Shame and smut and secrets ... Oh my
I want to tell it all...
I was so keen to see the new Nicole Kidman A24 film Babygirl.
The trailer and socials hype led me to believe this would be a sexy exploration of a competent and in charge fifty-something power femme leaning into her praise kink.
I wanted that narrative. Oh, god I so want us to explore that narrative.
What I wanted from Babygirl:
I wanted to see a competent woman in her fifties feel sexually empowered.
I wanted to see a sexy exploration of praise kink and sexual embodiment.
I wanted to see femme pleasure in all its glorious glory.
I wanted to see the female gaze.
I wanted to watch a woman feel empowered and embodied and sexy and turned on.
But ultimately I was disappointed because whilst there were glimpses of all of these things they were also smashed right up against the (ick) reality of middle aged femme sexuality in 2025. Which is a whole bunch of secrets and shame and a deep upholding of the Madonna-Whore ideal. So, I left the cinema as dissatisfied as I was by my sex life in my twenties.
In the same week that I saw Babygirl I also saw my personal (and oh so many, many middle aged white lady's) deity Elizabeth Gilbert speak. She spoke so deliciously about presence and personal freedom and I swooned so hard I nearly slipped off my seat.
In this week I also attended my first smutty romance book club with a brilliant, passionate, glorious intergenerational group of femmes. So now I am reeling with big, messy thoughts that I'm going to try and find the pearls in, but I dunno if we're there yet.
Elasticity
Babygirl has this bang-on scene where Nicole’s character Romy tries to communicate with her husband, and the father of her teenage daughters, a sexual desire. It's awkward and she fumbles and her vulnerability is so fucking present that she hides herself under their bed sheet to try and get the words out as a present, and somewhat timid, Antonio Banderas tries to understand what she wants. And it's painful in its awkwardness. The shame and terror in her confession is so present and so relatable.
I feel like we do such a disservice to ourselves by not placing the elasticity of our humanness at the forefront of our relationships. We are malleable. We are constantly changing and shifting and growing and hurting and integrating all the data we're taking in. Our desire changes. Our kinks evolve. In many ways we are unknowable because we are in constant motion. If we're not speaking aloud the true things in an effort to be seen and heard. If we're not asking the questions of those we’re in relationship with in order to see them and know them in every passing moment. Then, we go unknown.
But then going unknown is often far more comfortable than the discomfort of saying the true thing. And what manifests is the upholding of a mish mashed version of ourselves that often is a direct reflection of the others comfort with us. Isn’t that gnarly?
I saw Gina Chick speak last year and she spoke of our inherent discomfort being uncomfortable, and I've pondered it ever since. The moments where we actively choose comfort over discomfort and vice versa. Our comfortability in the discomfort of being a human. Isn't it baffling that some of our greatest discomfort comes in saying the true things and doing as we please, especially when it comes to the erotic.
And I don't mean erotic as sexual desire...I mean erotic as in desire, the deep knowng, the ‘fuck yes’ inside us.
If you have not can I implore you to read anything by Audre Lorde and follow and read the work adrienne maree brown.
This from adrienne’s Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.
”And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.
Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s.
But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial. And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”
Erotic in our Voice.
Babygirl highlights this in the first two opening scenes where Romy and her husband have sex, which appears to be satisfying, orgasmic sex. Followed by Romy heading into her office to watch porn and cum on her own. The sounds she makes when in control of her own orgasm are completely different.
I think about the performance of sex and the erotic. And it's connection to our voice. To what is true.
I once went to healer who told me to give myself an orgasm every day and see how tapped in and turned on it would make feel in my own life. I am a perpetual good girl and did as I was told and what I learnt was the truth of pleasure in an embodied way and the sounds my voice and body make. Knowing myself allows me to share that with lovers I invite into my bed. And my life. And my heart.
To say the true things, with my truest voice as often as I can.
And that shit is hard.
Stay in Line.
Romy is a powerful CEO type operating in a patriarchal industry, and world. She is mother in a floral apron allowing her teenage daughter minimise her, she is good wife, and powerful boss, and upholding all of the beauty standards and “rules.” She is doing it all. And she is exhausted and bored and all longing. It made me think about the Madonna-Whore straight jacket that we just spend our lives taking off. The performance of femininity and for who? The perception of others? The dictation of desirability. Pfft. Our desire is our own. Our body is our own. Why do you think they've always fought, and continue to fight, so hard to ensure it is not. But it is. The Botox and the Ozempic and the body count shame and the gender affirming and reproductive health care minimisation are just contemporary straight jackets to ensure we are tired and don't revolt. To ensure we stay in line. And don’t think for a second that i’m implying the threat isn’t real, it is, but when we interrogate the why and how we participate we take back, reclaim, and stand in our power.
Why do you think we make an aging woman secret? Why we make senior women invisible? Why we only learnt about the full extent and capacity of the clitoris until 1998, or have only begun to research perimenopause in the last few years. We must make older women invisible or perceptively undesirable because they have the fewest fucks to give and because they sit comfortably in their rage, and in the women I admire, their desire. They do whatever the fuck they please.
Secrets.
Rules that inherently linked to shame means we’ve gotten good at secrets.
We keep secrets all the time. Secret selves. Private longings. True desires. We don't share. Or experience. When I wrote Noni Blake and I asked women what they would do if they let pleasure lead and they could articulate with such specificity the unactioned longings. To wear red lipstick. To buy lingerie. To ride a motorbike. To leave my husband. To have sex outside. Entirely possible and actionable actions left unsaid and undone, only communicated in the safety of an anonymous survey or the privacy of late night DM.
