What happens when women hide their desires?

On Babygirl, performative sex, and the price of concealing what we really want

Like many women, I spent years faking orgasms before I truly experienced one. Which is to say, in the opening scene of Babygirl, I saw the signs: breath rushed, moans a pitch too high, head thrown back in an approximation of ecstasy. I wasn’t surprised when, after her husband rolls over in a state of postcoital bliss, Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) creeps off to another room, where she gets herself off—secretly, shamefully.

From the outside, Romy appears to have it all: a happy family, doting husband, and a high-powered career as the CEO of a successful robotics company. But as we later learn, her husband of 19 years has never made her come. She wants to be dominated; he wants tepid vanilla sex, whispering “I love you” while gazing soulfully into her eyes. For years, Romy rationalizes her unmet desires away—until one day, she’s faced with a wild dog that nearly attacks her on the street before a handsome young stranger brings it to heel. “Good girl,” he murmurs. Romy’s ears perk.

The man, it turns out, is her new intern, Samuel. When she confronts him at the office, asking how he calmed the dog, his answer is instantly flirtatious: “I gave it a cookie. Why, do you want one?” They embark on a whirlwind affair—and soon, she’s on all fours in a pencil skirt, lips fumbling for his outstretched palm. When he finally brings her to orgasm, she lets out an animalistic moan—then, tears.

Before Samuel, Romy is living on autopilot—performing her role as a wife, mother, and girlboss without deriving much pleasure from it.

Before Samuel, Romy is living on autopilot—performing her role as a wife, mother, and girlboss without deriving much pleasure from it. We see her cooking breakfast, giving presentations, faking orgasms, interspersed with shots of robots gliding smoothly along their tracks in an empty warehouse. Even her downtime is devoted not to real self-care, but a capitalist approximation of it: cryotherapy and ice baths to keep time at bay, EMDR therapy to “cure” the sexual fantasies she attributes to her chaotic upbringing.

Her childhood helps explain why Romy sought a life of stability—but in her quest for emotional safety, she has insulated herself against intimacy. She spends so much time chasing what she’s supposed to want, prioritizing her idea of a ‘perfect’ life over the experience she actually craves. Likewise, in the bedroom, Romy hides her fantasies from her husband Jacob, too focused on his needs to communicate her own: “I want to be the kind of girl you like,” she cries. “I want to be normal.”

Her fantasies are, in fact, very normal. But because she views her desires as wrong, Romy can’t conceive of a reality where they fit into her life with Jacob. For her, marriage is a devil’s bargain: she can either be loved or truly seen, but not both.

Romy’s story hit home for me. I spent years performing desire in relationships, sacrificing my own pleasure to preserve the perfect future I imagined. It wasn’t until I found myself in a ménage à trois with my coworker—someone I felt magnetically attracted to, but had no intent of seriously dating—that I experienced my own desire on my terms, without the pressure of performance.

I spent years performing desire in relationships, sacrificing my own pleasure to preserve the perfect future I imagined.

In Babygirl, Romy’s betrayal of Jacob begins with her betrayal of herself. Too ashamed to acknowledge what she wants, Romy performs for his pleasure—then resents him for not noticing. She tries, once or twice, to elicit dominance from Jacob—but her shame is so overwhelming that when she attempts to share her fantasies, it manifests as a series of desperate, unintelligible demands. Jacob is mildly bewildered, and severely unaware of the emotional stakes: “I don’t want to feel like a villain,” he says. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Samuel, however, does. Sexually dominant and preternaturally intuitive, he offers Romy an excuse to embrace her desires without taking ownership of them. It’s easier to reach new frontiers of vulnerability with someone unburdened by a shared history. And after decades of abandoning her own needs in favor of what she thinks she should want, Romy is hungry for someone who doesn’t let her hide from herself.

Too ashamed to acknowledge what she wants, Romy performs for her husband’s pleasure—then resents him for not noticing.

When Samuel and Romy meet in a seedy motel, their first attempts at dominance and submission are awkward, fumbling, achingly human. It’s clear that both of them are making it up as they go along—trying things on for size, then slipping out of their personas with a barely-suppressed laugh, half-bemused by the strange hungers they awaken in each other. Surprising even themselves, they transform everyday actions into a form of psychological foreplay: a glass of milk, quickly chugged, is more erotic than sex.

This, too, resembles my experience—because in my open relationship, I was permitted to do everything but fuck. As a result, we had to experiment with new forms of eroticism, with both of us constantly longing for more. With my ex, my own desires withered under the harsh light of obligation and a veritable cavalcade of relationship issues. With my coworker, nothing was expected of me—and like a plant pushing up from cracks in the concrete, my desire bloomed.

And after decades of abandoning her own needs in favor of what she thinks she should want, Romy is hungry for someone who doesn’t let her hide from herself.

Since its debut on Christmas Day, Babygirl has sparked debate. Upon witnessing Romy lapping up milk on all fours, some see a female CEO stripped of her power; others see it as a brief escape from the constraints of her life.

Writing for The New Yorker, critic Naomi Fry questioned whether Romy’s sexual submission is really born of animalistic desire, or an “even more committed embrace of robotic optimization.” I see her point, in theory; one could imagine a beleaguered girlboss defaulting to submission in the bedroom simply to avoid making another decision. But if Romy were seeking the path of least resistance, she’d stick to rote vanilla sex with Jacob. After decades of internalizing other people’s expectations while down her actual desires, Romy’s surrender is, ironically, one of the first real choices she has made for herself.

Before the affair, Romy was a high-functioning automaton. She believed she could suppress her desires to save her relationship—just like she muscled through everything else in her meticulously optimized, existentially empty life. But in the end, this nearly cost her everything—because her sexual desires were so elemental to her happiness that they couldn’t be ignored.

When I see Romy in that hotel room with Samuel, her face twisting between agony and ecstasy, I see a woman contending, for the first time, with her own humanity. And after years of performing at the office—only to come home and take on the affective labor of unsatisfying sex—she is finally off the clock.