Shame, Sex, and the Female Body

On 'The Substance' and 'Babygirl'

Halina Reijn, Babygirl, 2024, via Niko Tavernise/A24

It’s a real treat to have the philosopher and media critic Susan Bordo in The Metropolitan Review. She writes frequently on film and TV, and has a strong, compelling verdict on two popular films: go with Babygirl, not The Substance. Agree or disagree, Bordo is always an enthralling read. If you’re enjoying movie week at TMR — or you’re feeling generous about this brand-new cultural powerhouse — please pledge a $50 subscription subscription today. Every dollar pays our writers and gets us a wonderful little print issue, coming to you this spring.

-The Editors

“The particular greatness of movies,” Pauline Kael once wrote, is the power to connect with us “emotionally … in spite of our thinking selves.”

I’m never going to be swept away by films that are treatises, feminist or otherwise. Tell me a good story whose ending I can’t predict. Make me weep. Make me smile with pleasure. Turn me on. Give me one delicious image. Let me leave the theatre pondering what I’ve just seen. Break my heart. Just don’t lecture me.

The Substance and Babygirl: Two films by female writer/directors, both inspired by the experience of living in a female body in a culture that instills shame and self-hatred in us. It’s an evergreen theme for feminists; we’ve been writing about it (though only occasionally making movies about it) since the dawn of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960’s, and freshening the ideas up is a challenge.

The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, uses the relatively new genre of “body horror” to make some well-worn feminist points. The imagery is grotesque and often shocking, and feminists who grew up being told that “victim feminism” was an outdated downer, only to discover that in 2024 all the old wars had to be fought all over again — or never were won to begin with — felt horror to be a perfect vehicle for their anger. Fargeat:

The movie is about women’s bodies, and to me, I couldn’t find a better way than body horror to show the violence that we can do to ourselves. That was the real metaphor. There is symbolism to play with that flesh: ‘This is what we have inside. There is the white, lovely smile. And behind this, it’s a whole other world. I’m going to show you the inside world. And yes, it’s that violence, it’s that bloody, it’s that uncomfortable, and it can be that fucked up.

Symbolism. Metaphor. Already I’m wondering if I’ve wandered into a lit crit class. At the same time, it’s feeling like Feminism 101 and we’re studying Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller.

Fargeat, who studied political science for three years before going to film school, apparently didn’t notice how “uncomfortable” being a woman is until she was heading toward 50: “I had this huge wave of: ‘My life is going to be over. I’m not going to be interesting anymore. No one is going to look at me anymore. My life is finished.’”

I suppose if you’re slender and conventionally pretty — which Fargeat is, and French besides — the self-hatred women feel toward their own bodies may not come as an insight until aging sets in. Personally, I’ve felt it all my life, even during the years when I now recognize I was quite lusciously beautiful. But Fargeat’s delayed epiphany aside, it’s perplexing to me why she enlisted Demi Moore (who just received the Screen Actor’s Guild award for her performance, and may well be headed for an Oscar), whose calendar years are 52 but whose body is actually as fit as that of a well-exercised 30-year-old to enact the horror of the recognition that you’ve arrived at your expiration date.

I’ve read interviews in which Fargeat explains that she wanted an actress who had actually faced the prospect of aging out of star-status and struggled against it (which Moore has valiantly done through numerous surgeries, daily exercise, and of course plenty of water.) But the medium, not the actors’ backstory, is the message in movies—although it may weigh heavily at awards time — and watching the first scene, in which “Elizabeth Sparkle” moves her amazingly toned body through a workout video completely shattered any sense of identification that I felt with the character.

Those who love the movie will laugh at my too-sober failure to appreciate that this movie is not going for documentary realism. But no, I get that. Everything about it, from the stark, dehumanized sets to the distorted closeups of her boss (Dennis Quaid) screams “this is deliberately over-the-top.” He’s a parody of male toxicity and the ruthlessness of capitalism, and the poison literally drools out of him, whether tearing into crawfish, smoking a cigar, or just leering. He’s even more stomach-turning than the cringe-worthy scene in which “Sue” (Elizabeth’s “better version of herself,” who has been called into being by injections of “the substance,”) sews up the bloody gash in Elizabeth’s spine, out of which she’s emerged. (Elizabeth is mysteriously adept at injections and suturing.)

