A Sex Therapist at the Movies: "Babygirl"

Source: Image reproduced under license from Alamy Ltd.

As a practicing sex therapist, when I first heard about Halina Reijn’s new film Babygirl, about a hard-driving career woman who secretly wants to be dominated, I wondered how that could be enough to sustain a plot in 2024.

One would think female erotic submissiveness was old news by now. It’s been over a decade since Fifty Shades of Grey sold 165 million copies, and many women in my practice speak openly about their wish to be dominated in bed. Young men routinely tell me about dates who want to be spanked, choked, and blindfolded. It’s hard to imagine anyone these days being surprised that a woman might get turned on by being a sub.

Watching the trailer, I decided the answer must somehow involve shame. After all, it’s only recently that young women came to regard sexual submission as their birthright. A generation ago, people found Daphne Merkin’s New Yorker article about liking to be spanked pretty shocking (1). The 50-something lead in Babygirl would have come of age long before you could buy floggers on Amazon. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t any floggers in Babygirl.)

There are major differences in how people yearn to be dominated. For some, it’s a spanking. For others, it’s simply being told what to do. Babygirl is about the latter. In the film, Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a corporate alpha at the height of her powers. It’s her job to tell people what to do, but she secretly longs to be on the receiving end. Early on, we see her masturbating to creepy-sounding porn in which a woman is asked, “How does Daddy use you?” and replies, “Anyway he pleases." It’s creepy, but for Romy it does the trick.

An Old Pattern With a New Twist

The boss secretly wants to be bossed around. Most sex therapists have seen this many times. Except traditionally it’s a hard-driving, ambitious man who secretly wants to be dominated. With a female protagonist, some interesting differences emerge. Dominance is so much part of the patriarchal script that few suspect men of being secretly submissive. But until quite recently, a publicly submissive role has historically been more or less the rule for women. What’s still somewhat novel is her being in a position of power.

(For a spoiler-free film experience, see the movie before reading further.)

Here’s how this plays out in Babygirl: Walking to work one day, Romy is threatened by a fierce dog. She instinctively cringes. (I wondered about the symbolism there: Historically, leaders aren’t supposed to cringe.) A young man saves her. We see him calmly kneel and stroke the dog on the sidewalk. It turns out the young man, Samuel, is a new intern at Romy’s company. She notices him again in the office, and asks him to make her coffee.

“How did you get that dog to calm down?” she asks.

He observes her. His eyes are flat, emotionless. “I gave it a cookie,” he says.

She raises her eyebrows. “You always have cookies on you?”

“Yeah,” he says, flashing an easy-going smile. “Do you want one?”

His smile is flirtatious, but his eyes are flat. In nature, predatory species tend to have flat expressions. His flat gaze conveys that he knows a thing or two about power. He’s playing with her, like a cat with a mouse.

A few scenes later, Samuel and Romy meet in private. He’s requested for her to be his mentor. They jostle for control of the conversation. At one point, he asks if maybe at one point she got hired because she’s a power-hungry personality.

“You think that’s what I am?” she asks.

He replies quickly. “No, the opposite.”

“You think I don’t like power?”

“I think you like to be told what to do.”

How does he know this? Here’s LA Times film critic Amy Nicholson on Samuel: "People who are that good at sizing up strangers are either sociopaths or survivors. My money’s on the latter. At 6 feet 2, Samuel makes the other interns look like toddlers. He’s too old to have followed the prep-school-to-Ivy-League trajectory. His roots are in harsher soil (2)."

Therein lies the answer to my initial question: “How can you make a movie in 2024 about sexual submission that’s at all interesting?”

Safe, Sane, Consensual, or None of the Above?

This isn’t a movie about submission, in the usual way we sex therapists are taught to approach the subject.

Conventionally, BDSM practices should follow the same ethical standards as any other kind of sex: "Safe, sane, and consensual.” But if that were the case here, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Safe, sane, consensual dom-sub practices typically aren’t much more interesting to watch than straight-up vanilla sex. As it turns out, Samuel isn’t interested in safe, sane, and consensual. He doesn’t play by any mutually agreed rules. He shows up at Romy’s summer home uninvited, and befriends her children without asking her first—not a safe, sane, or consensual move by anyone’s standards.

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The sum of the matter is that he’s not entirely sane. He seems to be missing a sense of fear.

That alone makes him unsafe. From the start, Samuel makes it clear he could hurt Romy if he wanted to. She’s his corporate superior, and company rules forbid entering into personal relationships with anyone beneath you in the power structure. In his words, “One call, and you lose everything, right?” As sex therapist Laura Ramadei accurately notes, any consent under such circumstances is automatically dubious.

What keeps Romy in the game? As in any good work of art, the answer is complex. Desire, for sure. Audiences enjoy watching people do things no sane person would ever do, like risk everything for desire. Then of course there’s the danger of HR blackmail threat, which paradoxically adds to the appeal, since something real is at stake. There’s Romy’s state of confusion, which for someone who enjoys being dominated can paradoxically add something special to the mix. (Submissive clients I've seen say they often fantasize about being hypnotized.)

There’s also love, of a sort. Romy gets jealous when she sees Samuel with other women. Despite being married, she wants him to be entirely hers. The film downplays any romantic interest between the two characters, but Romy is no more able than the rest of us to entirely separate sex from love.

Sexual Shame and Its Effects

Finally, there’s the human shame cycle: You think there’s something terribly wrong with you. So you keep quiet about it. But the more you try to suppress it, the more insistent it becomes. Until eventually the secrecy is killing you, and you’re sure you’re the most terrible person in the world. As my fellow PT blogger Marty Klein notes, people with sexual worries tend not to realize that shame is their biggest problem (3).

Interestingly, the movie has a happy ending. No, not that kind of happy ending. Well, actually, yes, that kind of happy ending. But also something more important: In the end, Romy tells her husband about her submissive desires, and with time he apparently recovers from the shock. In the last scene, they're happily making love again—with a few twists taken from her recent adventures with Samuel.

I won’t entirely spoil the ending, except to say the dog from the start of the movie makes a surprise appearance in the fantasy Romy ultimately uses to help bring herself to orgasm. In her fantasy, the dog is playing happily with someone. (I won’t reveal who, and no, there's nothing obviously sexual about the scene.) Like all psychological solutions, the fantasy is a compromise: The dog still has teeth, but its master has no fear.

As every sex therapist knows, under the influence of shame people can turn self-destructive and get hurt. Shame fragments a person’s character. Relief from shame builds integrity. Ease up on shame, and your sexual dramas can live happily together with the rest of you—inside your head, where they belong.