Women in power

I went to see Babygirl on Christmas Day. I don’t know why they released it then. I was too embarrassed to say the title in front of my parents, who I was staying with, so I told them I had gone to see Nosferatu, the Robert Eggers vampire remake. About 15 minutes into my screening, which was half empty, an older woman got up and walked out, protesting vocally that she was in the wrong movie. I was evidently not the only one who was embarrassed.

For the uninitiated (this contains spoilers), Babygirl, directed by Halina Reijn, is the story of a high-powered corporate CEO, Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), who gets the hots for one of her new interns, Samuel (Harris Dickinson) after seeing him calm an aggressive dog on the street. In Kidman’s fantasies, she becomes the dog herself, tamed and brought to heel. Her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, is disgusted by her sexual desires and refuses to engage in practices like fingering her from behind. He thinks female masochism is “a male fantasy” and that Romy has been hoodwinked by traditional gender roles into wanting to get pushed around a bit. When she sits at the breakfast table with her family after cooking breakfast for her teenage daughters, he seems shocked and put off to see her wearing an apron. Profoundly unfulfilled, Romy embarks on an affair with Samuel, where they act out some mild kink. After they are found out by one of Romy’s subordinates (who, bizarrely, is also sleeping with Samuel), Romy comes clean to her husband and her marriage nearly disintegrates. From there, the movie is basically a feel-good story about cheating and forgiveness.

Babygirl has been billed as an erotic thriller for some reason in its promotional material. It is neither really but it is fun and smutty and enjoyable at times. Its sexual politics left me cold as did its feminism. It had a kind of bland, self-indulgent quality that reminded me, in its cuts between Kidman’s earnest striving for an orgasm and the promotional advertisements for her fully automated supply logistics company, loosely of associative Trick Mirror style personal essay writing. There is some connection drawn between the incredibly disciplined robotics world Kidman inhabits and her desire to be mildly degraded by an inappropriate sexual partner, but the film seems unsure exactly what that connection is or what it means.

Naomi Fry, reviewing the movie for The New Yorker, remarks that although the protagonist Romy’s fantasies ostensibly revolve around wild loss of control, “the submission that Romy seeks is not really out of control nor animalistic but, instead, suggests an even more committed embrace of robotic optimization.” This is perhaps not incidental or a flaw in the film’s design, nor is it, as Fry concludes, a statement about the punishing self-optimization routines that have come to dominate the world of the wealthy. Instead, it is the ticking mechanism at the core of the movie. Despite its billing, Babygirl is not really a movie about sex, much less an erotic thriller, but a movie about work. Its tidy resolution is the result of its anodyne labor politics. In this sense, it mirrors the organized #MeToo movement and replicates its fallible individualism. It obsesses over grey areas of consent and manipulation and what degree of transgression is permissible in the personal pursuit of sexual gratification.

Along the way, it gestures at broad feminist niceties. Various characters keep repeating that Romy could lose it all with “one phone call” — a line that is by turns sanctimonious and horny. Romy seems aroused by the idea. Elsewhere, her assistant, Esme, keeps begging her for a promotion and to pay more attention to the corporate advancement of women, including in one scene at a happy hour where Samuel anonymously orders a glass of milk for Romy. While Esme tries to pitch a DEI program to ensure that women are given equal opportunity, the camera, and Romy’s attention, are entirely focused on Samuel, who is standing across the room. After she gets the glass of milk and chugs it (a scene that AV Club calls an “infamous act of sadomasochism”), Esme and the corporate happy hour all fade and blur into the backdrop of Romy’s wild arousal.

This is the most clear-cut juxtaposition of Romy’s real failure, although other such cuts appear throughout. (In another scene, Samuel’s intern class watches a corporate training video about sexual harassment in the workplace, while Romy wanders by the glass-windowed office while they are huddled, eyeing Samuel’s back). Amia Srinivisan argues in The Right to Sex that the real problem with professors having sex with their students, even when it is nominally consensual and desired by both parties, is that pedagogy and sex are fundamentally incompatible. You cannot both teach someone and fuck them. Later on in Babygirl, when Esme confronts her boss with the reproach that she thought “women in power would act differently,” it is hard not to see this thorough-line as an indictment of Romy’s desires. She has been so focused on her own needs and on her tortured relationship to power that she has failed to foster a safe and empowering workplace.

In its first half, the film seems poised to indict Romy, Lydia Tár style. But it shifts unexpectedly in the second half. This is Romy’s fantasy, after all, and it never fully breaks through her bubble to the real world. In a final confrontation, Romy’s husband tells Samuel that Romy has been abusing and exploiting him to fulfill her own suppressed sexual urges. Samuel insists that that’s not the case and repeats some truisms about sexual liberation. This seemingly is sufficient enlightenment for all three to patch up the ending. Romy’s husband starts lightly dominating her during sex, finally giving her an elusive orgasm, and Samuel disappears entirely, after Romy apparently sets him up with an offer he can’t refuse at a rival company in faraway Tokyo. We do not know how Samuel feels about this job offer or how it is presented to him since none of that happens on screen. Instead, he vanishes cleanly from the film, leaving Romy behind to scrap her life back together.

