It seems to me that the modern age is offering up two vivid portraits of female sexuality in 50 Shades of Grey and HBO’s Girls. To my mind, neither is particularly reliable when trying to crack the code of female sexuality, although Girls comes a little closer in that it really nails the awkwardness of sex in your early 20s. It’s one of nature’s ironies that women come into their true sexual heat later in life, long after they’ve aged out of their 20s. If sex was always like it was in your 20s it would always seem far less preferable than sinking into fantasy, something romance novels and faux erotica like 50 Shades offers. But once sex becomes enjoyable, fantasy simply won’t do. Childbirth changes your body and makes sex hurt less. Funny how that works. Sex in film is usually simply about male eroticism – young hotties for your visual pleasure. That makes Girls stand out.
But one must remember that Girls represents a different time, a younger time, the beginning of a woman’s sexual journey – not to sound like a tweener novel.
I love it that the truth is coming out now about female sexuality – proving that we are every bit as carnal as men. True, we are dealing with things that can gum up the works, like not having any confidence in our bodies or having to live up to some kind of unrealistic ideal of what a woman should look like. Married women have to have sex with the same person over and over again. That can’t be easy. Or that fun. But remove the marriage cage and remove insecurity and remove social conditioning that divides women into the two categories of “good” and “bad” and just sit with what happens to a woman’s body when she is aroused…it is sort of sitting there, like solar energy, waiting to be tapped for its full power.
Just a little awkward, TMI straight talk for you.