Women’s Desire Is Finally Having An Authentic Onscreen Awakening
Shannon Murphy’s latest series, the poignant comedy-drama Dying for Sex, has garnered widespread plaudits for its frank and real depiction of reckoning with mortality, and celebrating friendship, intimacy and desire. Below, the director writes about shifting away from the male gaze to center female experiences and portray women’s pleasure in an authentic way
I love celebrating love and pleasure and the unspoken, physical language between characters in my work – with a focus on authentic female desire. This has been having an onscreen awakening lately; a result of more female directors finally being given opportunities to take up space in the cinematic landscape.
In my new comedy-drama series, Dying for Sex, the protagonist Molly (played by Michelle Williams) has never orgasmed with another person. She is 40 and has stage 4 metastatic cancer, so she needs to act fast to achieve her goal. She makes a drastic decision to leave her husband in order to spend her last months exploring different forms of pleasure through the kink community. What we highlight at the beginning of this series is that the male characters are more confident in asking for what they want sexually, while Molly is much less so.
I was on the cusp of understanding my own sexual desires when Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet came out in the mid 1990s; an intoxicating high-octane depiction of love that felt electric. The ultimate romantic love story, set to one of the greatest film soundtracks of all time. Stealing Beauty and Lolita (the Dominique Swain version) were other films that awakened my understanding of female desire, and I was completely turned on watching them. But they were all from the male gaze. In them, the female protagonist has no real goal until the male lead has entered the picture, and then she’s completely swept up in that. She is submissive. That is the nature of a male-centered narrative.
In Dying for Sex, Molly is literally vulnerable but becomes paradoxically powerful because she has her own objective – to be sexually fulfilled. She is picking and choosing men at her will, which creates a more active, compelling character. This makes her desires more compelling too, and it puts her at the center of the narrative.
“Historically, we have had the male gaze feeding us inauthentic versions of female sexuality and desire
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A huge amount of what we consume on screen is from the male gaze and experience, and as we learn so much about each other through television and film, these narratives are completely coloring how we view the world. What we choose to ingest influences our behavior. Women are half the population, so our storytelling should show us being the main character half of the time. Historically, we have had the male gaze feeding us inauthentic versions of female sexuality and desire. Because Dying For Sex is a real story (based on the podcast of the same name from Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer), it starts from a place of authenticity and we kept that vision through the writing, directing, and the way the cast were held on set. It’s my job to create an energy that feels relaxed and playful and open to everyone’s ideas, while ensuring we all stay on the same path.
I have been inspired by female filmmakers such as Lena Duhnam, who is great at putting sex on screen. But she has been shamed for it. So has Halina Reijn, the director of this year’s conversation-starting erotic thriller Babygirl. When a woman centers sex on screen, it’s often all that is talked about. It’s important to get to a place where female filmmakers don’t have to keep talking about being ‘female’. It takes up a lot of air and stops them from focusing on the actual artistry of what they are doing.
As an industry and society, we are in a good place to improve depictions on sex in our storytelling – we now have so much more language to employ around different kinds of feelings and modalities, and also what is appropriate, what feels right, and tuning into what feels genuinely pleasurable. Real connection can be confronting and exposing; allowing someone to really see you. It’s a beautiful thing and the deepest level of intimacy, which is incredibly sexy, off screen and on.
I want to leave behind a body of work that my nine-year-old daughter will be able to watch when she is an adult and feel proud of. A legacy to the next generation of women to feel confident in their bodies and open to talking about what they enjoy and would like to explore. To be drawn to partners who embrace and delight in this celebration and avoid the ones who do not. It’s a joy to be able to bring this to the characters in my work and therefore share it with audiences, who will hopefully find their own pleasure and liberation in it too.
Dying for Sex is available to stream on Disney+