Fine. I like a good horror movie, even those that carry political/social messages (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Stepford Wives, Get Out). But don’t ask me to take any feminist lessons from The Substance. And Fargeat wants just that. She doesn’t just want us to shudder (or laugh, if you’re that kind of horror film aficionado, recalling the trope, in other movies, of alien eruptions from human bodies) when “Sue” buckles and heaves inside Elizabeth and then splits her apart. She wants the blood and gore and grotesqueries that multiply over the course of the movie to be the vehicle through which she can (as she puts it) “hit people’s minds” about the real body horror that women suffer, absorbing cultural judgment and rejection, where it gestates into self-hatred. “Remember,” the directions on the kit tell the hopeful user, “You Are One.” But Sue, entranced with the power of her youth and beauty, doesn’t obey those instructions and ultimately tries to eliminate Elizabeth. Uh oh. You should know never, in a horror movie or thriller, to go inside a room that says “Don’t Enter.”

My stomach felt a bit pukey as the “better version,” bit by bit, gradually becomes a mass of disgusting stuff that vomits itself over the packed house who’ve come to see Sue, but my own mind was untouched by The Substance. Its ideas are old feminist bullets as far as I’m concerned, just rigged to create more splatter.

Still, The Substance is instructive (and more scary than its own images) as a cultural document, I grew up in the 50’s and early 60’s expecting nothing, then feminism gave me life. Anger was woven into the fabric of that feminism, but so was hope and excitement and community and discovery. We had words, we made up words, we put old words to new uses to express both the anger and the excitement. We wrote books, we theorized, we created poetry and fiction, went into politics, we shoved doors open. We didn’t need a graphic metaphor to bust through the mystifications and illusions and everyday violence; we did that by being ourselves, by thinking out loud and knowing that we‘d be mocked and dismissed and told we were ugly man-haters. We resisted in all the ways that history had prepared for us, and we became monsters in the eyes of many.

I didn’t need shock-and-awe to remind me of the violence done to women in this culture. But unlike my own generation, the 40 and 50-somethings of today grew up with a promise of equality and cultural acceptance that’s been so utterly betrayed, in so many ways, that only the most violent imagery is adequate to speak for their anger, their fury at being fucked-over after being told that they could be anything they wanted, that power (e.g. higher office) and equality (e.g. reproductive rights) were theirs for the taking. Not to mention the illusion created by Hollywood and the self-enhancement industries that beauty and sexual appeal need not have an expiration date.

In general, though, like my early idol Pauline Kael, I don’t go for movies that aim at my mind (I’ve been an academic most of my life, I’ve had enough of that, thank you) as much as those that wake and stir up emotions other than fury (I watch the news for that.) Movies that “get me in the feels,” as younger people say. Movies like Aftersun, Good One, and all of Sean Baker’s movies but most recently and especially, Anora. And Babygirl, which speaks to women’s sexual shame rather than the horrors of aging or getting fat. It’s been largely ignored during awards season, although both the original script and Nicole Kidman’s performance are more courageous, more nuanced, and more original than the gimmicky The Substance. I’m guessing that’s partly due to the marketing of it as an erotic thriller, which it isn’t. But also, despite the fact that sex scenes featuring ever-fuller nudity (we even get penises nowadays — a huge change from the days when a bare chest was the most undressed male actors got) — there’s (for want of a better word) a puritan strain running through our (originally actually puritan-settled) culture. Those athletic naked bodies engaged in sexual gymnastics have become totally non-erotic, too. The sex is so cinematic and the bodies so flawlessly perfected they may as well be clothed.

Babygirl, like The Substance, deals with the cultural distortions that generate women’s shame and self-loathing. But while the villain in The Substance is represented by the caricature-boss who fires Elizabeth Sparkle for being too old, in Babygirl the constraints on freedom and self-acceptance are already deeply internalized—and from way back, perhaps from childhood. The script (which by the way reads like a beautiful novel) doesn’t need a comic-book villain to trigger shame. And in fact, the movie is much more disconcerting because there are no comic-book villains or monsters. Everyone is deeply human.

Like The Substance, Babygirl was written and directed by a female film-maker — Halina Reijn — who was inspired by her own experience. “I always want to be normal,” Reijn said during an interview with The Daily Show. “My movie is sort of a letter to myself, to encourage myself to become more unapologetically my authentic self, without shame.” But rather than making a statement, the “letter” explores a question: “Can we love even the most shameful parts of ourselves?” Unlike cellulite and wrinkled flesh, they aren’t worn on the surface of the body, but lie deep within, often hidden since childhood, when we first learned to be embarrassed and guilty over our emerging sexual identities, needs, and fantasies.

