What's Happening with Sex Positivity?
The limits of maternal sexual liberation and objectification as power in Ginny & Georgia, or how I got sucked into this show for the youths
Last week, in my dire showhole, I started watching Ginny & Georgia after eyeing it suspiciously on Netflix for some time, and after hearing from my husband, a high school teacher, that it was a show all his students were into. Maybe there were some truths I could find out about the youths in this show, I thought, but secretly I was sure I would mostly roll my eyes at Georgia, the eponymous Southern sexpot mom.
Here are some notes I made on my phone while watching the first episode of G&G (as you can see from note #1, I was sure I’d quickly break things off):
Though Georgia’s daughter Ginny is biracial and articulate about racial identity and racism, her mom plays with guns in the house and listens to country music while drinking wine and waiting for her vibrator to charge, and there’s no real apparent conflict here. History does not exist. Maybe it will come later? I won’t find out!
Georgia fulfills white supremacist beauty ideals, self-objectifies, and gets her power from her looks + bodycon dresses, also thinks the other moms who like organic food are dorks
Though Georgia is a “bad mom,” in fact she’s the perfect mom— young, sexy, obsessed with sex, packaged for the male gaze at all times, into guns and gold-digging (but in like a using her brain way, so empowered); she likes the mayor of the new town, who all the “thirsty moms throw their twats” at, as Ginny’s friend puts it, but then the mayor hires her while giving her sleepy eyes, can’t end well
I bet it comes out that Georgia killed her rich ex-husband
Gahhh I’m hooked. Please send help.
Flash forward a week or so— or has it only been a few days?— and I’ve burned through the first season, sometimes barely paying attention, doing other things while Georgia (played by Brianne Howey) fights with an angsty Ginny (played by Antonia Gentry, who steals the show). Other times, I’m rapt by the teenage drama around texting, sex, sexting, mother-daughter relationships, race, women taking revenge on abusive men, and an anxiety that feels both particular to the youths of today, and utterly familiar to me, an elder millennial.
In some ways, bad mom Georgia gives into motherhood as the show progresses, by wearing more cashmere sweaters and white suits and fiercely protecting her son from bullying—though with nontraditional methods that feed into that bad-mom bad-bitch archetype. She’s the kind of mom that breaks little kids’ noses when they bully her own kid. But Georgia also makes friends with a neighbor mom who wears chunky necklaces over sweaters with collared shirts, whose kids drive her crazy. They smoke pot together. My issues with Georgia as a bombshell, sex-positive mother with a shady past, however, mostly remain, even if she adds some nuance to the much maligned “cool mom” who, like my own, drinks and smokes with the teens and is uncomfortably open about her sexuality.
Georgia is the bad mom you want to be, which I find annoying, because her appeal is mostly that she looks uncommonly good being snarky and sassy with her kids. But in the first season, the limits of Georgia’s maternal sex positivity are also made clear—an element of the show that saves some of Georgia’s made-for-the-male-gaze character.
Georgia sees the world, for women, as offering just two paths: passion or power. She wants the latter, which she believes she can only get through relationships with men. Despite Georgia’s openness with Ginny about sex—her unapologetic vibrator is practically a character— and the power women can derive from their sexuality—Georgia regularly manipulates men with her feminine wiles—when Ginny loses her virginity it is awkward and lonely. Ginny also has trouble understanding her own pleasure, but it’s largely (or unclearly) framed as a problem of youth, rather than gender and power.
But the anger and resentment that first sexual encounter stirs in Ginny does help her understand why her mother looks for power where she does. If men are going to mistreat and use women, we may as well use it to our advantage, mother and daughter seem to agree in that episode, using that classic feminism-as-turn-the-tables reasoning.
That reasoning doesn’t really deliver for anyone, one element that has kept me watching as I try to understand what exactly is happening with sex positivity in the show. Georgia may say she feels empowered leaning into her own objectification, but that sexual power is ambiguous and often confused in the show with her smarts. Georgia knows how to get what she wants from people, and it isn’t always her looks that get her there. She has good ideas to help the community. She’s a problem-solver. Unfortunately, she is more often defined by her thin, white, pretty and, in the words of many other characters, almost otherworldly hotness, which makes her character a bit of disappointment.
I’ve continued hitting play, however, for the show within the show— the stories of Ginny and her diverse group of progressive teenage friends. If Ginny and Georgia are part-Gilmore Girls, Ginny and her friends are part-Glee, part-Dawson’s Creek. They are all struggling with mental health, identity, sexuality, relationships, and the pains of growing up. In one scene, the camera zeroes in on Ginny’s face while she texts her friends. We witness the highs and lows of a simple group text exchange. It’s agonizing— the are they mad at me, the positioning and pivoting from one friend’s expectations to another’s.
As the show finds its footing (and also goes off the rails), other Gen Z-ish traumas and trials pop up— the effects of momentary internet fame, for instance. Other deeper issues that span generations come up too—there are threads about self-harm, racism, depression, anxiety. The characters handle them with a clarity and nuance I can’t recall in Dawson’s or My So Called Life, the teen shows of my generation, which were also way more populated with middle-class white kids (but did have some juicy and groundbreaking storylines— remember Rickie?).
I’m fascinated by Gen Z shows that explore sex because I’m curious about the sexual landscape for adolescents today. My kids are young, nowhere near that realm yet, but narratives like these make me wonder what kind of sexual world they will come of age in. G&G begins by illustrating that Georgia’s open, cringe-to-her-daughter sexual liberation doesn’t directly translate to Ginny’s own sexual freedom, nor does it really translate to any kind of freedom for Georgia, who is committing all sorts of crimes to escape bad men and accumulate a power that is never really her own. But by the second season, Ginny and her friends are mostly what we might call sex positive, and there appears to be little weight or uncertainty about this attitude beyond the pains of unrequited love and fears that a boy might “hurt” Ginny or hold her back in life.
This may be a downfall of the show, idk (I’m not fully caught up on Season 2). There is a lot of sex in G&G and much of it feels very true to the teenage experiences I had. But questions around consent seem mostly settled (“you have my enthusiastic consent!” Ginny says in one episode). The ease feels unrealistic to me, when I think back on my own teenage years. I wonder how realistic it feels to the young people watching.
Yes, kids these days need images of healthy sexual relationships. And I’m sure many of them already understand consent more than teens did in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I was growing up. But the show’s careful attention to very unsettled issues like racism and mental health does not always match the presentation of sex or sexual identity (or even gun control, though the subject comes up briefly in one episode). While Ginny and her friends explore and experiment, they also talk about the unrealistic expectations and performativity and deep sadness and rage they feel around their identities, but the link back to their sexual lives is fuzzy.
Then again, how do I know what the youths today need? They know better than I do, and I watch to listen.
Other stuff I binged this week:
Eternal frustration with the phrase “can women really have it all” after this happened:
This essay by Merve Emre on the state of criticism and its relationship to academy
This by Kimberly Harrington, in which she voices a lot of what’s under the surface of my issues above with sex positivity: “I’m interested in how fucked over my generation of women got on the whole sex and pleasure front and how I’m still pretty mad about it! And I might be mad about it forever!”
I will read anything Angela Garbes writes about the body and “maintenance as the work” (or about anything). Here she writes beautifully about touch, healing, body work, and a ballet-adjacent class.
I spent way too many hours and words on this essay for you this week. I could have written pages more but I hope you’ll read what’s there if you haven’t yet and as always, support the labor if you can:
Quick note that she didn’t break the kid’s nose. She encouraged her kid to do it. Not sure which is more traumatizing but at least it’s more empowering????