Over the last two weeks or so I worked my way through a Netflix series, Sex/Life:
is an American erotic drama television series created by Stacy Rukeyser for Netflix. The series is inspired by the novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men by BB Easton and it premiered on June 25, 2021. In September 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which was released on March 2, 2023. In April 2023, the series was canceled after two seasons
Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about its reception:
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 21% approval rating with an average rating of 5.5/10, based on 24 critic reviews. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Suffocating its more provocative ideas with steamy interludes and melodramatic writing, this erotic drama is too obsessed with sex to ever fully come to life.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.
When I read that after having seen the first or second episode, I was not exactly inspired to binge watch the rest.
And indeed I did not. But I somehow worked my way through to the end, one, two, or even three episodes at a time. And I’m glad I did, not because they finally pulled it off. They didn’t. But for what they attempted, that’s interesting. The principles in the series are confused. That’s OK. That’s standard. But the folks who made Sex/Life are confused as well. That’s not OK. But it’s interesting.
What’s going on here
Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the first episode, “The Wives are in Connecticut”:
Billie Connelly is a housewife living in Connecticut, married to her husband Cooper and with two young children. While loving her husband and family, Billie cannot stop herself from consistently reminiscing about her past as a wild party girl. The longing for her previous life grows ever stronger as her relationship with Cooper continues to disappoint her sexually. Despite the counsel of her best friend Sasha, Billie also keeps thinking back to her former relationship with Brad, a record producer. Billie documents her desires on her laptop, and this is discovered one morning by Cooper, leading the two to have passionate sex for the first time in years. However, after Cooper leaves for work, Billie impulsively goes to New York City to confide her feelings to Sasha. Upon arrival, Billie is left devastated when she sees Sasha slept with Brad the previous night.
That is to say, Billie is caught between good husband, father, and provider, Cooper, and hot bad/boy ex-lover, Brad. Now, that’s interesting. Why? Because it inverts a situation that Freud described early in the 20th century, where a men are often split between a woman they ravish sexually and a woman they marry and have children with – the Madonna/whore syndrome. A woman can be one or the other, but not both.
In this case it’s the woman who is thus split, between good-man hubby and bad-boy boyfriend. Freud and many thereafter assumed that this split was inherent in human nature. If so, then how can we possibly have a series where the shoe is on the other foot, as it were? Either Sex/Life is a complete fabrication, or Freud was wrong, along with many others. I think Freud was wrong about human nature. And, this being the 21st century and this is Netflix, we even have a scene where Cooper tries, and fails, at a sexual practice called “coital alignment technique,” of which bad-boy Brad was a master (S1, e5). [If you’re curious, read the Wikipedia entry and search YouTube for instructional videos. It’s not rocket science.]
And then there’s best-friend Sasha, who is a successful academic and single. Earlier in her life she had a choice between following her lover to graduate school on the West Coast or staying east to finish her own education. She chose to stay east. This inverts another trope, the man who’s split between the career on which his identity is staked and the woman he loves. In this case it’s the woman who is thus split.
Where Sex/Life fails is that, in the last episode, it all works out. Billy gets to marry Brad, who’s no longer bad-boy, and is in fact a dad, with another woman, a model who divorced him. And Sasha gets her old love-of-her-life boyfriend, who gives up his job to be with her. And, yes, good old Cooper is taken care of as well. So, we get to be happy for them, but we haven’t got the foggiest how that all happened. Or, rather, we have ideas, but they're all foggy.
...the tale has many inconsistencies. Truthfully, it is impossible for values to change and advance at this rate. Additionally, this season’s conclusion leaves a bitter aftertaste, as Billie gets back with her toxic ex, Brad.
It seems like it’s high time for shows to tell stories that accurately depict relationships, or at the very least, reveal how unhealthily connected people don’t yield desirable results. Towards the end, this show achieves none of these things. In actuality, it encourages and directs the viewers to tolerate unhealthy relationships.
Can we work it out?
I think so, though don’t ask me to work it out here and now. But I will make some observations.
There’s a name for the problem, or at least one aspect of it: essentialism. That’s the idea that things, including men and woman, have an irreducible and ineradicable nature, an essence. Madonna and whore are two essentialist views of women while bad-boy and good-hubby are essentialist views of men. Why not drop the essentialism and allow both men and women to embody both bundles of behavioral traits?
If it were that easy, we’d have done it long ago. Why’s it troublesome? Because the problem is not fundamentally a logical puzzle to be solved by the rational part of our minds. It’s a problem lodged in the so-called lizard brain, where attachment (Madonna, good-hubby) is one behavioral system while sexual passion (whore, bad boy) is another. I think if we examine the ethological literature on our primate ancestors – here I’m shooting from the hip; it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that literature – we’ll find that they have no need to combine the two systems into a coordinated way of interacting with a member of the opposite sex. Adults do not form long-term monogamous pair bonds. Thus the problem does not arise.
Humans do, or at least that has been the ideal in Western society (and in others as well) going back to the early modern era. Shakespeare wrestled with the problem in many of his plays, something I examined (and in terms of modern “evolutionary psychology,” though I didn’t use the term) in an essay I published three decades ago: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? [I’ve appended the abstract as an appendix.] But I don’t think he came up with a viable solution. Why do I say that? Because it he had done so, half a century ago, the problem would not be with us today. Obviously enough, it is.
Bonus: An exercise for the reader: Compare this series with The Seven Year Itch (1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. It dealt with the issue by some very clever flim-flammery which simply denied that men and women seeking active sex lives were at all problematic, or perhaps even real. For extra credit, follow the problematic through Mad Men.
Appendix: How Shakespeare struggled with the problem
Abstract: The plots in three of Shakespeare's plays are launched by the same device: the protagonist mistakenly believes that his beloved has betrayed him. One of these plays is a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, one a tragedy, Othello, and one a romance, The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare thus considered this one problematic situation, which has to do with a male difficulty in accepting one's beloved as both a sexual and a nurturing person, at three times in his life and produced different kinds of plays. By looking at his career through modern studies of adult development, we can see that the shift from one genre to another follows the reorganization of Shakespeare's psyche. The ultimate fruit of that development is Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, whose protagonist, Prospero, has managed to integrate those aspects of himself which had been in conflict in earlier plays. If we then place Shakespeare's career in a broader psycho-historical context we can see how he helped make the modern nuclear family psychologically possible.
Finally....
I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.
I follow that thought in a new post: Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}
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