GABE GONZÁLEZ: Hey, folks. Just a quick content warning. Second half of this episode of We Disrupt This Broadcast contains a discussion about sexual abuse and trauma.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: I feel like the idea that you’re not just treating the cancer in a person, you’re treating a person, and trying to think about sick people not as just patients and not just their illness, but as full human beings that have things that they wanna do.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González. It is often said there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. You can actually thank Ben Franklin for that saying. But I think he missed one thing, a very important thing: sex. And today’s episode is all about that. Today, we’re talking about Dying for Sex and how this poignant, funny, and deeply moving show explores two things almost all of us will experience but rarely talk about: death and sex.
The limited series, Dying for Sex, is based on the real-life experiences of Molly Kochan, who chronicled her journey on a podcast of the same name, as well as a memoir, both of which were released after her death in 2019. After a breast cancer diagnosis, Molly, played by Michelle Williams, embarks on a journey of self-discovery, partly spurred by the realization she won’t have much time left to explore herself, like her full self, her desires, her fears, her relationships.
And what’s most important about this series is that she can’t do this alone. As taboo as it might be to discuss things like death and sex freely, Dying for Sex insists that we do. Molly’s friend Nikki, played by Jenny Slate, and her care worker, Sonya, played by Esco Jouléy, aren’t just there to help her transition into the end of her life. They’re there to help her discover how to live it more honestly. It’s truly the sort of series that feels impossible when you think about it. It’s unabashedly sex-positive, it’s centered around women and queer characters who have nuance, and it’s darkly funny, as it reminds us of our heroes and our own mortality.
Honestly, I could see a million executives in suits saying this show is either too horny or too sad for audiences, but that’s part of the draw here: exploring one woman’s life in all its richness and complexity as she dares to ask the uncomfortable questions and do the uncomfortable things she never gave herself permission to explore.
I’ll be honest, I was on an emotional rollercoaster watching this show. I laughed, I cried, I let Robby Hoffman teach me how to be a better top, and I am so thrilled that we have the creators of Dying for Sex, Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, joining us this episode to talk more about the series.
Later on, we’ll chat with sex educator and consultant on Dying for Sex, Emily Nagoski. They’ll be joined by executive director of the Center for Media and Social Impact and executive producer of We Disrupt This Broadcast, Caty Borum. So don’t go anywhere. That conversation after the break.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re talking about Dying for Sex with creators Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether. They’re joined by Caty Borum.
CATY BORUM: Today on the podcast, we are so honored to be joined by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, who we will call Liz, the showrunners and creators of the incredible show Dying for Sex, which just won a Peabody Award. It’s just a really special show, and it is truly an honor to talk to you all–you geniuses–about this beautiful show. No pressure.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Thank you so much. That means so much. And we, you know, I don’t wanna speak for Kim, but I can imagine that she’s also very excited about winning the Peabody.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: You’re correct, yes.
CATY BORUM: I’d love if we could start with just the basic idea, which is what you had hoped to make in this show, and how you would describe it, and kind of the journey of finding the tone of it. That was like three questions at once.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: I could start a little, ’cause Liz sent me this podcast.
CATY BORUM: You’re talking about The Real Life Molly’s podcast.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Yeah. I was just completely bowled over by it. I had never heard anything so honest and vulnerable, and I didn’t know why, but I was just crying so much after. It felt like it released so much for me of things I hadn’t even really been allowing myself to think about.
Personally, I wanted to create something that would have that same impact on an audience as what the podcast did to me when I was listening to it, to make me think about my life, all the people in it, how I’m living, sex, death, like, literally just what feels good, what… All these things. It felt like it was really about everything somehow, and even though it was just about this one really ordinary woman’s life.
And also, it was so funny. I think that was the other thing. It was so fun- And I think Liz and I, we come from comedy both of us originally, and it’s like, could we make something this funny and this deep at the same time? And how can we make something that does this? I had never felt like that about anything.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: I think we knew going into it that it was gonna be very tricky tone, and honestly, that’s what excited me about it as well, was just that it was gonna be, you know, sometimes like slapstick comedy. I mean, I feel like comedy about sex is always just inherently physical, you know? Obviously. And, like, just kind of silly physical comedy mixed with some of the darkest, least funny things that a person could experience.
And I’m always drawn to that kind of weird, complicated tone that seems impossible. Like, I feel like that’s really fun as a writer to kind of be given that challenge. But I think also another reason why it seemed doable was because it was just so human, it was so real. Our lives are not comedies or dramas.
