So this is a Netflix show recommended me by my BBF. We've been friends since I was 8 and she was 9, and this show is about childhood BFFs as they move through life. It's originally a book, I think. I'm always looking for shows that I can put on and not pay too much attention too but that also hold my interest to some degree- and if they make me cry for sappiness sake - even if it's not that great, well that's just icing on the cake. This show meets the requirements. I watched Season 1, and there were a few SSL moments for me to review. Spoiler alert. It's not gonna be a great vulva rating.
If you were of the mind that something made for women with women involved in the making of it should be well done in the discussion/depiction of lady-gasm department, then you are mistaken. They might be, but they also very well might not be. Romance Novels would be a case in point.
An SSL Review (for those that don't know about them)
Only depiction or discussion of female orgasm and/or female masturbation and/or the clit are eligible for SSL Review. Nothing else counts, including plain 'ol sex if it doesn't include anything listed above. I specifically critique the realism (for instance, were the physical things happening to that women while she orgasmed things that could realistically cause orgasm for a woman?) and also speak on what the depiction/discussion reflects from and adds to the larger cultural discussion around lady-gasms and female sexuality.You can see all the SSL TV Reviews HERE (and as always you can find all the movie SSL Reviews HERE).
4 Wild and Crazy Orgasms - The Samantha Effect
Basically there are 4 scenes where Tully, one half of the Tully-Kate BFF unit that is the center of this show, has wild, vocal orgasms in situations that are super unlikely to ever cause a human female to orgasm. Basically, she's just getting banged by a dude with a penis, and there is no sense that anything (a hand, bedding, a vibrator, the dude's pelvis area) is stimulating her clitoral glans/vulva area. Despite pop-sexpert, pseudoscientific talk about how the "inner clit"/c-spot or the G-spot is supposed to be a valid thing that can be stimulated by penises and dildos in order to make a woman come just from getting banged - it's just not backed by any of the serious, physical scientific research of the last century - despite LOTS of trying to do so. Seriously.
I call this the Samantha Effect because it makes me think of Samantha from Sex and the City. She's a disticnt type of female character. She's the sexual wild-child of the bunch and part of her whole deal is that she orgasms so easily. She's the envy of the all sexual women in that she loves sex. She is confident and creative in her sexuality, and she can easily come from doing any and/or all the hot things one may have seen in movies or porn or read about in books. She IS the epitome of female sexual vivacity. Unfortunately, that basically means that she is pretend. She is largely a fantasy of dudes and ladiers. She is what a woman would need to be to happily, easily, and orgasmically fit into a sexual world set up largely for the penis's pleasure (AKA - our current world). In other words she comes from nothing more than an object stimulating the inside of her vagina - something you may not think of as pretend, but probably is according to all of our physical data on the topic.
Anyway, this Samantha-like archetype is what Tully is in this show, and as always, that archetype is giving viewers a super unrealistic and twisted view of how orgasm actually works for the ladies. It reinforced the idea that ladies can come from the mere act of intercourse and that the most lucky, sexually confident ladies always do. It's a big crock of shit we keep eating by the spoonful. Anyway, I talk more HERE about the Samantha Effect and about how the actress who plays Samantha has had to grapple with the unrealistic sexual nature of the characters she plays. She's actually pretty thoughtful on the topic of sexuality.
The Scenes
Back to Tully - in true Samantha-sex-confident-lady mold, she is always having wild orgasms from sex that in real life should never be assumed to cause a woman to actually, physically orgasm. Here are the scenes in questions.
S1 Episode 1
We're only seeing the very end as they are winding down, ya know - the thrusts are slowing down and they start taking deep breaths and laughing a little, so we don't actually see Tully orgasm or the dude she is with for that matter. What we see is her up against a wall facing him with one leg around his waist, both of them fully dressed as if he just unzipped and she just pulled her panties to the side under her skirt. It feels as though they had a super quick, passionate fuck that ended in both simultaneously orgasming right before we cut to them. There's no sense that she is in a position to grind her clit/vulva area against his pelvis while fucking, and there's certainly no hands anywhere near her pelvis. It's just a scene reinforcing the unrealistic idea that if it's passionate enough a lady can just come from a dick moving in and out of her.
S1 Episode 6
The episode opens with Tully, cowgirl on a dude bouncing up and down. All 4 hands are above the waste, and she's perpendicular to him in a way that is unlikely to give her clit/vulva area stimulation against his body. She's screaming and moaning as if in a perma-orgasm. It's the kind of vocalizations you regularly hear in porn. Kate is in another room trying not to hear it. Both her and the dude come in this position in a crescendo of her vocalizations. She rolls off and they have the following conversation.
