Sleeping With Other People
It's hard to decide what movie to watch on the streaming services. There's tons, and you don't usually have an idea of what you want when you go in. It's kinda like walking into Blockbuster back in the day. You circle the outside wall, looking at all the new releases in alphabetical order, and you get to the end and still have no idea what to watch. Do you go into the middle for the older movies? Do you take another loop? Maybe you missed something awesome. It's hard stuff. I have a little secret that helps me sometimes though. I make it a point to specifically find movies directed by women to watch. It narrows down the field, and I have a sense of adventure about it - like, don't care what it looks like, just try it out and see what happens. That's how I ended up watching Sleeping With Other People. It's a great romantic comedy. It's a bit When Harry Met Sally-ish, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.
However, I wasn't all that happy about the lady-gasm stuff in it. I always hope for better when it's a woman director, but I'm definitely disappointed on that from time to time. The whole world has weird ideas about lady-gasms, which includes women. If it was just a situation where men didn't get it, and women totally got it, this whole orgasm gap would have been fixed a long time ago, but that's not the case. Women have a much better chance of getting it because we have our own bodies to explore on, but you take all the crap info we get; stuff like our sex ed that ignores the clit, also all the TV, porn and movies we all watch that ####very incorrectly#### shows women coming by being boned with no additional clit stimulation, plus all the bad sex advice and bad sex studies that tell us things like cervix touching and g-spot stimulating will cause orgasm (####completely unverified in scientific literature####). Take all that nonsense and it's no wonder we women just sort of make up our own ideas about what our bodies are doing in relation to our sexual pleasure because the cues and information we get about it are shit and often conflicts with what our bodies are telling us.
Some women might get through all that with an okay sense of their orgasm and sexuality, but most of us don't. Some of us end up calling our arousal an orgasm. Some of us can masturbate just fine, but can't seem to make our orgasms work with a partner or only sometimes with a partner. Some of us go for years with arousal and no orgasm during sex and we might justify it by trying to convince your partners (and yourself) that you enjoy sex for sex sake and don't need an orgasm. Some of us have never orgasmed into our adult years, and some of us fake our orgasms for our partners and sometimes to ourselves. Most of us, all in our own way, eventually feel the insecurity and confusion and sadness of being #### culturally gaslighted#### about how our orgasm works and about how sex is supposed to be for us.
My point here is that just because we're women doesn't mean we understand or can identify the female orgasm any more than we understand other bodily functions we don't have good information and/or conflicting information about. I mean, do you expect someone to tell if they 1. tore their ACL, 2. have bursitis, 3. a dislocation, or 4. have a tendon tear? I mean, we can really only safely assume they feel what they feel and can really only confidently say that something is going on in the knee area. Now, just like you need educated knowledge on knee injuries to really understand what happened to your knee, you also need lots of realistic, practical, accurate, non-conflicting information about what orgasm is physically to know if the sexual/arousal/excitement stuff you are feeling in your body is physically an orgasm. This education could just happen through basic cultural education during early life - similar to how males learn this, but that's not what happens for women. We ladies instead are bombarded with conflicting and downright incorrect physical information, and thus it's important to remember that just because we are women doesn't mean we're experts on female orgasm.
With that, let me just get right into the SSL Reviewable scenes, so I can start talking about this specifically. An SSL Review, for those that need a little refresher, is a review specifically of any discussion or depiction of female orgasm, female masturbation, or the clit. I critique the realism of the depiction/discussion and also write about what the depiction/discussion says about and/or adds to our cultural understanding of female sexuality and orgasm. I try my best to just stick specifically to those SSL Reviewable moments, so it usually stays pretty focused on those moments in the movie only, but sometimes I like to digress.
So here we go. I have tons of these reviews btw. You can find all the other movie SSL Reviews HERE and the TV SSL Reviews HERE.