Like, our lives are both at the same time. And so I think that was another thing that meant a lot to Kim and I, was just that this wasn’t gonna be, like, an easy show to explain or, like, put into a category. And it, honestly, it’s rare for stories about women, I think, to be that complicated and to not be put in a box. There’s definitely, like, a push to categorize a lot of stories about women, I think, and this existed outside of those categories, so that was really great and fun.
CATY BORUM: I mean, look, I wanna jump in because I feel like tonally what’s so brilliant about the show is every time you are in that dark place, it’s not just a joke, but it is a truly absurd joke.
Like, the clown doctor comes in. You know, she hacks her way basically into, you know, a stage one cancer support group, ’cause like stage four- … cancer support group is, like, a bummer. And, you know-
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: That came from a real, that was really kind of an interesting thing. We spoke to this amazing woman who has stage four cancer, and she was just telling us, you know, so many amazing stories. And one of the things she said was that the stage one cancer support groups are sometimes not that excited about having stage four people in their groups because the stage four people are too depressing.
CATY BORUM: Yeah.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: It was like, it was just like things like that that would kind of pop up that would be like, well, that’s a kind of perfect mix of tones. That’s both incredibly tragic and, like, hilariously funny and a weird really specific thing that I don’t think we’d seen before.
CATY BORUM: Let’s actually play that clip for our listeners because it is so funny.
CLIP: Dying For Sex
I got cancer, and then it was gone for two years. And then it came back as stage four.
Did she say stage four? Shit.
Sorry. Um, I didn’t tell you guys, uh, I’m stage four ’cause I wanted to be in this group. Anyway, the whole time that I thought that I was healthy, my body was just, like, like, waiting to give me more cancer.
Wow.
Uh, that’s my cancer journey.
Molly, I’m so sorry. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave the group.
What?
What’s happening to you is their worst fear.
Mine too. What if we’ve gone through all this and the cancer comes back?
KIM ROSENSTOCK: I think what was really important to us, and something that became very evident as we were talking to as many people as we could in these various communities, was that, like, there’s no one way that this looks.You get this diagnosis, it could look like any- you have no idea. Like, it really is different for everyone, and that’s kind of like all of our bodies are different like, like- Yeah …
And something that felt really important with the support group that you’re touching on is, like, one of the things that Molly, the real person, experienced was feeling like kind of a weirdo because she was so horny, and no one else was, like, talking about sex and like she was finding communities about cancer. She would be in the cancer support group, but like if she started talking about lube or, like apps, like people were just, like, looking at her like she was, like, an alien.
And so it felt like that to me was another huge thing was, like, putting a sick woman on screen who is also sexual, who is also able to experience pleasure while she’s experiencing pain, that this is not, it’s not a binary. It’s not one thi- it’s not black and white. ‘Cause I think, I do think that’s a big part of female storytelling, honestly.
CATY BORUM: Oh, yeah.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Like, it doesn’t look like one thing. Like, there are multitudes, and I think we really tried to capture all the different ways that this can look and feel while just honing in on this one woman’s story.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: And what I loved about the podcast and what I loved about the story is that there are these, like, underlying comedy tropes or whatever that are, like, underneath all of this really heavy stuff. So I just am bringing that up ’cause you brought up the support group thing because I remember, like, when we were sitting in the meeting, like, listening to Sam tell her story about her experiences with stage four, I just remember thinking, “Well, that’s a perfect, like, comedy scene,” you know? Like, that’s a perfect, like, fish out of water comedy scene. And it’s like…
CATY BORUM: Yeah
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: And I think that was an important way that we approached the storytelling was, especially in the beginning, we really approached it with our comedy sitcom backgrounds, you know? Like, we tried to approach it, like, trying to find what would be, like, the sitcom story structure in this moment in her life or in this moment in what was happening to her so that we weren’t dwelling too much on all the tragedies, so that we were, like, challenging ourselves to find what is the kind of madcap joy, or what are the shenanigans? What are the, what’s the thing? All the things that we kind of learned from doing seven years of New Girl, which is what we did together, and sort of applying that to the way we were breaking the stories in this.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Because shenanigans can get you through a lot of dark times. Shenanigans are necessary, like especially if you have something really dark and heavy going on, like you need that.
