The desire for a ‘normal’ sex life

In Babygirl, the age-gap affair faces off with the impossible sexuality of motherhood and marriage

I’m supposed to be on my semiannual newsletter hiatus, but what can I say, I just can’t stay away. And last week, in the middle of an otherwise slightly claustrophobic but mostly lovely holiday break, I saw Babygirl with friends and I just can’t not say anything about it!! I’m still technically trying to recoup from what I can now see clearly was a pretty hellish fall, but I’m sure I’ll send a few more little missives before I return fully at the end of the month! For now, lap this up and plan your 2025 accordingly…

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In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman’s Romy is a high-powered executive who becomes the “babygirl” of the film after a wildly hot and kinky affair with a young intern in her office. When the film begins, however, it’s Romy’s husband (played equally brilliantly by Antonio Banderas) who comes off as the real baby.

Romy’s husband is sweet, but also a little rude, babyish in both his vulnerability and need. He is a very male director who talks like a male director, and while he’s loving, it’s a love that’s often cloying, deprived, certainly boring. His hands, in one shot, look like spiders, ever crawling toward his wife.

In the opening scene, Romy and her husband have sex. By all outward appearances, it’s good. But then at the end, when it looks like they’ve both climaxed, he tells her he loves her. Romy looks exasperated. The crack in the facade is broken. She runs into another room to get herself off.

Like a good wife, Romy keeps this information from her husband. Sure, he’s a vanilla lover, but he’s her husband. Even so, while it’s clear she wants something cruder, even demoralizing, in bed, he just wants to make love and look her in the eyes.

Soon, she is casting about, trying to find a way to articulate what she wants. She is, however, deeply ashamed to admit what that might be. In one scene, she covers her face with a sheet, telling her husband she wants to watch porn while he has sex with her, but then she backs off.

Romy is not only the perfect mother, leaving notes in her children’s lunches and wearing a floral apron that only she seems to like—she is also the perfect career woman, excelling at her AI tech job, a mom boss in a man’s world who mothers everyone around her. She is also, of course, the perfect wife— the kind who credits her husband at the office, even when he is not around, for her best ideas. And the kind who has regular sex with her husband, even though she doesn’t enjoy it.

In all areas of her life, in other words, including sex, she works like a finely-tuned robot. She seems to have it all. But there are more cracks: her daughter mocks her lips injections and her aging body; her husband mocks that apron but clearly benefits from her domestic charms; she does cryotherapy and fears her own irrelevance.

Like many women, in other words, Romy wants both a mommy and a daddy, someone to cradle her and to dominate her. She wants someone to care for her— and someone to tell her what to do.

But like many women, she also worries that what she wants means there is something deeply, irrevocably wrong with her.

And so, after a party at which Robyn blares, Romy begins sniffing and eating the necktie of that young male intern. A business podcast drones in the background; a family photo sits beside her.

(The audience in the theater laughed uncomfortably.)

Right away, the world of sexuality presents as a kind of secret third thing— a space that is neither the trap of the domestic nor the trap of public life. Neither tainted by the failures of the girl boss, nor the dogged demands of domesticity, maybe sex is the domain where women can claim their own freedom?

But finding any sense of liberation in marital sex proves, for Romy, just as fraught. As Silvia Federici argued decades ago, marital sex has long been conceptualized as a refuge from the agony of the workplace—that is, for men. Housewives, for their part, take on the role of the affective and sexual trash can, says Federici, into which the husband dumps the pain accumulated by waged work.

For the housewife, sex thus becomes another chore for her to complete. It’s part of maintaining her marriage, but also, another way of maintaining the stability of home life. For her husband, she provides not just care, but emotional regulation— a phenomenon a sex therapist told me the other day she still sees come up in her practice all the time.

Romy wants more, but at the same time, she wants to be the dutiful housewife, the good mother. Even so, soon it all becomes too much to bear, to juggle, to make work. She pushes her husband off when he paws her in bed, trying to initiate sex—a scene of feeling touched out in marriage if ever there was one! She admits to him in a rage that he has never, not once, given her an orgasm. She has been faking it throughout their entire marriage.

(At this, the audience gasped. But was it over her lack of pleasure, or her audacity to tell him the truth?)

Her husband, in response, does not ask why or what she wants. Instead, he just says, “You’re not normal.”

As she begins her affair with the hot young intern, Samuel, Romy breaks from the home and all its expectations. She breaks from the burdensome expectations of careerism and wifedom. She breaks, too, from the perceived normalcy of her sex life.

Much of the affair with Samuel is conducted in a hotel room. In Babygirl, as in All Fours, the hotel room becomes a kind of autonomous space that is neither domestic nor professional, not private or public. There, Romy isn’t a wife or a mother or a career woman, she is allowed to be simply a desiring machine, wanting, and working out what she wants.

