Kidman, follows a high-flying CEO who puts her career and family at risk to have an affair with her young intern. I almost changed my mind reading this description and considered watching that film about Bob Dylan instead, because the plotline sounded so cliché it bordered on boring – probably just another 50 Shades of Gray vibe.
But it wasn’t.
When leaving the cinema, my friend and I agreed that our main feeling was “positively surprised”. Sure, it was explicit (it’s R-rated!), but there was more to the film than nudity. I found myself laughing out loud with the rest of the cinema, it was absurd and witty in parts of the dialogue, like nice awkwardness, and quite vulnerable moments.
It’s unsurprising that the marketing would focus on how this is a “hot” movie. It perhaps doesn’t sell as well that the central theme (in my opinion) is shame, specifically shame related to sexual desires, and trying to navigate the desires you have – and as a result, the audience can perhaps also explore how these desires are shaped in the first place.
A brief recap of the situation: Romy, the CEO (played by Nicole Kidman), has been with her loving husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) for 19 years and they have two daughters together. But Romy reveals that she has never had an orgasm with Jacob - she’ll usually get off afterwards to porn. Then one morning, she is nearly attacked by a dog on the street. A young man steps in and calms the dog down. This young man turns out to be her new intern, Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson, who also starred in Triangle of Sadness). Romy secretly desires to be treated like this dog, basically being told what to do by someone like Samuel. But she is deeply ashamed of this desire and tries to be what she thinks her husband wants instead.
This starting point reminded me of philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s book “The Right to Sex”, which explores themes of sexuality in a structure of female oppression. Among other things, Srinivasan contemplates what it would take for sex to be truly “free” when it’s plausible that our desires are shaped by an oppressive system. In the feminist view, we live in the patriarchy, so giving consent to sex is a complex topic. For example, a reluctance towards Romy’s fantasies might be that we disagree with a patriarchal view that men have a right to dominate women and might question whether this dominance within sex isn’t a form of oppression too – but in Romy’s case, the scenario really turns her on. Srinivasan discusses how to navigate this (maybe) uncomfortable fact and considers what we can do about it, not just theoretically, but how we’d practically achieve emancipatory social change.
A disclaimer: This discussion of sex and desire is of course limited to consensual sex, so some obvious cases where there is a lack of consent (e.g. children) are not what we’re talking about here. It’s rather in the cases of, when someone consents, what that even looks like under an oppressive structure.
Something I greatly enjoyed about Srinivasan’s book is that she doesn’t moralize or explain away certain desires as false consciousness. This approach was also characteristic of her course in general (she taught a special paper during my undergraduate at Oxford called “Feminism and Philosophy”, don’t mind me flexing). In other words, Srinivasan doesn’t question people’s desires as being inauthentic or not what someone truly wants if they only knew better. Rather, Srinivasan encourages the reader (and her students) to sit with the discomfort that our desires are entangled with problematic structures – and that’s just how it is right now. There isn’t necessarily something “wrong” about our desires or the things we consent to just because the system under which they are formed is not ideal. It’s quite paternalistic to assume that you’d know what someone’s desires would actually look like if we were just “free” or say that desire ought to look a certain way.
But – and this is the important bit – it’s interesting and helpful to look at what things within this structure made our desires how they are, and whether we think that it is a good structure. Because consent alone isn’t enough to liberate women from oppression, according to Srinivasan. The topic of desire is quite polarizing among feminists too, and it’s interesting to see how the movement has changed historically - Srinivasan presents it clearly and succinctly in her book. As I understand it, she is showing readers that we need to think through topics like consent and desire and oppression, struggle through them, be generous when considering opposing views and grapple with their arguments - because merely yucking someone else’s yum, as they say, just isn’t very constructive.
So: something we can do, according to “The Right to Sex”, is critically consider why society regards certain types of bodies as worthy, beautiful, or “fuckable” (Srinivasan, 2021).
Say for example you believe that all body types are beautiful and should be equally desired, even though society focuses mostly on the desirability of muscular men or slim women. And yet despite this belief, you’re still only attracted to the body types which society holds in high regard. What Srinivasan argues is that we should be aware of how we’ve been disciplined to thinking a certain way, shaping our desires. Who we choose to have sex with is a political question, desire is a political question. And if we believe and want to move towards a society where all body types really are considered beautiful and desirable, then maybe we could practice refocusing the lens on other types of bodies, noticing their beauty, challenging the attributes we are attracted to. I think this would apply to sexual fantasies too – again, not saying that Romy’s desire to be treated like a dog is wrong or false, but it could be interesting to consider what has shaped this desire and whether she agrees with the structure that has created it.
It’s complicated to subject our sexual preferences to political scrutiny. Srinivasan acknowledges this: “We want feminism to be able to interrogate the grounds of desire, but without slut-shaming, prudery or self-denial: without telling individual women that they don’t really know what they want, or can’t enjoy what they do in fact want, within the bounds of consent.” (2021). It’s hard for the discussion not to end in authoritarian moralism and telling people what is right and wrong.
Using the feminist lens makes the film interesting to watch because there’s not an easy answer. At one point, having found out what his wife desires, Jacob says, “Female masochism is just a male fantasy”. Romy doesn’t contradict him because she feels bad, but Samuel protests and tells Jacob that this is an outdated view.
Jacob has this role of a very liberated modern man who supports his high-flying wife and is a doting father, and in many ways, he seems to be doing everything “right”. But the fact remains that Romy’s desires aren’t met. She wants this other way of being together with her partner. And despite Jacob being very “liberated” and thinking that he is helping Romy be free too, he still carries certain views of sex which render Romy unfree, in a sense, because she is shamed for her desire. When Romy for example asks him to put a pillow over her head, or describes to him things that she likes, he says he can’t do it, because it makes him feel like a villain. Which, in turn, makes Romy feel like a villain for not being satisfied.
I think the film is pretty good. It’s difficult to talk about desires and sex in a radical way. A lot of reviews I’ve read have focused on what the film “gets right and wrong about dom/sub kink” or the fact that it’s really quite “unarousing” (she drinks a lot of milk), or that it’s cliché that the CEO dominates in the boardroom but longs to be dominated in the bedroom. Like, yeah, sure. But this type of review misses the potential of the film, in my opinion. Because it doesn’t really matter what Romy’s sexual fantasies are specifically. It could have been a whole host of other scenarios. What’s important is that she has sexual fantasies and desires which she feels ashamed of – and it asks the audience: what do we do about that?
What I found so great about Babygirl was the discomfort that all the characters went through, as they tried to figure out their various roles and grappled with desires and shame. It was the many conversations where it was awkward and hard, and then the acceptance and love that was shown anyway. I think this is something which Srinivasan points to in her book as well – encouraging us as feminists to sit with the uncomfy-ness and acknowledge that we still have a long way to go in figuring out what it would mean to “end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women.” (2021).
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a perfect film. I think there are lots of questionable elements too, one being that it’s a relationship between a CEO and an intern, and considering our response if Romy and Samuel’s roles had been reversed. But nevertheless, I think it was interesting and quite a happy thing that the film managed to show the vulnerability and the struggle that it would probably take to move towards freedom.
Angela Davis defines freedom as a constant struggle, a collective striving; Srinivasan encourages the same, to conduct “experiments of living” and practically trying and seeing if we can answer the question of what freedom from oppression looks like.
If you think “The Right to Sex” sounds interesting but maybe don’t want to commit to reading a whole book of feminist philosophy, I think a good place to get a feel for her is this article she wrote for London Review of Books about incels and whether there is a right to sex. Srinivasan is a great writer and it’s well worth a read!
Sources:
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, Bloomsbury (2021).
The right to sex, review by Federica Gregoratto, Contemp Polit Theory (2023).
Does anyone have the right to sex? by Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books (2018).
What should feminist theory be? by Amia Srinivasan, Radical Philosophy (2022).
Review: The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, The Oxford Student (2022).