CATY BORUM: Another area that’s really funny, but in a way that’s totally not judgmental is, of course, Molly’s sex life. So what was your process in thinking about how to really tell the full sexual span of that experience in a way that felt open and also intimate, but most importantly, very funny every time?
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: I think Molly, the real-life Molly, was our guide there. You can just hear it on the podcast, like, the way she talks about her experiences. I mean, she is absolutely without judgment, and it’s actually Nikki on the podcast who’s often the one that’s like, “What? What happened?” Like, what… And that was our North Star throughout the entire production, too, was just like, “Okay, we’re never gonna, we’re never gonna judge these sexual experiences she’s having. We’re never going to make a joke at the expense of the person who is trying to find pleasure. We’re going to find comedy within what’s happening, not, like, we’re not gonna laugh at that person or that character. We’re gonna kinda laugh as if we’re part of it. So I think that was, like, an important thing that we talked a lot about throughout the story breaking and actually making the show.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: One of the first stories that Nikki is listening to that Molly is telling, it seems like it’s about to go somewhere, like she’s getting this, like, happy ending massage. And then, and Nikki says something like, “And then he, like, put it in you or so- or, like, pe- ” And, and Molly’s like, “No, we just hung out, and, like, it just felt good. I just let him, like…”
And it’s like this assumption that penetration is the end, is the goal of sex. I think making a sex comedy, and that is partially what this is- is about a woman who does not want penetrative sex, and sex is something completely different from that for her, but that doesn’t mean it’s not sex. I think just the question of what, what does sex look like? I think, you know, Liz and I, we grew up with sex comedies, like a guy, like, you know in a pie-
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Sticking his dick in a pie …
CATY BORUM: oh, yeah.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Like, like, there’s not a lot of banging on this show. Like it … And again, I feel like that in and of itself is, like, kind of, it’s, like, the worst, like, the worst way to get people to watch. There’s tons of banging, but it’s not gonna look like how you think it’s gonna look.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: No, I mean, but that was really important, I think, moving into actually shooting it. And by the way, our director, Shannon Murphy had an incredible sense of wanting the show to be hot. We wanted the show to be arousing. We wanted the show to be genuinely hot while we were showing sex that isn’t penetrative.
And showing that sex, especially for women, I think can be very mental and emotional and sort of an experience that’s, like, happening from many different angles and layers and, you know. So and kind of trying to put that on screen, and I feel like Shannon Murphy and Michelle Williams, who plays Molly, like, really kind of understood that.
And all the men and the male actors that were in the show as well, I think that was a conversation that we had with everybody, and that was what we were always thinking about. Like, the episode with Rob Delaney and Michelle when they’re in the hospital, you know, like at the seventh episode, I feel like that’s, like, such a hot sex kind of adventure that they have, but there’s no penetration. And for most of it, they’re kind of just, like- looking at each other or, like, talking, or, like, kind of touching each other, but, you know, it’s like, I think it’s like…
KIM ROSENSTOCK: it’s just like intimacy.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: It’s intimacy.
CATY BORUM: Yeah I was gonna bring up intimacy, ’cause again, the idea of the woman’s gaze into sexuality, this piece about intimacy is really important, and really is, like, the turn-on, right?
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Yeah, they know each other. And they’ve set up the boundaries that work for them, and then you’re watching them sort of play within those boundaries. I mean, it’s interesting. As you were talking, I was thinking about even the phrase, like, male gaze versus female gaze. I actually think the whole idea of a gaze is male, you know?
CATY BORUM: Yeah. Love that.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: That establishes a binary, like, either you’re watching it this way or that way.
CATY BORUM: Feminist theory would say, yes, the whole idea is male. Yes.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: ‘Cause I think for women, it’s not always about looking, you know? It’s, like, about feeling.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: And I think for us, just like we’re trying to show that having cancer can look a lot of different ways, being a dom can look a lot of different ways. Being submissive can look a lot of different ways. Getting pleasure looks like… I think, to me, it was so exciting to see a woman and her vibrator on screen, and not cutting away when other things would cut away. It’s like, that’s where we would, like, move in. Like we would, like, really stay there and, like, show the whole thing. Because it feels like so many people do feel shame or do feel like something’s wrong with them because they don’t see the things that make them feel good portrayed visually on television. So for us, the fact that we could put a show out there that people would watch, that would be, like, on Hulu, that, like, you might actually see yourself in it and feel a little less alone, you know, was huge.