As in All Fours, the scenes of sexual discovery are also therefore awkward, uncomfortable, and mutual in a way that is rare for representations of heterosexual sex. The age and power differences between Romy and Samuel serve to neutralize (somewhat, and imperfectly) other power imbalances that might exist if Romy were, say, a man and Samuel a young woman (hello Cormac McCarthy), or if the two were the same age. And so there’s an interesting parallel (somewhat, and imperfectly), between this young man and this woman in midlife. Each have a kind of power (of gender, of age), and each lack another kind (of gender, of age).

I agree that some of what irked me about this film is that, per usual, Romy seems to need a man (a man-boy no less) to guide her toward what she wants. As Glynnis MacNicol writes about the film, Romy’s “youthful insecurity” makes an otherwise novel narrative feel familiar. We’ve seen this kind of woman before. I found myself distracted by this throughout the film, as well by the question MacNicol poses about whether the film itself is trying to do too much, simply because we are so hungry— desirous even— for more expansive depictions of women, age, and sexuality.

But because both Romy and Samuel lack experience, they also both lack the language to articulate what they want, and what they’re doing. The best they can come up with is that they are “playing” like babies. And it’s their play that is undoubtedly the most compelling art of the film. Because it’s grown-up play— an erotic space they create together outside the complications and conflicts of both public and private life, yet still informed by both.

(In the theater, during the first best sex scene, a woman in front of me began anxiously shopping for sweaters on her phone beside a man that looked to be her husband. What was she running from?)

Both the public and private realms, and the threat of exposure, create the pressure necessary for that third space to exist at all— and for it to be charged with the kind of erotic danger and risk Romy enjoys (he could ruin her family or her career whenever he wants, for instance, which seems to eventual heighten her attraction to him). They may be in their own pretend play world, but public and private life still give them the roles, characters, and narratives they play with.

As children know, fantasy is also where real-life problems are worked out. This kind of sex, contrary to the “normal” kind, is not an escape, or a one-way feelings dump, but a place where power is negotiated and renegotiated.

There are scenes between Romy and Samuel that are so erotic and hot, so fun, they felt instantly classic. But in a few moments, the line between real violence—that is, assault—and kink becomes so blurred in the film it threatens to disappear altogether. This is part of the film’s power, and indeed, part of Romy’s kink. She craves not just novelty and the prohibition of an affair, but also high-stakes risk. And I have no issue with the kinks of these characters (or anyone’s kinks for that matter). If anything, I relate to Romy’s desire to feel controlled and directed in a sexual relationship as an antidote to a life in which she is both decision-maker and caretaker.

But at times, I struggled with the thesis on consent in the film.

Babygirl explores how traditional marriage can confuse not only a woman’s relationship with her own sexual desire, but with consent. In one scene, Samuel insists it’s fine for them to continue the affair, “as long as it’s consensual.” To which Romy replies, “What does that even mean?”

Because for Romy, who has been faking orgasms and forcing herself to have sex with her husband during her entire marriage, what is consent really? Sex has become for her a duty, something to grin and bear.

Ultimately, there is not one clear viewpoint on consent in the film. This is a film, after all, about two people who are drawn to each other in ways some might call “toxic” or “unhealthy.” People who do not initially understand their desires and do not have any clear language for consent. And a film, of course, is not a consent workshop or an Emily Nagoski book. Art need not offer a model or theory, or as a friend put it to me, a set of sex tips.

What Babygirl does do so well is depict two people trying to find pleasure in a culture that has very conflicting ideas about that very subject. For example, we believe consent should exist and has value, but also that women should have sex with their husbands even if they are not sexually satisfied by them. We believe, too, that women need to be told what to do, while they quietly care for everyone around them.

Last year, I wrote about women declining to have sex with their husbands for New York Times Magazine. What I really wanted to understand when I began reporting the piece was whether marriage, as an institution, can survive the introduction of women’s consent—which is another way of asking whether marriage, as an institution, can survive women pursuing what they want and speaking honestly about what they don’t want.

Some couples I spoke to appeared to struggle because they didn’t seem to have a framework for imagining a marital relationship without obligatory sex—without passion, was it just a business deal? a deep friendship? a form of family?

But the women I spoke to struggled much more profoundly under the weight of one question about their sexuality: am I normal?

The origins of marriage, of course, are economic. They are also sexual. Marriage was created as a form of social and economic control, but also as a way to sexually discipline women into whatever counts as “normal.” It has become less de riguer these days for men to take mistresses, the way they were once expected to do. But women have never been allowed that kind of freedom within marriage.

So, I wondered, when you introduce women’s sexual consent into marriage, can the center hold? Is there any there left there?

This is why I find Romy’s learned helplessness, her childishness, so endlessly fascinating—and true. In marriage, Romy has not only erased her identity as a wife and mother in the kind of self-actualizing, even careerist, way we often evoke that idea— but in the bedroom, as a desiring creature. What Romy wants ceased to matter in her marriage, her pleasure secondary to the performance of contented married life.

Romy and Samuel do eventually fumble into a language of consent together in a way that feels not only erotic, but thoughtful, caring, and meaningful. But Romy continues to struggle against perceived norms. She has so internalized the narrative of what women are allowed to want (nothing), of what healthy feminine sexuality looks like (regular monogamous married sex at all costs), and of what counts as neurotic, deviant, sick, and twisted (anything else).

