The insatiable baby-woman

'Poor Things' and the pornographic fantasy of feral 'female desire.'

Still: YouTube

---

If you like this essay, you’re in luck, because I have lots more just like it. I’m always taking a critical feminist lens to heterosexual love, sex, and culture. Make sure to subscribe so you get my essays in your inbox each week.

All my essays are free, but paid subscribers get a carefully curated link roundup each weekend. They also make this whole thing possible.

---

This week, I finally watched the buzzy film Poor Things. It takes a lot these days to drag me to the theater, but it was the culmination of a couple things. A bookstagram account recommended my book—a sexual coming-of-age memoir—as accompanying reading for the film, and a handful of people reached out to tell me they wanted to know my “thoughts” on the movie.

Well, I have so many thoughts, but there was one thought I just could not escape: porn. Not because the film is pornographic—although there are plenty of sex scenes—but because of the film’s depiction of a woman in a base, carnal, and primal state.

The basic premise of Poor Things: it’s the bildungsroman of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, the monstrous creation of Godwin Baxter, a Frankenstein-like mad scientist. At the start of the film, Bella is crude and uncontained, grunting out monosyllabic words, wobbling around on unsteady legs, peeing on the floor, and spitting out any food she doesn’t like. The ghastly reason for Bella’s wildness? Godwin—SPOILER ALERT—took a recently-deceased pregnant woman’s body and cut her fetus out. Then he transplanted the fetus’s brain into her skull.

Bella has the brain of a baby and the body of a woman (a concept that still has me feeling queasy 24 hours after first encountering it on screen).

Bella’s brain appears to mature at a fast clip, as she gains motor skills and a vocabulary, but as the movie goes on it’s impossible to say just how old she is, cognitively. Does she have the mental faculties of a toddler, an adolescent, or a teenager? She masturbates at the dinner table with an apple and then a cucumber, and she exclaims with childlike wonder at this newfound source of pleasure. Then she ecstatically explores partnered sex (“furious jumping” and “tongue play,” as she calls it) with a ladies’ man played by Mark Ruffalo.

It’s unclear if she is meaningfully capable of consenting to any of this, but the film presents Bella as not being able to get enough: “Why don’t people do that all the time?” she asks, postcoital. For her, it is all bodily sensation. Desire and pleasure are physical, not mental or emotional: “I had the heat that needed release,” she says after “sex” with a different man. (The scare quotes because, again, the question of consent.) Her prodigious appetite goes beyond sex: at one point, she consumes so many delicious pastries that she vomits. For much of the film, she is a ravenous pleasure-seeking creature.

This reminded me of the pornographic trope of the insatiable woman. For years, I covered the porn industry as a journalist with a special interest in women’s desire, sex workers’ rights, and the politics of fantasy. I watched a lot of porn—indie queer feminist films, tube site clips, niche fetish videos, big-budget parodies, OnlyFans stuff, and so on. There are lots of different pockets of the industry; porn is not a monolith. But certain themes emerge within and across genres.

One of those themes: the messy, feral woman. For all of mainstream porn’s images of idealistic femininity, it also often presents women in a state of untamed wildness. A typical shoot starts with glamorous high-femme photos, known as “pretty girls,” which capture the “before.” After the sex starts, hair is slightly mussed and makeup is worn off. A more extreme fetish shoot might end with smeared lipstick and running mascara, which actually reminds me of the poster for Poor Things, with Bella’s graffiti-like scribble of makeup. 

A Poor Things promo poster.

This postcoital mess is the aftermath of acting out the fantasy of an insatiable woman whose hunger overrides shame and prohibition. She loses herself in desire and pleasure. The disintegration of the “pretty” self is evidence of authenticity; the mess is visual proof of her internal experience. It means she really wanted it; she really liked it.