CATY BORUM: The other piece is the cancer part. And one thing that struck us that was– it felt fun to play with as a viewer, but also you could feel the authenticity of what we would call the sort of administrative headache of cancer, right, that it’s-
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Right.
CATY BORUM: You know, Nikki’s carrying around the file and the CD, and they’re always on the phone with the insurance companies. And it’s like-
KIM ROSENSTOCK: All the portals. There’s so many portals.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. And just the meetings about the can- that, that it’s, you know, when culturally, we hear about cancer, like, “she’s bravely fighting the cancer.” But actually, it’s this horrendous bureaucracy of impossibilities, right? So we wanted to ask you about that, because that feels, again, the whole show is characterized by authenticity, and that too is an unexpected part of authenticity about- Our healthcare system and, you know, this doesn’t need to be-
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Our perfect healthcare system?
CATY BORUM: Our perfect healthcare system? Yes.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Nothing is funny about that. No.
CATY BORUM: You found the funny in it …
KIM ROSENSTOCK: At one point, I think maybe we’re making a whole show about Sonya, like the palliative care social worker. ‘Cause just to even show palliative care, again, as an option for treatment on screen, so many patients don’t even know that is an option. They think it’s for hospice. They think it’s just for people who are literally in the final stages of dying, and the point of palliative care is to help manage symptoms and give you the best quality of life that you can have while you’re experiencing a chronic illness. Even just putting that job on screen and then it was able to serve us in two ways because also it’s this amazing non-binary character who is also-
CATY BORUM: Sexy.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: …opening up her mind into what sex can be, right? So, like, we were looking for all of those places where we could cross the medical world and the sexual world thematically, weave them together. And I think we wanted to really take a character with the doctor, Molly’s doctor- Yeah … who could seem like, oh, you know exactly who that is. We’ve all had that doctor who’s been really dismissive, especially with women. Mm-hmm. Like, that you’re made to feel crazy.
CATY BORUM: Golf metaphors.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Yeah. And he’s almost, he’s like an extreme version of it. But I think for us, what was so exciting was to really humanize him and, like, actually show, like, change is possible, even with someone like that. If you have someone questioning him and, like, actually advocating for themselves in a way and, like, welcoming him into it, not necessarily just calling him out or, like, hating on him. But, like, I think Molly, again, with her radical acceptance, was trying to accept him for who he was and bring him onto a higher plane that she was going to now with life. And so I feel like it’s hopeful in that way, for sure, that change is possible, and especially with cancer. So many people will go through this, and, like, it touches almost everyone’s life.
CATY BORUM: That’s right.
CLIP: Dying for Sex
Well, any other symptoms that have come up?
Um, yes. Insomnia, hot flashes, and vaginal dryness during intercourse.
Yeah, I am, yes. Wee bit dry. Wee bit dry in my vagina.
Oh my God, did I just pretend my vagina has a Scottish accent?
Okay, Sonya, you wanna take this? It’s a- Yeah … mental health issue.
How is having a dry vagina a mental health issue?
Well, it’s be- you know, women, you know, r- emotional feelings.
It’s so common. I have some really fun lube options that I can offer you. Would you like some? Slick, slick, slick.
Yes, yes, yes.
Check, please. Waiter, get me out of here. M- mo- moving on…
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: The way that we talked about the show initially was like, “Okay, there’s the cancer part and then there’s the sex part.” But I think that is the problem. It’s actually one person. It’s a person who has a illness. And so I think that’s one of the problems with the way that we think about medicine a little bit. You know, of like, it’s like exactly what Kim said, for many reasons, and I’m definitely not qualified to talk about that. But I feel like the idea that, you know, you’re not just treating the cancer in a person, you’re treating a person. And trying to think about sick people not as just patients and not just their illness, but as, like, full human beings that have things that they wanna do.
CATY BORUM: And desires.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: And the other really important part of, like, the insurance and the, all of the logistics is that it really is a burden on the caretakers. Mean, I think that was, like, another-
CATY BORUM: Big theme …
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: big theme. ‘Cause you’re, you kinda understand how Nikki’s like, “Well, I’ll take care of that part of it so that you can, you know, have these last few months of your life to do other things.” But taking care of that part of it is so overwhelming. Mm-hmm. It leads to so much burnout.