Babygirl’s director, Halina Reijn, has named the erotic thrillers of the 90s and 2000s, such as Basic Instinct and 9 1/2 Weeks, as her main source of inspiration. In its depiction of an affair between an older woman and a younger man, the movie seems to echo earlier cult classics like The Graduate or The Piano Teacher or Fatal Attraction. But what it reminded me of most of all was the the feminist porn director Erika Lust’s elevated hardcore videos. Lust works on a series called “X-Confessions,” where viewers anonymously submit their sexual fantasies and they are dramatized into short porn films that are shot like music videos. One of her first films, The Good Girl, for which she became known, follows a young woman who decides to explore her repressed sexual desires and ends up hitting on a pizza delivery man by dropping her towel and asking him to have sex with her.

Babygirl operates in the same kind of suspended reality. One where you could reasonably get naked in front of your Doordash driver and there would be no negative consequences to it. What troubles Reijn is not if it is wrong for Romy to have sex with her intern or to play along with the illusion that he is in power in their dynamic or the psychological consequences he might potentially experience, but whether her responsibilities stand in the way of her sexual fulfillment.

Labor is an HR question in Babygirl. The problem with workplace violations is not their ethical basis but how hard it is to get away with them without being caught. The nuances of the robotic supply chain logistics company that Romy runs are left deliberately vague. Her warehouse is tidy and emptied of low-wage workers, who might conceivably be overseeing the work. In her gleaming office, she presides benevolently over upper management whose actual jobs appear to be mostly HR related. Similarly, the film sweeps aside questions of sexual ethics in favor of a fantasy of complete freedom. If there is a specificity to the desire to have sex with your employee, if it gratifies a certain kind of hierarchal urge and reproduces an existing labor relationship, Babygirl reduces it flatly to “kink.”

---

In 2002, Steven Shainberg adapted Mary Gaitskill’s short story “Secretary” into a movie by the same name. The differences between the short story and the film have been detailed elsewhere, not least by Gaitskill herself in a 2017 essay called “Victims and Losers: A Love Story,” which was included in her collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. The basic plot of both is that a young woman named Lee, depressed and adrift in the world and living at her parents house, learns how to type and gets a secretarial job for a domineering lawyer. When she starts making typing mistakes, he punishes her by making her bend over his desk while he spanks her, among other ritualized forms of sexual humiliation. Lee is upset and embarrassed by the experience, but she also compulsively masturbates to it. He has recognized something inside her, a tendency towards masochism and self-abnegation, that he exploits. The problem, in the short story, is that he only sees her as a fetish object. He gets off on her real fear and shame and humiliation. There is no fantasy, no consent, no third wall to be broken. She ends up quitting her job and receives hush money from the lawyer. When a probing journalist calls, she hangs up the phone.

“This is an almost impossible story to make a movie of,” writes Gaitskill in “Victims and Losers.” “Its drama is internal, rendered in language very nearly like code and meant to be sensed rather than explicitly seen.” In the film, Gaitskill remarks, the secretary never seems to experience real humiliation. She is eager and accepting of her boss’s transgressions. Instead, he experiences ambivalence and, ultimately, regret. His ambivalence, Gaitskill writes, comes at the expense of Lee’s. His complexity offers him enough redemption that the way can be cleared for the film’s happy ending: he will come to really see her and fall in love with her and marry her. Like Christian Grey, he becomes capable of regular love and his cruel and degrading predilections are transformed into regular heterosexual domination. Secretary has become a romantic comedy.

In an essay on the two versions entitled “Watching Secretary 20 Years Later, Post-#MeToo,” Emily Kenway wondered how the story would have been adapted in the 2020s. “Would a short story about workplace sexual abuse be translated into a kinky rom-com with a happy ending?” Gaitskill herself revisited the story again in March 2023, when she wrote a kind of sequel to it called “Minority Report” for The New Yorker. It is an expanded version of the “Secretary” story, describing the aftermath of Lee’s life into her old age. She does not understand what has happened to her, the degradation, the shame, the arousal, and cannot fully process the experience until she starts reading a wave of stories about workplace abuse, sexual harassment, assault. She tries to speak to a journalist but too long has passed and she cannot bring herself to describe what actually happened. Eventually, she goes to see the lawyer, who is still working. He tells her he has been “punished” for his transgressions, that another secretary wrecked his life and his marriage, that he’s lucky he didn’t end up “cancelled.” As she turns to leave, he invokes a specific memory: the first time he made her undress and spanked her, he saw that she was shaking at the end so he put his hand over hers and she, in his telling, put her pinkie finger over his index, holding it there. In this small gesture of intimacy, he both accuses her of collusion and begs her to exonerate him.