The porn scholar Linda Williams argued that porn films use a variety of visual strategies to overcome the “invisibility” of cisgender women’s pleasure, compared to the visual “proof” of a hard dick and ejaculation; they attempt to depict the “frenzy of the visible” in women’s bodies as a means of reassuring heterosexual men that what they are witnessing is “not the voluntary performance of feminine pleasure but its involuntary confession.” For example, Williams writes of moaning in porn:

The allure of the sounds of pleasure resides at least partly in the fact that they come from inside the body and are often not articulate signs (meaningful combinations of sound and sense) but, rather, inarticulate sounds that speak, almost preverbally, of primitive pleasures.

There are all sorts of seemingly involuntary paroxysms in porn: twitching limbs, gagging, squirting. (I once wrote some 3,000 words on the realities of performing squirting in porn, which one legendary performer described to me as the result of chugging water, sometimes to the point of life-threatening overhydration, and then being vigorously stimulated until peeing uncontrollably.) These acts make visible—or appear to make visible—what is inside. Sometimes there are quite literal attempts at seeing inside, with prying fingers and penetrating camera shots.

You see why I couldn’t stop thinking about porn? In Poor Things, Bella spits, vomits, pees, grunts, and moans. She cannot get enough of any of the world’s pleasures. Her impulses are as unrestrained as her spasmodic dance moves. Bella is a walking “frenzy of the visible.”

At one point, we actually peer inside her body—or, really, the body that she inherits from her dead mother Victoria. In a flashback to Godwin’s creation of Bella, he surgically cuts the top of Victoria’s head and the camera unflinchingly captures him removing the cap of her skull like a hat. We see the wet, snaking folds of her brain, which is to be replaced with the brain of her fetus, which is removed through a cesarean. Victoria is cut right open to access her dark insides. So far as the self can be located anywhere in the body, Bella is the fetal brain that formed in the deepest cavern of Victoria’s body, now “involuntarily confessed” through that same body.

In porn, feral insatiability and the frenzy of the visible can fulfill a viewer’s wish for intimacy, acceptance, belonging, authenticity, and shamelessness. I think it can also appease a viewer’s yearning for power, control, and dominance—a desire to witness an “involuntary confession,” know the unknowable, see what is invisible, and, well, be god-like. There are obvious parallels to Godwin, who Bella refers to as “God,” and who is clearly inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story concerned with men’s attempts at fucking with nature and coopting women’s sexuality and reproductive capacities.

Some folks see Poor Things as having a critical “feminist” message. It certainly does show men going goo-goo-eyed for the insatiable Bella while also being desperate (sometimes to the point of insanity) to control her appetites. Many have suggested that Bella’s sexual adventuring represents a meaningful quest for selfhood and autonomy, including one reviewer who called it “a wondrous feminist meditation on the power of self-discovery” (I gasped). It’s true that Bella’s cognitive abilities gradually advance and she discovers a great deal: she reads Emerson, debates philosophy, becomes a socialist, and studies science. It’s also true that the movie feebly attempts to have a moral position: Men wanting to fuck a baby-brained woman? Bad but funny.

I found the film’s feminist ideas to be totally weak, cheap, underdeveloped, and opportunistic. Poor Things isn’t earnestly interested in women’s sexuality; for much of the film, there is no intimacy, emotions, or erotic fantasy, just genital-driven “heat.” Yes, the film mentions “tongue play” and the clitoris, but Bella’s awakening largely consists of immediate ecstasy from a little bouncing and thrusting. It makes me want to mail the filmmakers a copy of Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. As Angelica Jade Bastién wrote in Vulture, “Poor Things comes across as a pretentious 14-year-old boy’s idea of female becoming, if that boy had a Criterion Channel subscription.” In other words, a fantasy.

The psychologist Michael Bader suggests that our own individual fantasies basically serve to make us feel safe enough to experience arousal. Say, you’re a woman with fantasies of submission—maybe you fear that your own desire is too much. I hold this kind of interpretation lightly; fantasies don’t have to be psychoanalyzed. But I think this framework can be interestingly applied to a buzzy mainstream film like this one. Poor Things isn’t explicitly meant to arouse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dealing with fantasies—whether it’s on the part of viewers or the men who wrote and directed the film. It portrays a woman who just can’t get enough. Not just any woman but a baby-woman. Who feels safe with this fantasy?

I know I don’t.

---