Dude: That was...Tully: I know.Dude: You are...Tully: I know.Dude: So good.Tully: I know. I am so good.Dude: I was pretty good too.Tully: (questioningly) yeah. (playfully) But not as good as me. You don't think Kate heard, do you?Dude: Oh definitely. Don't pretend you don't love it. You are an exhibitionist.Tully: I am not!Dude: Pfhhh! If Tully heart has an orgasm and 5 strangers aren't around to hear, did it really happen?
I kinda feel like this conversation is revealing about this sex-lady archetype character that Tully embodies - about the many of us women who might play at that type of character in bed. Like if you look at it in the way I do as if all this happened as we see it, but she was a real-ass person and not a character, it feels very real and the orgasm very fake to me.
It feels like her making a big thing of how sexy and sexual she is. It's her playing at a type of sexuality that she is not actually experiencing - whether she consciously understands that or not. It's not that it isn't fun or exciting or arousing or pleasing to her, but she didn't orgasm like the dude did. He did orgasm with all the physical and chemical things that come with it, and she made him do it. She played the part of a person that not only can make a dude come but also make him feel great about it because she came too, and she did it by allowing him to do nothing more than enjoying an action (getting his dick bounced on) that is super orgasmic for a person with a penis. It's a win-win win if we pretend her experience was the same as his - which is what we are doing. And, I'm not saying that she is consciously making a choice to 'fake'. I'm saying she is existing and acting inside of this sexual situation in whatever way she figured out how to be while growing up and living inside a fucked-up, misleading, lady-gasm-ignorant sexual culture.
I think that it's a real thing in real life for women to do what we believe should be orgasmic, and although we don't actually orgasm, we go through the motions and vocalizations of it, and the climactic feel of it, plus the power of giving that pleasure to a partner is enough for the moment - and maybe even enough to make ourselves believe we came. I think this is real because I've done it myself, and I don't think I'm that strange of a person. This play-acting can be fun and satisfying until it's not anymore. Anyway, I think this scene, although fiction, sort of holds that reality inside it.
It's a complicated sexual world for the ladies, people.
S1 Episode 8
This episode starts out with almost the exact position and situation of the last Episode 6 scene. It's just a bit shorter scene. She's screaming less, and they don't have that conversations after. All that to say it's exactly as physically unrealistic that she would orgasm simultaneously with that dude when there is absolutely nothing happening to her clit/vulva area and EVERYTHING happening to his penis.
S1 Episode 9
Cloud is Tully's hippie mother, and she is talking about Tully's birth to Kate and Tully when they were teenagers.
Cloud: Katelyn, it was magical! The moon was full, my cervix was ripening, and then this Sagitarian creature just slithered out of me like some aquatic beast. I actually orgasmed. It was the most exquisite pain. I became a woman that night, so it was my birth too.Kate: Oh. That's really cool.Tully: Yay. Birth-gasm! (with two thumbs up) Totally appropriate story to share with your daughter.
Listen, I'm no fan of throwing around the idea that women can orgasm in pretty much any situation. I'm very against it, actually, on a scientific reality-based terms. I mean, even progressive, educated sexperts say the craziest, baseless shit sometimes about how women can orgasm by doing just about anything from getting their necks kissed to sucking dick. That's some bullshit I will rail against.
Birth-gasm, though. Not sure what to say exactly. It's definitely something I've heard said before. I can also say there's no physical record of it in scientific literature, but also how could there be? No one has physically investigated it. I would also say that an orgasm is a sudden, rhythmic release of the blood pooling and muscle tension that has been built up through arousal, and there's a lot of intense stuff going on in the pelvic region during birth. That type of release very probably isn't a common part of birth, and you really don't hear this as any kind of even slightly common sensation among the many births that have happened, but there is certainly all kinds of muscle action and blood action going on down there, so if any of that happened to feel like an orgasm to you when giving birth, FAB. I say go with it. As long as we don't start hearing people saying it's common or that ladies should expect a birth-gasm, or that a birth-gasm is a goal (since who knows what that even physically means) or an indication of a 'better' birthing experience, or that you should feel any type of way about not having a birth-gasm, then hey, whatever. Not every woman will even ever be in the situation to have a birth-gasm, and if they are it's probably only a couple times, and it's a BIG, tough physical experience, so I won't say shit about anyone's unique experience as long as we all understand it's just a personal unique experience.
Vulva Rating
So, overall, because of all the reasons stated above, this season of this show is not getting a good SSL Review. All Tully's orgasm scenes reinforce the incredibly unrealistic, but insanely overly-depicted idea that ladies, at least the most sexual and cool ones, should be able to orgasm merely from a penis moving in and out of the vagina. It's just dumping that idea on top of the already plentiful pile of like depictions taking up real estate in people's heads of all ages and genders. It's just extending the misunderstanding of how lady-gasms realistically might happen and fucking up sex for everyone.
For this, Season 1 of Firefly Lane gets a 1 Vulva Rating.
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