At the same time, the film throws into relief just how empty that vision of normalcy is. After all, is Romy supposed to want her needy husband who literally cannot and has never made her cum?

I couldn’t help but think of all the married women I have spoken to who feel similarly—like there is something wrong with them because they are not turned on by our narrow vision of women’s sexuality.

The best moments in Babygirl are closeups of Kidman’s face, contorting in jouissance, as she suffers with what her desires might say about her, or might mean for her life. She is both surprised by and terrified of what she wants, of what turns her on—and therefore, of herself.

Is this normal? her face says. I cannot want this.

Her face contains agony, self-hatred, fear, and confusion— along with glimmers of knowing, satisfaction, fulfillment, relief, and the carnal desire to ask for it anyway, never mind the consequences. It is her Freudian superego battling with her id, perhaps— or maybe the entire human history of women’s repressed desires battling against the very Freudian tendency to pathologize feminine desire and view it as a threat to the social order.

It’s a face that speaks, too, to the deep suffering many women feel today, despite the purportedly horny age-gap narratives we’ve all lapped up over the last year. She is trapped and alienated from her own desire—and blaming herself for all of it.

Babygirl, in other words, shows not just that women of a certain age have kinks and can still get some. It depicts how the desire for a normal marital sex life—and the desire to confirm that one’s sexuality is normal—can actually kill desire itself.

Romy’s face eventually just becomes a mess. The pursuit of what she wants destroys her, turns her into a train wreck, upends her life. I didn’t like that. It made me prickly. But what I want for Romy (by which I mean what I want for me) doesn’t matter, at least not in terms of my aesthetic judgement. Because art should make you feel something anything, just like sex should.

And Romy’s self-destruction-by-pursuit-of-pleasure feels honest, like a necessary wrinkle in the story of midlife women breaking out, liberating themselves with the aid of a new young guy.

This is, after all, a more accurate depiction of what we do to women who are wild or desirous or powerful or unruly. We make them feel guilty and wrong and dirty and deviant. We diagnose them. We shame them. We scoff. Most of all, we force them to believe that it is their behavior that is causing their lives to fall apart, not the roles women are expected to play at home, in public, and even in that third space, in bed.

But as any parent knows, there comes a time when playtime has to end—when the authority figure pushes the kids along and forces them to fall in line with the flow of time, social order, and capital.

It is Romy’s daughter, notably, who begs her to come home. There are no questions about what Romy wants. It never matters what a mother or wife wants. There is only the discussion of what Romy’s sad husband needs— emotionally— and the quiet understanding that whatever Romy does want, it’s the least important element in the table. Romy returns to her marriage. And I really hated that.

“It’s my fault,” she says to her husband. “It’s my problem.”

He agrees.

When she reveals her transgressions, her husband—the enforcer of sexual norms, as husbands so often become, knowingly or not—tells her she has put her children at risk. He yells at her violently, says she jeopardized the children, and kicks her out.

How exactly has she hurt her children?¹

Maybe Romy needs high-stakes sexual play. But a mother wanting, we are to understand, is a dangerous enough thing unto itself. No one dissents or insists otherwise in the film; no one advocates for or even asks whether Romy is happy. The final scene shows her replicating a softened version of her kink with her husband, who, I guess, gets it now?

She cries out, maybe in pain, maybe in pleasure; she sounds both like dog, a feral bitch, and a vulnerable baby.

I found this ending frustrating for the typicality of such a story arc. How could she go back to this guy? But a few days after watching the film beside two women with whom I have discussed exactly these issues at length—how marriage saps and steals desire, and how many women get trapped there—I realized that the typicality of the story, including that longing for normalcy, and the way so many women do remain trapped not only in their marriages, but in the denial of their own desires, that’s what made Babygirl feel real (albeit tragic) in a way most age-gap romances just don’t.

I’m not sure this is meant to be the point of the ending, but I’m not nearly as interested in artistic intention as I am in aesthetic experience. The ambiguity of the ending, though, has split critics, especially those who craved some sense of refusing this quest for normalcy.

And yet, the experience of touching one’s deepest desires, only to have them ripped away by the people who are supposed to love you, that is an experience that will likely be familiar to many women.

Cheers!

1. As someone who lived through similar scenes many times as a kid, I’ve always been torn between empathy for a mother’s desires/humanity and a child’s equally human need to be seen, cared for, as well as the very culturally constructed experience of wanting my mother to be “normal.” I’m still parsing the nexus between our narratives on addiction and drug use, mental health, single motherhood, social and political control, morality, desire/pleasure, the importance of insisting on maternal autonomy/humanity, childhood trauma, and the insistence that all mothers (but especially single mothers) be punished for their sexuality/existence by carrying domesticity and childcare alone and suffering as much as possible, and probably always will be?? For now, I’ll say that these are all threads we tend to fail to PARSE at all, especially with respect to how our views of what women owe the world via family create even more impossible pressures for mothers and children, especially mothers and daughters.