Classic Desk Bang
The female lead is Lainey, and she is having an affair with a doctor that is kind of an asshole. She goes to his office and in between patients, fucks him on his desk. It's pretty standard movie desk-fucking. She's in a skirt. They are standing and kissing for a hot second, and he moves her to her back to the desk. Her legs are up, and he is standing in between them. They quickly start unbuttoning, etc. down there. It cuts to the door for a sec, and when it cuts back, he presumably penetrates her and says, "Is this what you wanted, Elaine?" and she says, "Yes, I want it all the time. It's all I think about." From there, he starts banging into her slowly. She gives a lustful 'uh' with each thrust. He stays close to her (his head is close to her head). We are looking at them from the side from the waist up. All their hands seem accounted for, and not touching her vulva area. She is tensing her neck and face, arching her back. After approximately 40 seconds, he gives a final orgasmic 'uh' and kinda collapses in post-orgasmic bliss. At the same time, she leans her head back, opens he mouth and gives her orgasmic 'uh' as she's sort of banging on his arm with her fist.
They had a simultaneous 40 second, intercourse orgasm, ya'll! It's the gold-standard of media intercourse, and...it's pretty damn unlikely given that intercourse is such a shit way for women to orgasm (seriously - stimulation inside the vagina has never been shown to cause a physical orgasm in scientific literature...like for real). I will say - at least he was bent forward against her which could possibly make his pelvis pressed against her clit/vuvla area instead of being upright at a right angle to her with his pelvis definitely not against her clit area. That gives a small chance of her getting some clit stimulation, but honestly, she wasn't really like grinding against him or anything like that which, I think, is a sensible ingredient for a woman having an orgasm during intercourse related pelvis-against-clit friction. Otherwise, assuming she came from 40 seconds of his intermittent pelvis touching on her clit as he was banging her is pretty far-fetched.
So, this scene is the most classic, and I think harmful, of intercourse scenes because it shows a woman getting off from a quick bang with very little likelyhood of sustained, appropriate clitoral glans stimulation. It sits with all the thousands of scenes like it and feeds into the incorrect assumption we've all probably had at one time or another (and probably still do deep inside us), that intercourse is as orgasmic for a woman as it is for a man; that encompassing and fully stimulating the penis is as orgasmic as stimulating the inside of the vagina with a cylindrical object. It is not. Penises get very well stimulated during intercourse, and clits, as a rule, do not - at least without some added special attention. Scenes like this are why 16 year old girls have sex for the first time and wonder what the fuss was all about. Scenes like this both reiterate already deeply-held yet incorrect cultural assumptions about intercourse and also propel those myths into future generations.
Yet it seems so, so, so normal of a scene, right? And that, my friends, is why we have such a problem.
Dudes Teaching Ladies How To Masturbate
Listen, I have no problem with the principal of a dude teaching a woman how to masturbate. If a dude knew the physical realities of lady parts and lady-gasms, he might be a pretty good teacher, given that stimulating the penis to orgasm and stimulating the clit to orgasm is not really that different. In a way, I think men and women could learn a lot from each other on this front. All that to say, my problem with this scene is not that a man is teaching a woman how to masturbate, but that it's got some problematic info about orgasm and the cervix and G-spot. It definitely has some good tips in there, but the focus on the inner vagina confuses the good points, So in the end, the overall takeaway is basically the confusing shit society is already teaching us; that the inside of the vagina, the G-spot, and the cervix are as important as the clit. They are not. They don't cause orgasm and the clit does. I think the intention with this scene was good, but I don't think it comes out right. I don't think it gives the right clues, and I don't think it does much more than reiterate the status quo when it comes to creating understanding about what physically causes orgasm in women.
Here's the scene.
The male lead, Jake, hooks up with this women and there's a scene of them having sex in lots of different positions. It's hot, and they are both vocal throughout, although we don't see the 'orgasmic' final vocals. It just cuts and they both fall back into the pillows exhausted.
Jake is going on about how great it was and he says,
Jake: did you, uh...Jake looks sooo confused and the it cuts to him talking with Lainey at a store. These two lost their virginity to each other, and many years later met up again and have become platonic friends.
Thea: No...but don't take it personally. I don't Orgasm during sex that much.
Lainey: So? Lots of women don't come during sex.
Jake: So? No no no, that has never happened to me before.
Lainey: Well, what positions did you do?
Jake: Mmm no, we did everything. Why, what's your favorite position?
Lainey: I don't know. The regular one.
Jake: The regular... Come on.