“Sex’s threat is objectively indistinguishable from its capacity to confirm,” writes Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism. The difference between a sexual act that is desired and one that is not desired is located less in the act and more in the relation itself. In Lacanian terms, all desire is the byproduct of demand minus need. A demand for your needs to be fulfilled carries with it a layer of desire — to be affirmed, to be loved, to be seen, and to have concrete material proof of it. Because this desire is per se unsatisfiable — love cannot be materially given — desirers turn to the realm of fantasy, which allows both for them to envision satisfaction and to for them to really fully understand the desires of others. Other people are unknowable. You can never really inhabit someone else’s imagination, their psyche, their fantasy worlds.

“To have sex erotically—and ethically—,” writes Becca Rothfeld in her essay, “All Good Sex is Body Horror,” “is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her.” What would sexual liberation have looked like for Lee, freed from the punishing constraints of the systems that surround her? She is vulnerable to her boss because of the strict hierarchies of the workplace, the labor relationship that is explicitly replicated in her boss’s sadism, and the gendered expectations of submissiveness and heterosexual deference inculcated into her. Out in the world, when she tries to experiment with BDSM, it rarely goes well. She is afraid of being judged, of being the wrong kind of woman, of inviting something she won’t end up wanting. When she starts reading #MeToo stories in her 50s, her first reaction is that the women are complaining about being attractive and frequently hit on, that the grievances are in a way a brag. Later, she quietly changes her mind.

---

By reversing the normative gender roles and power dynamics of Secretary, Babygirl attempts to upend the script of abuse, desire, and fantasy. Romy is asked to redo an ad she appears in for her company so that she comes off as softer and more feminine. She dresses in long skirts and filmy blouses. Her hair cascades into messy updos. She is caught in the messy trap of modern womanhood, doing gendered labor at home (cooking, mothering, faking orgasms) and formal labor in the workplace. No wonder she wants to be told what to do for once. But her desire is not only, or maybe not really, for kink. Her relationship with Samuel is not particularly kinky in the end. Half of what turns her on is the transgression. He has chosen her as his mentor in an internship mentoring program. They sit in meeting rooms with the shades down and tussle over their sexual relationship. When he is sent to her vacation home to bring her her laptop, she is furious with him for crossing boundaries and threatening her marriage. After he tries to end it, she pleads with him and stalks him at his other job, trying, like Lee’s boss in “Minority Report,” to get him to reassure her that he will not ruin her life, that he enjoyed himself, that he wanted her, still wants her.

Babygirl never exits the realm of fantasy. It stitches itself up neatly at the end. Romy keeps her perfect job, her perfect life, her perfect marriage, and she also gets to orgasm. Samuel is swept out of the way. He becomes a vehicle, curiously, for Romy and her husband to understand one another. Above all, he is a tool in their relationship. Romy can be forgiven for her indiscretion because she is a woman and because she will now dedicate herself to the advancement of women in corporate management. Everything else is noise.

In this reading, Babygirl is pure wish fulfillment. It leans on a kind of reactionary sex positivity which posits all sexual desire as uncomplicated as long as it is nominally consensual. The pursuit of individual gratification in Babygirl trumps even the formalistic exploration of real BDSM. When Samuel asks for a safe word, Romy offers her husband’s name. Whenever he appears in a non-sexual context, at work or at her home, she turns on him. He tells her that he and Esme don’t practice the same dominant/submissive kink because Esme isn’t into it. It’s unclear if Samuel is really into it or if he too just likes the power games. Perhaps, like Lee, he is also a little bit of a masochist himself. Romy humiliates him routinely. When he tries to end their professional relationship, she refuses, and when he tries to end their sexual relationship, she pursues him aggressively. He cannot get the upper hand.

Babygirl has largely been received as a story about sexual liberation. The New York Times described it as a story about “two people who have briefly slipped off the restraints of everyday life.” AP claims that it offers a more “female point of view” than traditional erotic thrillers. Autostraddle claims that the “discomfort” of Romy’s seniority cancels out the “discomfort” of Samuel’s dominance and “all that’s left is eroticism.” Another Substack essay that was sent to me in an algorithmic recommendations roundup described it as “beauty and orgasms.”

Reading this chorus, I wondered if I really was too fixated on the workplace transgression. Perhaps it is fine to sleep with your intern if he seems to really want it or to drag your colleagues into your sexual dynamics. Perhaps it is empowering for women to behave like men in power or somehow transgressing heterosexual norms to want to be sexually submissive to a man. I felt prudish and ideologically rigid, a feminist scold.

But I think if Babygirl had had any real interest in breaking out of the realm of fantasy, in exploring the real actual consequences of what Romy does, it would have been a better film. It is fashionable now to claim that good politics often make for bad art, but what generally actually makes for bad art is a refusal to examine the political and messy dimensions of interpersonal relationships. Sanitizing uncomfortable sexual desires into something clean and normative and uncomplicated keeps art solidly palatable, unpolitical, and profoundly vapid.