Stop Making Orgasm "Pretty"

on feral bodies, fake gasps, and the Hollywood orgasm problem

May 24, 2026

If you know me you know I worked in film and TV. I directed, wrote, acted — was repped at CAA, the whole thing. I retired from the biz but I still adore watching. LIKE I ADORE IT. It’s shamanic for me, mystical, it’s a ritual…I take my art and cinema and even pop TV seriously. And I have seen just about every sexy or erotic film there is. So I feel entitled to say this:

We have a problem!!!

There are not enough realistic orgasms in TV or cinema and I think this directly contributes to the abuse we are seeing surface in the news.

Culture at large is out of touch with the reality of female sexuality and its potency and also wildness. Sex and orgasm have been pornified or sterilized and it leaves a HUGE collective shadow that creates abuse. The avoidance of healthy and real sexuality in culture is damaging to our collective sexual wellness.

Repression creates disfunction.

Sexual energy will come out somehow. It is meant to. It is the most powerful energy out there. And yet, even in 2026, we are still largely coollectively sexual unwell. The stats are terrible.

And young people are brought into a society that conditions them into a false narrative of the female orgasm and female sexuality in general, and honestly ALL sexuality. And maybe I’ll write a PhD thesis on this. But for now here is a quickie — yes, pun intended…and something I want to CELEBRATE in culture, as opposite to complain about:

The best orgasm I’ve seen on screen in a long ass time is Nicole Kidman’s in the film Babygirl and I want to explain why.

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The film opens with her character Romy having sex with her husband (Antonio Banderas) and she is on top of him performing an orgasm that looks and sounds very much like Hollywood or porn — controlled, polished. Then she secretly watches kinky porn in a dimly lit room, chasing something she can’t get from the real thing in her real bed. Her orgasm with her husband though is flawless. Convincing. Utterly fake. And it sounds like what you would expect. Head thrown back and gasping. Pretty and pornified.

Later she’s with her young lover Samuel (Harris Dickinson) and her orgasm is THE REAL DEAL. She grunts. She sounds like a wild animal. Messy and weird and feral, afraid she is going to pee — completely, terrifyingly present. Then she weeps in his arms. It is beautiful.

Director Halina Reijn knew exactly what she was doing with that contrast — the performance at the top, the animal, visceral, wild at the end. The whole film is in those two scenes. And it earned Kidman the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice.

And yet — I just watched the #1 worldwide TV show Off Campus on Prime Video. Millions of viewers. Based on Elle Kennedy’s beloved romance novels. And first I want to say that I LOVED it. Okay, just needed to get that out of the way. But there is a scene that critics are calling a rare, groundbreaking moment of female-centered pleasure on screen. The character is a sexual assault survivor and she has — for the first time — a safe space to feel pleasure on her own terms. The fandom wiki literally named the episode “The Orgasm.” I applaud them for broaching such a tender topic and they really showed how trauma can show up in sex very well. That was a huge step for millions of people to see. The main character Hannah is determined to heal, to have sex again and orgasm with a partner, despite her trauma.

I write about something similar in my book F*ck Like a Goddess, that when I was 22, healing from date rape, I went to a therapist and said I wanted to have an orgasm with my boyfriend and couldn’t and she suggested mutual masturbation. Which also worked for me at age 22. That was 20 years ago. Did the writer of Off Campus read my book? Doesn’t matter, but what matters is that there was so much build up to this grand moment of healing (though they don’t call it that) but it is that, and when the moment came for the lead character to have her big O — it was shot as just a few gasps and done. Okay, maybe some women orgasm in 3 seconds with one gasp, and yes, Hollywood is Hollywood and we should be happy they are showing at all ya ya…but can we give the girl more than 2 seconds? Even with the magic of moviemaking?!

I get that even ONE female orgasm on TV is big. Yes, yes I know. But if the depiction is whittled down to one gasp…

This is heartbreaking!

We are celebrating one gasp as a breakthrough. Maybe it is one, compared to what came before. But it makes the female orgasm, sweet, small, quick, and pretty. And millions of people just watched it and filed it away as the template. Especially young people. That breaks my heart!

This is education whether we call it that or not. Studies show the average age of first porn exposure is now 11-13 years old — which means the sexual scripts that get wired in earliest, what sex is supposed to look and sound like, what women do, how long it lasts — come from an industry designed for male consumption. And then on the other end you have mainstream media, which in its attempt to be tasteful or legally protected, shows us a one gasp female orgasm and calls it groundbreaking. Also, there was no nudity, so if they wanted to make it more real it would be more sound, more times, maybe more weird faces…but it didn’t need to be more explicit.

Where in any of this does a young woman learn what her body actually does? Where does a teenage boy learn what a woman actually sounds like when she is really there? Where does anyone get initiated into the truth?

Mostly there is very little REAL sex anywhere in media — and I think this is part of why we are so f*cked and repressed as a culture. Why is something like the rape academy a real thing? Why are incel pipelines a real thing? Young men radicalized into violent misogyny — I am not saying porn is the only variable but I am saying when the only model you see is a woman performing for the camera, when no one ever shows you what it actually looks and sounds like for a woman to be genuinely present in her body, you grow up with a broken map. And broken maps in the wrong hands are dangerous.

There is porn. There is Hollywood. Where are people seeing or hearing the real thing?

These false representations only create a fake initiation into what sex is. And it is too late to take down YouPorn or reshoot every film where a woman has a sneeze orgasm. So the remedy has to be more honesty. More realness. More of the actual thing.

Even in the spiritual and transformational circles I run in and teach in — we have our own shadow of the “sacred.” The tantric woo-woo blissed out sex. What about piss, sweat, spit, grunts, and all the animal sides? Even the tantra and sacred sexuality space is usually an escape from the body and its actual wildness — there is still a focus on the ascension, the elevated, the transcendent, instead of accepting the beauty and the mess and the magic in the spit, the cum, the sweat, the blood.

The sacred and the animal are not opposites. The body is not the obstacle to transcendence. It is the vehicle. The feral is the holy. They are the same animal.

And I want to apologize for adding to any idea that sacred sexuality looked some kind of polished, high-holy way. Because if your sacred sex doesn’t involve grunts and strange feral sounds and dripping of all nectars aka body fluids — then I don’t believe it. I believe you are performing a different kind of performance. A “holier” one. But a performance.

I hope more writers and directors make what Halina Reijn made. I hope more actors do what Nicole Kidman did — let themselves be heard, actually heard. I hope more shows trust their audiences to handle what real pleasure actually sounds like instead of giving us one gasp and calling it revolutionary.

Because the alternative is what we have — a generation of young people whose only reference is pornographic, and a generation of young women who have learned to contain their orgasm into one polished exhale so they don’t seem like too much.

You are not too much.

Yell. Moan. Scream. Grunt like an animal in heat because you are one. Drip and sweat — all of it. Let your body do what your body actually does.

Until we stop pretending and stop being ashamed of these bodies we cannot heal. We cannot get sex out of the shadows where it festers and distorts and becomes dangerous. This world has a long way to go and I’m not saying a real female orgasm will save it —

but just maybe it will.

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