Lainey: From behind (quietly)
Jake: Exactly. 'cause you hate your dad.They have to deal with the cashier and stuff and then it cuts to them in her apartment putting together the thing they bought.
Lainey: Oh my God. Mouse trap (mouse trap is their safe word for when it's getting too sexual)
Jake: You know, it's like, when do you orgasm? I mean like when does that happen for you?Lainey shrugs
Lainey: When I'm with Matthew (that's the doctor she desk-fucked)Jake: Yeah yeah, okay.
Lainey: That's it.
Jake: That's it!? Okay, well that just explained everything. That that's...I mean you haven't had an orgasm in a year!? Come on, that's bullshit. Not even when you masturbate?
Jake: Lainey, you've got to be kidding me. What? You don't masturbate? Why not?
Lainey: What? - I don't kn...I mean I've tried to. I try. I just..I don't know. I ...I get bored.
Jake: Bored? How's that boring???
Lainey: But I feel good when I'm with Matthew. I don't. I don't know how to recreate that myself.
Jake: Okay, well, fuck the tv. I'm gonna teach you how to finger yourself today. Right now. Okay?
Lainey: What?
Jake: It's go time sister. Alright, let's go. Alright?
Lainey: Okay
Jake: No no this is a good thing.
Lainey: O boy. (exasperated)
Jake: It's about time. Get it out. (Empties a jar). For the purposes of today's tutorial your vagina will be played by this former bottle of green tea
Lainey: Looks just like it.
Jake: Okay... Good to know. So, here's what we do. First thing, you, you take this guy, (Shakes index finger) this uh index finger and you're gonna uh, slide it in the like that, okay, and you're gonna curve it up a little bit, and I want you to tap the roof like that. You see that? That's your g spot alright? You got that?
Lainey: Yeah, I'll check it out. (kinda uninterested)
Jake: Okay, good. Alright, next move. You're gonna take the middle finger here, alright? And you know, the bad boy, right? You're gonna have to pop that in as well, and you're gonna have that one tapping the roof, and this one, the middle finger is going to be, you know, sorry if circling uh this uh just like fleshy gap area.
Lainey: My cervix? Jesus!
Jake: Yeah sure. You know what it's called. Wonderful. Good for you. Okay, yeah, so you're gonna go after the cervix here, so you're gonna mind the gap. Right? Tap the roof.
Lainey: Mind the gap, tap the roof.
Jake: You got it. Alright at this point you wanna start thinking about something, uh, arousing. You know, like, uh maybe you wanna think about the guy you lost your virginity to perhaps?
Lainey: Gross.
Jake: Okay, and then you're gonna start to get wet. You're gonna start to get wet and then you're gonna start to feel some, uh, contractions in your vagina, alright? At that point you're gonna want to squeeze your vagina harder than it wants to go, okay? And that's called k...
Lainey: Kegaling
Jake: We'll it's pronounced kegaling, but it doesn't matter.
Lainey: Uh I got into med school. I think I know how it's pronounced.
He congratulates her on med school (He didn't know she'd been excepted.) and they talk about it for a minute. Then she tells him to keep going.
Jake: Okay, so, do you know what a dirty DJ is?
Lainey: No.
Jake: You don't? Okay great. Okay, so the biggest misconception that guys have about the clitoris, uh, if they can find it, is that they're too nice to it. Okay?
Lainey: Mmhm (skeptical)
Jake: Like, that's the problem. I mean the trick is to be a little rude to the clitoris, okay?
Lainey: Oh, really?
Jake: Yeah, just go to town on this little mother fucker here. You just, like...you just tweet, tweet tweet (rubbing top of the jar hard like a DJ). You know, so that's the dirty Dj. You know, like you're scratching a record. You know this... ( And continues doing it and saying DJ things). And you just really wanna work that little bugger. You remember like the old IBM think pads?
Lainey: Mmmmhmmm (looks pained)
Jake: And that little nub, right? Okay so you just really go after it like that. Just like this.
Lainey: Fueeew, yeah. (she's getting more interested and excited)
Jake: Right, so uh you have that. That's phase 3.