I hope you find this as heartbreaking as I do. I love that you share your longings with me, please don’t stop. I will be safe harbour for your true things, happily.
Romance, erotica and smut is one the highest grossing industries in publishing that just keeps growing. The only genre that thrived with the introduction of e-readers because finally readers could read without shame. People wouldn’t have to know what you were reading any more.
And, like with most things we gender femme we belittle it and minimise the joy of it.
We exist in a society that hates the erotic. We’ve binaried the erotic. We’ve placed so much shame in the erotic and in gender. We are particularly scared of the femme erotic.
Rebecca Wolf writes about a lot of these same things in her Substack The Braid, which I highly recommend. She wrote this recently:
“In Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds she writes:
'I had been taught that the story of Adam and Eve was a biblical primer on good and evil and the consequences of following one's appetite. To disobey God was to be cast out of the Garden of Eden and face 'sorrow in your loins for all your remaining days.'
What I came to appreciate was an act of courage that led us out of the garden and into the wilderness. Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal. We just have to make certain we do not betray ourselves... The snake who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honor your hunger and feed yourself. Devil spelled backwards.’
I am no longer interested in screaming into the void about all of the ways they're trying to starve us, focused instead on my hunger for all the apples in the garden, especially the ones I'm not supposed to eat.
I have gone from being Eve to being the snake.
Reminding myself and any woman who needs the reminder to eat the apple, too.
And tell Adam if he wants to stay he can watch."
- Rebecca Woolf - The Braid.
Romance, smut and erotica readers are voracious readers. And they are horny to see the characters in books get to experience the things we would love to but don't. The joy of desire explored. The garunteed orgasm, the happy ending, the romantic lead who is safe. The erotic expressed for some as having a partner that takes on the emotional and task based labour out of life. For others it's to witness the delight of being railed by a harem of men, or the Lochness Monster in masc human form.
There's comfort in their audacity, in lives where we're so disempowered by capitalism and being 'good' in an effort to make everyone else comfortable.
Craving.
I think we collectively are craving more. We want more. And that's not gendered. So many of us want more than the bullshit we've been sold. I think our discomfort sits in the fundamental knowing that this isn't it. We're meant for more, individually and collectively.
In the same way I want horny kink positive empowered and embodied stories about femmes. I also want empowered horny gentle slow burn romance sensual narratives for mascs. I want more queer joy. I want the stories created for young people to be more grounded and real and authentic. And I want to see every culture and body and faith represented in a way that feels fucking empowering and possibility making.
I want more.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love hit a moment in the Zeitgeist that became a permission slip for so many people to quit their jobs, and leave their marriages, and not have kids, and go on adventures and say yes to their lives. And as a result Elizabeth Gilbert is still a figure head symbolising that for so many. To be a woman in her fifties standing messily in her grief and humanness and share what she's fucking up and learning and how she's taking the grit and turning it into pearls so we all can too. It's what she did for me last week. It's what I wanted Babygirl to do for me. It's what the romance that I read (and write) to do.
Is it about permission? Is is about modelling? Is it about the vulnerability of witnessing people stand on stages, or reading words on pages, or onscreen, say the true things so we feel less alone. Is it about stories that become legends, and hopefully one day battle cries?
Is it saying the things like:
The loneliest I've ever felt in my entire life was when I was in a 'happy' marriage.
Or, the best sex I've ever had is with myself, and it's only because I've experienced that that I've been able to articulate what I want and need and desire to my lovers to have sex that feels expansive and exploratory and deeply pleasing.
Is it acknowledging that our desires, kinks, longing changes as we age and learn more and that's perfectly okay.
Is it acknowledging that nothing exists on a binary - not gender, not sexuality, not feelings, not even happiness. That multiple things can exist at the same time and that we are capable of holding it.
That the perpetuation of Church based, industrial, racist, patriarchal, capatilistic lenses means we're programmed for shame. We're programmed to feel like we're not enough. That we are perpetually letting someone down. That we're not normal and things would be better if (insert purchase/goal/feeling here).
If we just...
And it's all actually bullshit.
You’re enough. Your aliveness makes it so.
And, the rules aren't real. So, fuck em.
If we're constantly informed by our past and the impact it has on us while striving for some future version we miss what's right here and what's always been enough exactly as it is.
Breath in our lungs.
The chaos we feel is founded. The shame and confusion and overwhelm we feel is founded. The terror and fear is real and warranted. Your anxiety is legitimate.
I want to hold the macro less, and the micro more.
I want to hold the small delights.
The true things.
I want to practice going moment by moment more and choosing from MY delight and MY curiosity and not the fear and shame perpetuated by the bullshit.
I want to embrace the erotic in everything.
I want to say the true thing in an effort to be the truest, realest, calmest thing I can be in any given moment.
I wanna be my own damn babygirl.
And I want to write it all and tell it all.
Love.
Claire.
If you become a paid subscriber to Pearler you’ll join The Grit Guild where i’m currently conducting a romance writing smutty author choose-your-own-adventure experiment. I’m writing a novelette with The Grit Guild’s help. Every week at the moment, and every few weeks thereafter, you’ll get a chapter in Lulu Dare’s story.
Read more about Lulu and what’s gonna unravel here:
Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.