Romy (Nicole Kidman, astoundingly overlooked by the Oscar nominations) is a high-ranking executive (perhaps a CEO, I found it a little vague) at a robotics company. The “most shameful part” of an otherwise picture-perfect life is that hidden behind her immaculately groomed and put-together surface are sexual needs that she has learned are not “normal.” She’s excited by fantasies of submission, of giving herself over to the more dominant will of another, to transgress the prescribed formula for a “healthy,” “adult,” self-respecting sexual relationship based on equality. Her gorgeous and successful theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas) clearly adores and desires her, but when she experiments with bringing her fantasies into their sexual relationship, he experiences it as kinky and disturbing. He ignores her request for them to watch porn together while they make love, And when she puts a pillow over her face during sex, he recoils. “It makes me feel like … a villain,” he says.

You can understand his reaction, knowing how many fictional murders (and actual murders) involve smothering, and often during sex. He’s a nice guy; he doesn’t want to feel like a serial killer. And he prides himself on his enlightened male “feminism”; He wants their relationship to be egalitarian, not one of masculine dominance and female submission. But you can also feel how shaming it is for her to have him turn away when she tentatively reveals her need for something less “correct.” It short-circuits her sexual response and she’s unable to have an orgasm.

Rather than talk about any of it with him she pretends to come, Then, when he’s asleep, Romy gets out of bed and masturbates to porn in which the woman is submissive and calls her sex-partner “daddy.” That little girl, masturbating under the covers to images and ideas that even some versions of feminism have declared unacceptable is her secret self, which she carefully hides away underneath fabulous designer clothes that only Nicole Kidman could wear and perfectly styled hair—just enough loose tendrils to warm up what otherwise is a pretty icy, though very fashionable, look. In the daytime, she tends to her botoxed face (yes, we see her getting the injections, a scene which in its own way breaks more movie-conventions than anything in The Substance), puts little loving notes in her daughters’ lunchboxes, and practices a speech she delivers that day at work.

Later in the film, after the stitches that have held it all together have been ripped apart (about which later) she tries to explain to Jacob. “Her confession,” the script reads, “comes from very deep within” and is excruciatingly halting and tortured, revealing the extent of her shame:

ROMY: Since I was very little, since I can remember even, I've always had these specific thoughts—

JACOB: What thoughts?

ROMY: Dark, dark thoughts—

She tries to find the right way to say it.

ROMY: Thoughts of - violence. Revolting thoughts. Embarrassing.

(she has a hard time saying the words out loud)

Of being -forced and hurt, and humiliated—

Worried where she is going, Jacob looks at her.

ROMY: I was so ashamed- I still am. I have no idea where they come from, who planted them in my brain. I would give anything to erase them, to delete them-

She forces herself to look at Jacob

ROMY: I see myself as a strong, smart women, who is…in control of things, who knows what she’s going—Who is loving and caring and responsible, and who wants to work on herself. Not some kind of embarrassing—masochist, or ignorant…weak, anti-feminist who—

Jacob cuts her off, pressing for details. But in fact she’s just described exactly how Jacob sees it: “Humiliation—domination—submission…whatever they call it—It’s neurotic,” he says later in the film. And then he adds “Female masochism is a male fantasy, a male construct.” It was not his finest moment.

But Reijn, thank goodness, isn’t going to allow any male to have the last word on what constitutes female sexual “neurosis.” She does, however, need a conduit for Romy’s liberation from the shame she feels, and that’s provided by Samuel (Harris Dickinson, who you might best remember from “Triangle of Sadness”) a 25-year-old intern who has very different ideas about what’s sexually “normal” and who intuits, responding to subtleties at first, that Romy the polished professional has a secret self that craves the relinquishing of power. Samuel is of a different generation than Jacob, and doesn’t see anything weird about “playing” with power. And without even trying, he exudes an innate personal confidence that shatters the authority that Romy has come to expect others will yield to. She’s unnerved by him even before she meets him, as she watches him—at that point he’s an anonymous stranger — calmly subdue an out-of-control dog in front of her office building. Later, when she discovers he’s an intern for her company, she asks how he did it. He says he had a cookie. But actually—I know because my daughter has that way with animals — it’s in the nature of his personality. I can scream at my dogs and they ignore me; Cassie can make them do what she wants with just a look. (Later, in one of those brilliant sequences that can absolutely make a movie for me, Romy, while having sex with her husband, fantasizes Samuel in the seedy hotel room where they’d sometimes met, effortlessly training the dog to obey his silent commands.)

The nuanced portrait of Samuel is part of what makes Babygirl one of my favorite movies this year. I have Facebook friends who refused to watch the movie, imagining it to be a more artsy Fifty Shades of Grey. And, like Romy’s husband Jacob, they equated the erotic pull of submission with “female masochism” and a more general acceptance of male dominance. But Samuel, unlike Christian Grey, doesn’t have a red room with instruments designed to elicit pain, and although by personality he’s a natural “alpha,” he’s also extremely attuned to and attentive to others. He feels his way delicately and imaginatively through his relationship with Romy, and although he’s sexually dominant, their back-and-forth is not as psychologically unidimensional or patriarchal as a “male construct” centered on domination. He calls her his “babygirl” after she’s sexually opened up to him, rewarding her for her vulnerability with a fatherly protectiveness. But she frequently tries to reassert her control by playing the concerned mother, telling herself—and him—that her main worry about the relationship is that he, being younger than her, not be hurt. That infuriates him. He knows it’s bullshit, for one thing. But also, when Romy tries to assert her “more mature” position, he feels belittled and humiliated.

As far as sexuality goes, however, unlike Romy he’s completely without shame—and that’s why he’s good for her. “What we were doing — It’s like — In my mind — We’re like — two children. Playing. It’s natural,” he says at one point. And he is childlike in some ways. He has trouble finishing sentences. He doesn’t really have things all figured out— and he knows it. When he does a little “sexy” dance for her it’s hot, but also kind of awkward, and far from projecting masculine toughness, he exudes a trance-like sinuousness that until very recently, was reserved for female bodies.

As attuned as he is to Romy’s erotic needs, he’s also naively, solipsistically oblivious to the realities of her life. In that respect, too, he’s like a child. Although their sexual relationship is liberating for her, it’s not just “play” for Romy, and Samuel is genuinely surprised and distressed when he realizes that he’s seriously disrupted and injected chaos into her life. Whether or not you agree with Samuel about what’s “natural” or even like him much the role is much more subtle and crafted than we typically get in movie depictions of erotic relationships. For me, it brought back memories, some pleasurable and some painful, of past relationships that were both liberating and humiliating. When that happened, it was usually with a man much younger than myself — an “inequality” that I found more complicated than it’s normally depicted in popular culture or criticized by those who view such relationships as either predatory on the part of the woman (that, believe it or not, is how one podcaster viewed what he saw as Romy’s “exploitation” of Samuel) or transactional on the part of the man (the “Roman spring of Mrs. Stone” paradigm.)

In the end, neither Jacob or Samuel get to define and dictate Romy’s sexuality. There are a couple of forced illustrations of how she’s been transformed: On the job, she tells an office sleaze-bag to fuck himself, something the careful, always appropriate “old” Romy would never do, and in bed with her husband — her relationship with Samuel, having broken things open — there’s more sexual honesty and true equality. She’s no longer quietly creeping away to privately masturbate. Rather, those aspects of her sexuality that Jacob had seen as weird or masochistic have become an accepted part of their relationship. That, I have to say, struck me as a bit rosy. But the “everything all better now” tidiness is countered, thankfully, by that amazing final scene in which, while having sex with Jacob, she fantasizes Samuel and dog. That makes the end of the film into something more complex and subtle—and for my taste, so much more satisfying than a political/feminist “message.” Yes, she’s doing better expressing herself with Jacob — and she’s having non-faked orgasms—but not at the expense of exorcising that “most shameful” part of herself. That part isn’t named, judged, or celebrated. It’s simply evoked, in a perfect sequence that the viewer is free to respond to however their own sexual psyches take them. I found it brilliant.

Riding home after seeing Babygirl, I thought about the difference it makes when women themselves make movies about women. Reijn has said that the film drew inspiration from erotic thrillers like “Fatal Attraction”—but with a crucial difference. Reijn: “I don’t like to punish my characters. I really love to be human about them.” That includes the men in Babygirl, but more significantly a “career woman” like Romy. In the days when men had a monopoly on the erotic “gaze,” women characters who dared to aspire to power in the workplace were turned into deranged neurotics whose sexuality is desperate to the point of psychosis. Writer James Dearden’s original ending for Fatal Attraction” was even changed at enormous expense when preview audiences felt that having Alex Forrest commit suicide was not enough punishment for the bunny-boiler. “Kill the bitch!” Male viewers shouted when a homicidal Alex breaks into the sacred space of the family home. And so that’s what Adrian Lyne’s revised version did, with the added satisfaction of giving every man’s dream of a wife (Ann Archer, looking both angelic and sexy) the task of taking down the crazed interloper.

Babygirl doesn’t punish Romy — or any of the male characters either—although I could make an argument that those nominating and handing out the awards are doing just that. That would be too much for this piece, however.

Susan Bordo is a feminist philosopher and media critic specializing in U.S. politics, popular culture, gender, and the body. She is the author of influential books on the female body, masculinity, Anne Boleyn, Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Election, Post-Trump politics, and television. Her weekly stack is BordoLines.