Mm-hmm. And I just wanna shout out Keisha Zollar and Sasha Stewart were writers on our show, and they both have had experiences with chronic illness and cancer, and they told us some really amazing kind of stories and experiences, and a lot of that went into the show as well. I mean, I really feel like Kim and I, we knew that we needed to add to Molly’s story a little bit, like get other perspectives, but we wanted to actually speak firsthand to as many people as we can. Because I do think, like, some of these stories, it’s like not the story that the person thinks that you wanna hear, that’s what you actually wanna put on the show, you know? Like, it’s like it’s the story that you have to kind of dig for a little bit because a lot of the times, the story or the experience doesn’t fit into the role of perfect patient. So it’s like kind of trying to hear what it actually is like. That was really important to us.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Sasha and Keisha were amazing, and just to say they also… Even that golf story I think came from a story with Sasha and her actual doctor. Like for Liz and I, having collaborators that did have the firsthand experiences, that lived experiences that we didn’t have with a lot of these things was absolutely essential because, again, like we, we know what we don’t know, and so they had these specifics.
And they could tell us, “Here’s something that is normally not portrayed accurately,” or, “Here’s something I wish I would just see on telev- Here’s something no one is talking about that you wouldn’t know unless you’re actually, you’ve lived through it.” And like we were able to put… Sasha had her husband come talk to us about caretaker burnout, and he said some of the darkest things I’ve ever heard.
And I was like, this is so real and honest, and she was sitting right there. And it was just incredible to have all these people open up to us and be so vulnerable so that we could then make sure our show felt as authentic as possible and would reflect the honesty and the truth of these situations.
CATY BORUM: We also really felt that authenticity in the final episode. So we’re watching this peppy hospice worker named Amy, played by Paula Pell, and she describes the death process with this kind of gleeful detail, explaining how the body actually knows how to die. And it was such a funny scene, but it also felt so real. How has the response been to this part of the show?
KIM ROSENSTOCK: I think we’ve heard from so many people, and that’s been one of the most incredible parts of this that I don’t think either of us could have predicted. People thanking us, people saying they’re actually talking about death now. We thought we were making a show where the sex was gonna be the most taboo thing we could put on screen, and by far the thing that people have talked to us the most about was the death.
And putting the same sort of unflinching lens on that and pushing in when normally you would pull away, that’s stuff that, you know, I think we’re really proud of, and then it was really important to us. And literally, even our, one of our editors had just lost his mother to cancer, and he was watching the footage of that episode.
He was like, “My mom literally said the same thing that Molly says on her deathbed.” And I was like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” And he was like, “No, thank you. No, it made me feel like there’s a common humanity that we all have, actually. And there’s something really comforting and soothing about that.”
And actually, it does, for me anyway, and for, for a lot of people, it does make it feel less scary to look at it. Especially in our society in America, we’re scared to talk about it. Even hospitals, they put them away so nobody has to look at them. And I think for us it was so important to get that on screen. And then, yes, how do you do it? How do you keep this a comedy was the huge question. But we kept thinking in that last episode, that was the hardest one to write, it was the hardest one to break.
And at some point, I think, Liz, I think it was during editing, we were like, “I think it’s just about showing the dying part.”
CATY BORUM: Yes.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: It’s just she will tell you what’s gonna happen, and at some point it was so liberating to just be like, And then we’re just going to, like-
CATY BORUM: Show it …
KIM ROSENSTOCK: be with her through that. We’re not worried anymore about jokes, about structure. Like, it sort of just is what it is.
CATY BORUM: Yes. And that’s exactly how it’s experienced, right, when Amy says, “And then my favorite part is the rally. You get the rally, you’re gonna go…” So when we see that scene, we actually understand, oh, Molly is about to die. This is the last, but this is a very natural part of it. It’s very meaningful.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: I think, again, to kind of bring it back to the real-life Molly, what was so incredible about the podcast was that she’s podcasting from her deathbed. I mean, she’s, you’re hearing her voice change, you’re hearing her breathing change. And to start with that level of courage and to kind of feel like that was our mission was, like, to put her story on screen. And I think the reason that she did it was because she wanted us to have these conversations. She wanted us to actually look at it and talk about it. And as we were working on that episode, I was so comforted, honestly.
I was, like, sort of following my own feelings as well ’cause I was like, “This is so comforting to know, and I can’t believe I didn’t know this, and I’m in my 40s, and I had no idea what happens when you die.” Mm-hmm. Like, I don’t, like… I heard from my dad, you know, that he also kinda didn’t know these things and was, like, so comforted by hearing that speech as well, and I mean, it just feels good to look at it, like Kim said. It feels good to talk about it. There’s a reason why people for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years did do that. For some reason, we’ve gone away from it.
