“Babygirl” Starts a Conversation Every Gen X Woman Needs to Have

The provocative new film dares us to come clean about our desires. Can we do it without getting hurt?

There’s a moment in Babygirl, the new film directed by Halina Reijn, when Samuel, the 20-something intern played by Harris Dickinson, tells his boss, Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, that if they’re going to continue to meet up outside the office, it has to be consensual. Panic-stricken and confused, she asks him what “consensual” even means.

It’s a moment I felt deep in my Gen X bones.

Coming of age in the ’90s, “consent” wasn’t a word I ever heard in connection with sex. And I’m not the only one. My girlfriends and I often talk about how, when we went to parties in college, we got drunk first so we could loosen up and let things happen to us—so we could have fun without thinking too much about it. Or at least, we thought we were having fun.

We woke up in beds we didn’t recognize, next to people we didn’t remember, checked to see if our underwear was still on (it usually wasn’t), and laughed about it afterwards. We ended up with unexplained chafing and bruises at best, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies at worst. Or maybe our lingering doubts about the exact definition of “rape” and cases of PTSD are worse; they certainly cost more, in terms of the 50-minute hours our therapists charge us.

You could fill a bingo card with the consequences of our youthful indiscretions, but hey, at least we weren’t prudes? We were a good time. In the ’90s, the labels “easy” and “frigid” got tossed around a lot, and we tried our best to occupy the narrow space between the two. We were cool girls. Cool girls who had no idea what “consensual” meant—just like Kidman’s Romy.

I wasn’t planning to see Babygirl. The trailer made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, and after reading Glynnis MacNicol’s critique, I made up my mind to skip it, dismissing it as anti-feminist—a patriarchal fantasy of a woman with power being, quite literally, brought to her knees. But the awards buzz around Kidman’s performance, and the fact that the movie is written and directed by a woman, made me wonder if it was a mistake not to find out what the fuss was all about for myself. When my daughter, home from college on winter break, asked if she could have the apartment to herself for the afternoon to entertain a friend, I decided the universe was sending me a message, and bought a ticket.

As I settled into my seat, still uneasy about what I was in for, I heard a woman at the end of the row complain to her girlfriend that the theater was too hot. “They need to turn the air on. I’m going to have a hot flash.” She marched off to find a manager, and I relaxed. I was in the company of my people. About to have a hot flash and willing to go speak to someone about the ventilation system? Welcome to middle age. I tucked my notebook and pen beside me. As Jenny’s resident seducer of men young enough to be my children, I felt I should be prepared to take notes.  

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what Babygirl is about, but for the uninitiated: Romy is a brilliant, high-powered CEO of a tech company in New York City. She’s married to Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, a theater director currently rehearsing a production of Hedda Gabler. (The subtext here is not subtle; the titular character is a bored and unhappy woman who feels stifled by her marriage.) A new intern, Samuel, piques Romy’s interest when he calms a snarling, unleashed dog on the street outside their office, and the two embark on an affair in which Samuel does things like order Romy to crawl across the floor and lap milk from a dish. 

Romy, who, as we see in the movie’s opening scene, doesn’t have orgasms with Jacob, has them in abundance with Samuel. He fulfills desires she’s been unable to articulate to her husband, and it seems, even to herself, outside of watching some daddy-dom porn while she masturbates. That Romy is thirty(ish) years older than Samuel, and the married mother of two daughters not far from Samuel’s age, while problematic, is less concerning than the fact that she is also his boss. It’s a mess!

It is, however, a hot mess. The chemistry between Kidman and Dickinson is electric; I was squirming in my seat, feeling flushed, the first time they shared the screen. By the time Romy and Samuel truly get it on, as “Never Tear Us Apart” blasts—an inspired musical choice; those first notes are truly transcendent—I was considering downloading a dating app again, or possibly propositioning a stranger on the street after the movie ended. If Luigi Mangione nudged my sleepy perimenopausal libido awake, Babygirl blasted an alarm clock. 

This movie is extremely, as my daughter would say, “Gen-X-coded”—not surprising, considering that writer-director Reijn is exactly my age. There’s that INXS song, which I haven’t heard since I played it on a loop as I scribbled tear-stained pages in my journal about the boy I was in love with, who said he was going to ask me to prom before his parents made him take a girl from their temple. George Michael, my biggest crush of all time, is also featured; Samuel dances to “Father Figure” in a scene I’ll be watching again, several times, as soon as the film comes to streaming services. And the cigarettes! Gen X loves to sneak a smoke, and Babygirl is full of furtive cigarette smoking.

Of course, the affair can’t continue long before confusion, jealousy, anger, biting words, and bruised feelings crop up. Because however much we might like to think we’re capable of just having fun—at one point, Samuel tells Romy that they’re just playing together like kids—that’s not how it works. When you make yourself vulnerable to someone in the way that Romy does with Samuel, when you engage in that kind of intimacy in the context of a “casual” relationship, someone is bound to get hurt.

Imagine someone suddenly coming into your life, someone who seems to fully see you, who understands and validates desires you’ve been haunted and confused by since childhood. Then imagine that you bare yourself to that person, body and soul, that you allow them to play out your darkest fantasies with you, to begin to heal gaping psychic wounds that no one has ever acknowledged in you before. It’s powerful stuff, and Babygirl faces it head-on.

I once dated someone who was experienced in the world of kink; swinging, sex parties, that sort of thing. He, like Samuel, was charismatic and confident, and our connection was immediate and intense. When the subject of swinging came up—I told him that a friend of mine had gone to a “sex club” with her partner, and I was equally fascinated, repulsed, and turned on—he asked me, “Is this something you have interest in?”

