The Reassuring Awkwardness of Babygirl

I'm not the only middle-aged woman who doesn't know exactly what she wants.

A couple of weeks ago, I took myself to see the film Babygirl. It was, in fact, the first time I have ever gone to the movies alone, and it was …. magnificent. Did I get some looks when I walked in by myself? Sure. Did I care? Not particularly. It was so nice to be able to take in the movie without worrying about the experience a companion might be having. The experience was, instead, all mine.

As an extremely horny middle-aged working mom who just left a sexually unsatisfying marriage, I strongly empathized with the character of Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), who is also an extremely horny middle-aged working mom in a sexually unsatisfying marriage. Like me, Romy also plays a series of specific and very prescribed roles in her life — mother, lover, boss — and the effort that she puts into embodying these distinct roles, and rapidly switching between them, feels so familiar.(As I wrote in my newsletter last week, I’m not always successful at keeping the silos of mother and lover totally separate, try though I may.)

But what I loved most about the movie was watching Romy fumble through a messy exploration of her sexual desires and fantasies — and wrestle with their implications. In a fantastic scene early in the movie, Romy meets her intern Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson, who reallllllly grew on me) in a seedy hotel room for a potential tryst. She’s unsure that she should even be there; when he arrives, he starts barking orders. Here’s how it plays out:

Samuel: Get on your knees.

Romy: No! What?

Samuel: <snaps fingers> Get on your knees, now.

Romy: I’m… <Samuel bursts into laughter> No!

Samuel: <laughing> I don’t know how to . . . is that what you want? Be honest.

After a brief conversation, Romy starts walking towards the hotel room door as if to leave, then hurries back and starts kissing him. He pushes her away, and they wrestle. He tells her to take her clothes off, and she says no. He asks her to get on all fours, and she says “why?” Eventually she complies, and he tells her where to crawl and gives her a treat — which he later tells her to spit out. The scene ends with Romy, face down on the carpet, having an orgasm. (This is another thing I appreciate about the movie: Romy’s raw, gutteral, grunty orgasms, especially as contrasted with the hyper-feminine and breathy fake orgasms she performs for her husband.)

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I absolutely love the awkwardness, embarrassment and vulnerability of this hotel scene. I love that even though she’s a total badass in other areas of her life, Romy still doesn’t know what she wants sexually, and she’s not sure if she should be OK with the things she thinks she wants. She’s certainly not sure if she should be OK with being told what to do by a younger man. I enjoyed watching her try to identify her desires and weigh those desires against what she perceived as her obligations.

I loved all this because I, too, have recently started exploring new aspects of my sexuality and sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing or even what I want. It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone.

Some women disliked the movie for this reason. In her excellent piece about the film for Bustle, author Glynnis MacNicol — a middle-aged woman who has had many romps with younger men — argues that what makes Babygirl fall short is that Romy is so uncertain of what she wants. She writes:

One of the thrills of age is knowing what you want and arriving in a place of not being afraid to ask for it (though, ideally, not from your 22-year-old intern). Instead, Kidman’s Romy, a nervous, uncertain woman, whose enormous success we only understand through her possessions, not her behavior, senses she might want what Samuel offers, but needs him to tell her what that is. Who she is. Women looking to men to tell us who we are is the oldest, tiredest story there is. Its presence in Babygirl is disappointing, if predictable, and it undercuts everything else this movie is striving for.

MacNicol is right that the movie might be more powerful if Romy were more confident in recognizing and expressing her sexual desires. But as a middle-aged woman who should have zero fucks left to give, I nevertheless find these feats difficult to accomplish. I am still, sometimes, a “nervous, uncertain woman.” I find it hard to separate what I actually want from what I think I should want. I’ve been socialized my whole life to think of other people first, and to feel shame about my body, so it truly is hard for me to recognize what I desire and to feel confident enough to ask a person — a man! — for it. I wish this weren’t the reality of the situation, but it is — and I appreciate that Babygirl tells this story.

Romy also openly grapples with the question of whether sexual submission is socially acceptable — a concern that highlights generational differences in sexual norms, a theme the film nods to in several ways. Romy’s husband Jacob (played by a beautiful Antonio Banderas) rejects her request that he have sex with her while watching porn, because it makes him feel uncomfortable, and he later tells Romy that she “not normal.” The younger Samuel, on the other hand, tells her the opposite: she is totally normal.

Submission is an especially complicated desire for Romy because she is a woman who has fought so hard to acquire power in her professional life. Would it be OK to relinquish that power in the bedroom — with a lover who is so much younger and one of her own interns, no less? I understand why she is so hesitant.

I recently hooked up with a guy who liked to move me around and tell me what to do. It was one of my first experiences with this power dynamic, and I felt unsure and uneasy the whole time. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to escape the feeling of being overpowered by men; did I really want to introduce that into my sex life?

Of course, I realize that this kind of dynamic can be incredibly freeing, too. I make 800 decisions a day on behalf of my family, so perhaps it’s okay to transfer the mental labor of sexual direction to my partner. And letting go of the semblance of control can certainly be liberating. As Babygirl writer and director Halina Reijn told The New York Times, “total freedom and actual liberation” requires us to “connect to our inner animalistic side.” Meow, and yes please.