Lainey: Mmmmhmmm (She starts doing these things to the bottle - she's getting progressively turned on, and so is he)Jake: So again, you know. (He's intently watching her pushing her finger in and out of the bottle with her thumb on the top 'clit' area). Yeah perfect. Natural. Okay? Yeah so tap the roof.
Lainey: I know.
Jake: Mind the gap. Oh see. Okay, yeah, work all three. Look at that. It's like you're doing...
Lainey: Right there?
Jake: Oh boy oh boy. It's like I feel like Anne Sullivan teaching Helen Keller about water. This is amazing. What a break through.
Lainey: Mmmhhh (still poking her finger in and out of the bottle, She's pretty much stopped touching the outside of the bottle).
Jake: Yeah that's it.
Lainey: Like that? (She's poking the bottle intently)
Jake: Yeah, you know, just like take a night. Crack open a bottle of rose and just have multiple orgasms if you want. You know... You know...
At this point it just looks like she has a finger in the bottle and is kinda rubbing the g-spot roof area. There doesn't seem to be any outside play at all. She's very turned on and intent on stimulating that bottle's g-spot
Lainey: Uh primotologists actually believed that women evolved this way so that, uh, they could mate with as many men in one session as possible...
Jake: Fucking awesome.. you know... That's neat...
Lainey: Multiple orgasms for multiple partners...
Jake: Yeah...
Lainey: Gang bangs and such...
Jake: (gets a clear head suddenly) Yeah...I'm gonna go home.
Lainey: (her head suddenly gets cleared too - She's a bit flustered) Yeah me too.
Jake: No you live here.
Lainey: Yes I do.
Jake: Bye.
It cuts and she's out with a friend that says, "I think it's a little weird that a straight dude had to tell you that." to which she responds, "I think it;s sort of great." Then they start talking about something else.
The Dirty DJ
Here's the final scene I need to tell you about. Lainey's with a dude in bed. They are doing it from behind on all 4s. She looks kinda bored, then she sits up and moves his hand down to her vulva area. She says, "be rude to it." So he starts going to town on it in circles - the soundrack has some DJ scratching. It then cuts to them both falling back into bed satisfied.
My Thoughts
Clearly the scene where Lainey adjusts her sexual encounter in order to get hers is a big Fuck Yeah for orgasm equality. She asks for and gets clitoral glans stimulation ####(something that realistically will cause orgasm in females)#### in order to come. Bravo. I love seeing manual clit stimulation during intercourse. It's a rare thing to see, so this scene gets big ups from me.
- I also love that we see Jake's hookup getting banged in all kinds of hot sexy ways, but yet we also know that she didn't come. That's realistic, yo. None of the montages of them fucking included clitoral stimulation, so no, she wouldn't come.
- I don't love that Lainey's first question about it was what positions did they do. Unless the answer is Position Number my-hands-and-mouth-all-over-her-clit then it doesn't much matter which way the dick is getting moved in and out. It's still just a dick moving in and out a vag, and that's not great for lady-gasm, yet her asking the question is an insinuation to the audience that the intercourse position is mucho important to whether a woman comes or not.
- I also don't love that the prop chosen to represent Lainey's genitals was a bottle. A bottle is basicall all vagina and no vulva. All inside and no outside. I mean, they talked about the clit which is on the outside, and I guess the tiny rim was supposed to represent the whole clit/vulva area, but that's B.S. The clit is further from the vaginal opening than that, and where were the lips? The lips are very sensitive, ya'll. Because of that prop, the outside was waaaayyy downplayed, and the inside was waaaayyy emphasized. It should be the complete opposite. Their intentions aside, I think the overall feel of that teaching scene was that you needed to stick your fingers in your vagina to masturbate, and that's how pretty much no women do it (see the masturbation surveys by Shere Hite).
- Seriously, why not use a prop that has an outside. Something that, if not more vulva than vagina, at least has any vulva to it at all. Something like a fruit -a peach or papaya, or maybe a Kleenex box, or a piece of paper with a hole cut out, or he could use her hand...really anything but a bottle.