I told him I didn’t know. Yes, I was curious. But how far was I prepared to follow my curiosity? I wasn’t sure I wanted to venture beyond the realm of fantasy. “I think I’d feel jealous if I saw you fucking someone else,” I said. This was over text, so I couldn’t read his expression, and one of us steered the conversation elsewhere. A few days later, however, he told me that he felt we had a lot to learn about each other.

“I’m still getting to know you,” he said. “For example, I didn’t realize that jealousy was something you might feel.” As if jealousy were not a normal human emotion that we all feel. He seemed disappointed by this admission of my humanity, and not a little disapproving. I wasn’t, apparently, as cool as he’d imagined me to be.

Those who engage in polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, whatever you want to call it—I’m partial to the term ”sex nerds,” as Brandy Jensen calls them in her hilariously insightful piece for The Yale Review—would have us believe that maturity, honesty, and clear communication can vanquish things like jealousy, insecurity, and possessiveness. And perhaps they can, to some extent. But the implication that such feelings are childish, or worse, shameful, rather than perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of, is the reason I stay far away from such people in my own personal life (the aforementioned relationship was short-lived).

Of course, polyamory is not the main dynamic between Romy and Samuel. It’s merely incidental to their relationship, since she is married to someone else, and he dates people his own age. (There is, however, a sweet scene between Romy and her Gen Z daughter, who introduces her mom to the idea that it’s possible, and maybe even fine, to be “just having fun” with one person when you truly love, and are committed to, someone else.)

No, the main event in this film is domination and submission, power and the decision to willingly hand that power over to someone else. And that’s where consent is so crucial—that word I, and other women my age, were never taught. When Samuel says the word “consensual” and Romy asks, “what does that mean?” she speaks for every Gen X woman who ever did shots while she was getting ready to go to the club, so she wouldn’t have to think about whether she really wanted some creep to take her back to his crusty apartment and fuck her on an air mattress while his roommates played video games in the other room. 

Perhaps not every Gen X woman can relate; perhaps some of them always felt in control of their bodies and understood their own agency—or maybe the time when they didn’t is a distant memory, now that they’ve arrived triumphantly in middle age. One of MacNicol’s chief complaints about Babygirl is that “nervous, uncertain” Romy allows Samuel to tell her what she wants, rather than having the confidence to ask for it herself. “Women looking to men to tell us who we are is the oldest, tiredest story there is,” she writes. MacNicol knows what she wants, she says, and is “able to convey that clearly and without shame.” I wish I could say the same.

The first time a man ever choked me, I didn’t see it coming. I was with someone I’d been dating for a while; it wasn’t the first time we’d slept together. I’d grown comfortable with him, able to share some of my traumatic sexual history and able to have an orgasm, neither of which are easy for me. He was bookish and sweet, a decade older than me, a dad. That is to say, I was surprised when it became clear that choking me, spanking me, and slapping me in the face were his biggest turn-ons. (This last, I never got used to—and it was his favorite.) I went along with it because I thought he loved me, and I loved him. Being hit by someone who claimed to love me was not new; it’s how I grew up. So I pretended to like it, and tried to believe my own lie.

After that relationship ended, I was celibate for a while. When I decided to dip my toe back in, I dated a man who moved his hand toward my neck the first time we had sex. I shifted away, and he dropped it. The next time we were together, he asked me what I liked, and didn’t like, in bed. “I don’t want to be choked,” I said before I could even think about it, surprised at the force behind my voice. I sat up straight and said it again. “Don’t ever choke me.” He didn’t say anything, so I continued. “It makes me come. It does. But I hate it. I hate that it makes me come. So don’t do it.” He nodded, his face solemn. “I’m not sure what I like,” I said, somewhat stunned to realize that was the case. “I think… I think I just need to feel safe.” I was exhilarated by this unexpected honesty, proud of myself. This is the new me, I thought.

That night in bed, he choked me from behind. I froze, too shocked to move. I couldn’t understand what I’d done wrong. I’d been honest. I’d been vulnerable. I’d stood up for myself. And still, his hands were around my throat. I didn’t come. I felt like a piece of me was being chipped away. I didn’t say anything afterward.

And this is what makes me nervous about Babygirl—that men will see it and decide this is what we all want. That they’ll think it gives them carte blanche to tell us what to do, to hurt us, to humiliate us, and to say “good girl” afterward, as if we liked it. (But I do like to be called a good girl; that’s the problem. Why is it so hot? I don’t know.) That they’ll smirk at the bar as they order us glasses of milk, as Samuel does in the movie. (It better be almond milk, is all I can say; are there middle-aged women out there who can still digest dairy? If I drank a glass of milk, the results would be decidedly unsexy for everyone involved.) 

I want to be in control of my body, and my life, and I also want to be able to let go of that control. I want to be like one of those Anne Geddes babies we saw everywhere in the ’80s and ’90s, curled up and slumbering peacefully in the palm of a man’s enormous hand, and I also don’t want anyone telling me what to do, ever. Is it possible for us, as women, to hold that contradiction? Is it possible for men to understand it? Can we have both? Those are the questions Babygirl asks. They’re questions I didn’t know other people had, too—and that’s why I loved the movie. It made me feel less alone, which, I believe, is the point of any piece of art. 

It’s not a spoiler to say that Babygirl leaves us with a glimmer of hope that perhaps we can find a way to communicate our desires, and have them fulfilled, without upending our entire lives, or putting ourselves in danger, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps, as a wise man once said, the truth will set us free. I’m ready to start telling it.

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness.