A spiritual kick in the dick

'Dying for Sex' is a reminder that we're all just walking each other home—sometimes via penis humiliation and crushed balls.

Rob Delaney in Dying for Sex. Screenshot: YouTube

There’s that famous Ram Dass quote, “We're all just walking each other home.” Like a koan, it’s better felt than explained, but, roughly, it speaks to our shared journey in this life—personally, spiritually, mortally—and the support and companionship that we offer each other along the way. I think that quote is as true in sex as in the rest of life. We’re all just walking each other home.

That’s what I keep thinking about after binging all eight episodes of Hulu’s Dying for Sex. Not the now-infamous flying penis scene, but rather the intimacy of the show’s kinky sex scenes, and the tenderness of these human explorations against the backdrop of impending death.

In case you’ve missed the publicity blitz: this limited series based on a real-life story stars Michelle Williams as Molly, a middle-aged woman whose terminal cancer diagnosis prompts her to leave her disappointing husband and embark on a journey of sexual and emotional self-discovery.

Molly has never had an orgasm with another person, including her husband, and she’s determined to experience the little death before the big one. She jumps on the dating apps, hijinks ensue, and Molly pretty quickly realizes that, actually, the thing she’s into is dominating men.

Conveniently, she has a handsome neighbor across the hall, played by Rob Delaney, who is into being ordered around and having his dick kicked. There’s also a man who is into penis humiliation and another with a kink for being a human dog.

It’s notable how much communication happens in these scenes within scenes. What are you into? What are your boundaries? What do you want to try next? It all stands in stark contrast to the prototypical vanilla hetero hookup, where hardly anything is communicated, everything is assumed, and boundaries are nonexistent.

“Is there anything else you want to try?” she asks the man she refers to as Pet. “No judgment. … There’s nothing wrong with you.” Together, they create a space where their secret selves can be safe.

This lack of judgment is unlike the sex she used to have with her husband. Early on, we watch as she asks to give him a blow job and then he pulls away mid-act. He pathologizes her interest in performing oral sex, suggesting that it’s her response to being sexually abused as a child. Her husband even questions the authenticity of her general horniness on the grounds that it might be the influence of her cancer drugs. He tries to trace her desire to its alleged source and then invalidate it.

But with these new partners, there is mutual understanding and a willingness toward play. Hooper, a man with the most beautiful dick that she’s ever seen, wants her to tell him that his penis is pathetic and ugly, the worst she’s ever seen. Molly doesn’t question the reason behind his desire for humiliation, and she doesn’t inform him that, actually, it’s a beautiful dick. Instead, she meets him in his fantasy, as he does with her wish to dominate him.

The same is true with Pet, who wears a full-body dog costume. “I’ve never had someone check me for ticks before,” he tells her, post-coital. “How did you think of that? You are incredible. I feel so taken care of.” It’s a laugh line, but a tender-hearted one; there is real care here.

With Neighbor Guy, they don’t have penetrative sex. Instead, they masturbate in neighboring rooms—him rocking, sweating, and desperate, with her panties pressed to his face. The only kind of intimacy this moment lacks is physical—they don’t have to touch to be completely undone.

Afterward, they sit on the bedroom floor, leaning against the bed, while snacking on ice cream and cookies. She is euphoric; he looks tender and giddy. He talks about a past heartbreak and explains, “I’ve been very lonely in my life and doing this with you has made me feel… not lonely.”

It’s clear that she feels the same, although she’s not yet able to talk about her feelings, or even the fact of her terminal cancer. She’s also struggling with flashbacks relating to her childhood sexual abuse, which interrupt these moments of play, pleasure, and connection. But those dynamics shift dramatically over the course of the show. Her sexual adventuring proves to be healing.

There’s probably a smart piece to be written on vanilla fantasies about BDSM, and the ways that kink is narratively redeemed in the mainstream via tales of catharsis and transformation. Does it need to be emotionally productive, a form of self-help, to be a valid and acceptable sexual practice?

Then again, tales of catharsis and transformation are real, in kink and in sex more broadly.

Dying for Sex is about intimacy with the self, and with others, but that seems to have gone unnoticed by conservative and right-wing responses to the show. Over at The Free Press, Kat Rosenfield lumped the show in with All Fours and other cases of media depicting middle-aged women in the “relentless, even reckless pursuit of sexual fulfillment,” as she put it. Rosenfield writes:

Underlying these stories is… a view of sex that prioritizes personal satisfaction over human connection, and pleasure over partnership. … in this fictional universe, sex is a solitary enterprise, a journey to enlightenment that women undertake alone.

To see a lack of connection and partnership in a show like Dying for Sex, requires a pretty soulless interpretation of sex. Indeed, here’s sex in Rosenfield’s words: “It is something you do with another person, sometimes in order to create yet another person.” Mmm, sounds fun.

I also have to identify the fantasy here: that heterosexual marriage is about “human connection” and “partnership,” in contradiction to frequent testimonies and data-backed reports to the contrary. Never mind the implicit positioning of marriage as counter to pleasure and satisfaction, which: depressing but statistically accurate.

Rosenfield’s piece feels like a thesis that was written before watching the show—or else one arising from a total inability to take seriously any kind of sex that happens outside of monogamous married life. In Dying for Sex, it’s these “relentless” and “reckless pursuits” that bring about human connection and partnership—and to a degree Molly never experienced in her marriage.

At times, I felt conflicted about the way the show plays kink for laughs; and, of course, BDSM is too often tied to trauma, which can be true, but it’s just one narrow slice of the story of kink (in the case of Dying for Sex, childhood trauma was part of the original true story). My overarching takeaway, though, is that this show has a lot of heart—unlike Babygirl, a mainstream exploration of BDSM that I found to be as aesthetically delicious as it was narratively shallow.

For all the show’s light lols about pee play and human dogs, Dying for Sex is interested in showing that sex can be healing. It can change you; it can change your partners. And that is so far from being a frivolous bucket-list wish. We bump up against other human beings in so many different ways in life—colliding and jostling and swerving, coming together and falling apart. Sex can be part of that. It can be a way of channeling inner dramas. A way to find ourselves or lose ourselves. It’s part of walking each other home.

It’s a glimpse of home, too—it’s called la petite mort for a reason. Sex alters consciousness and melts the boundaries of the self. You pry open a portal and step inside a sideways door into a parallel universe. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the show ends with the big death—and, damn, it is beautiful.