- And can I just say, Lainey was clearly faking it with her doctor lover, Matthew. I mean she's never masturbated to orgasm. How the fuck does she know what an orgasm is?? Seriously. And, when she's trying to explain her lack of masturbation she says, "But I feel good when I'm with Matthew. I don't I don't know how to recreate that myself." She doesn't say she orgasms. She says she feels good. MmmmmHmmmm. Sound like she's mistaking arousal for orgasm because she has never experienced an orgasm. I mean, I know she's a fictional character, and I think it's possible the director actually may have wanted it to seem like she faked with Matthew, but I think the opposite happened. I think the scene of her orgasming with Matthew was so normal and convincing of its sexy goodness and orgasmic-ness that no one would question that she came with him. Most people don't think too hard about these kinds of depictions, and she was never really called on her wishy-washiness about her orgasm with Matthew. So, I think in the end the viewer is left assuming Lainey orgasms with hot intercourse even though she doesn't masturbate, but then she also learned how to stimulate her clit to orgasm as well. So, the movie sort of reiterated our incorrect cultural understanding of female orgasm - that there's different kinds of lady-gasms, vaginal intercourse ones and masturbation clit types. There are not. Clits are where it's at. Vag orgasms are a thing people talk about (probably because our culture desperately hangs on to the hope that women can just come during whatever is happening that makes dudes come) but has never been verified in scientific literature.
- I do love that Jake is appalled that Lainey hasn't masturbated though. He should be. Grown people who are having sexual interactions with other people should be knowledgeable about their own body's wants and needs, and that involves masturbation. Boys don't have quite the same upstream swim to find masturbation that girls do, so this is especially important for girls.
- Dude, don't start hitting the cervix. That shit hurts and it's not gonna make you come. I don't know where this idea that hitting the cervix causes orgasms came from, but stop. It's painful. I do kinda know where it came from. It's something inside the vagina and vaginal orgasm research enthusiasts are always (unsuccessfully) trying to connect stimulation of something inside the vagina with orgasm. There's this scientific paper relating to orgasm research in women with spinal cord damage that says it proves (but actually for sure does not) that the cervix stimulation can be another route to orgasm for women. It's BS.
- Also, similar to what I was saying above, stimulating the G-spot does not cause orgasms. It can, it seems, for some women cause ejaculation through the urethra, but like in men, an ejaculation is different from an orgasm. Orgasm and ejaculation just usually happen at the same time for men. Anyway, like I said above there's lots of researchers obsessed with showing us that stimulation of something inside the vagina can cause orgasm and the area about an inch or 2 in towards the stomach where the urethra sits against the vagina (which is often called the G-spot) is often the focus for these hopeful but thus far unsuccessful researchers.
- So...please tell me why Lainy's masturbation lesson is so goddamn focused on the cervix and the G-spot? Sure, touch them if you want, but they ain't gonna get you there. Talking about them so much adds to women's confusion by piling on to the already messy information women get that associates vaginal penetration with orgasms as much or more often than it associates clitoral stimulation to orgasms...making it incorrectly seem like clitoral stimulation is just another way to orgasm instead of the way to orgasm.
The Vulva Rating
This is definitely a mixed bag. There is truly clit and lady-bation love in this move, and I'm all for that. I also think the intentions might be on-point for a lot of these scenes. However, intention isn't enough. In the end, I think that the overall take-away from this movie ends up being that yeah, clits are great, but you can also orgasm from getting banged, and that really a huge part of masturbating for a woman is getting your fingers to work the inside of the vagina. Those are both ways of emphasizing the vagina over the clit when it comes to female orgasm and female sexuality.
That incorrect emphasis (think if we emphasized men's balls over their penises when it came to male orgasm) is a HUGE part of why female orgasm seems so confusing and why so much partnered sex continues to exclude the clit and thus exclude the female orgasm. It's a reinforcing of the already shitty status quo of depictions/discussions/information about the female orgasm, and it contributes heavily to orgasm inequality.
I'm going to be generous with this rating because I REALLY like the scene where Lainey gets her clit rubbed while having intercourse - a rare scene in media where a woman is depicted as clearly getting an appropriate amount of clitoral stimulation in order to come. It's one of the better scenes I have ever SSL Reviewed, but it's mixed in with all the other stuff and it's goodness gets kinda erased in the end. So, this mixed bag, that I'm rating nicer than I might feel because of that great scene gets a 2 1/2 out of 5 vulva rating.
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