CATY BORUM: Yeah, and just the phrase, you know, w- when the character says, “The amazing thing is that your body knows how to die, and here’s what happens,” that’s such a normalizing, humani- you know, from the sex to this, it’s, oh yeah, of course. This is what we’re naturally gonna do, and can we just discuss that?
KIM ROSENSTOCK: The body is so cool, and I think this is a show about how the body is really cool. And a lot of us learn to hate it or to have all shame about our body. Like, for all these different reasons, we’re taught why we should feel bad or, like, we’re not normal.
But then you learn that these things about what your body is designed to do, like how it’s designed to shut down, and you’re like, “The body is amazing,” and that this is a show about learning to accept and love your body. We are all, like, so lucky to, like, be alive, and we should give ourselves a break. It’s like we’re here. We’re breathing, you know? Like, it’s- Agreed … incredible.
CATY BORUM: Well, I think that is a lovely note to end our conversation, even though I would love to talk for hours more, and we truly, at the podcast, we really feel like your show should be required viewing for all different kinds of reasons. And it’s just been such an honor to talk to you all. Your work is beautiful, and your teamwork. Thank you so much for the gift of this work.
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER: Thank you so much. It was such a fun conversation. Yeah. And thank you so much. You’re amazing. Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again to Kim and Liz for joining us. I cannot stop thinking about what Caty called the “bureaucracy of impossibilities” that Molly faces when she’s seeking care. Healthcare often robs people of their humanity when they’re at their most vulnerable, and it’s an aspect of Molly’s journey I hadn’t considered from that perspective. Her sexual self-discovery isn’t just about taking back control in her sex life or her relationships, it’s taking back control of her whole self. It’s a radical reminder of her humanity.
Having watched the series, it’s also no surprise that the creators’ comedy backgrounds were so important in bringing humanity to this story. Similarly, with the writers and the cast, which is studded with so many smart, empathetic comedians, all of whom know that tragedy is never all sad. We laugh when coping with trauma or tragedy. Like, we have to. We really do.
And all of this makes so much sense when you realize the real-life Molly chronicled her own story on her own terms through a podcast. It feels like a sort of guiding light for the tone of this show, to honor her fully. All right, to follow Kim’s advice, give yourself a break. We’re gonna take one too, and when we’re back, we’ll be talking to sex educator and consultant on Dying for Sex, Emily Nagoski.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re here with Emily Nagoski, sex educator and author of the books Burnout, Come Together, and of course, the seminal work, Come As You Are. She’ll be in conversation with Caty Borum.
CATY BORUM: We are truly delighted and a little bit beside ourselves to be joined by the bestselling author Emily Nagoski, who has done so much to create a different portrait about women and sexuality and sexual desire and the connection with wellbeing. And we’re even more excited because Emily was also a consultant on Dying For Sex.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Thank you. It is my pleasure to be here and talk about this project, which I sobbed through all eight episodes.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. So did I. For those who might be unfamiliar with what we would now call your classic book, Come As You Are, can you provide a kind of summary of your, your key thesis idea there about the connection for women between emotional wellbeing, intimacy, and sex?
EMILY NAGOSKI: Yeah. So I was teaching college students, and the last question on my final exam this semester was, “What’s one important thing you learned?” And more than half of my 180-something students just wrote, “I learned I’m normal. I’m not broken. Just ’cause I’m different from other women doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me.” It got to the point where I skipped over all the grading and I just read everybody’s answer to the last question, crying in my office, door open, and that’s the day I decided to write Come As You Are.
CATY BORUM: Wow. That’s incredible.
EMILY NAGOSKI: And normal means not the statistical definition, but feeling like you belong, like you have a place within the human community, that you are welcome here, that you are not broken or diseased, that you are part of the community of human beings.
CATY BORUM: So turning to the show, Dying For Sex, what are the themes or angles we see on the show that are really supported by your own research into women and sexuality?
EMILY NAGOSKI: The thing that just warms my heart about Dying For Sex is that this is the story of a woman who decides to turn toward who she truly is as a sexual person and explore her own body and her own autonomy as an individual in a body.
And as she does that, it improves her life in all the other domains of her existence. It is still somehow radical to witness a woman saying, “Here is what I want. I’m gonna go communicate clearly about my boundaries and experience the thing I am interested in experiencing.” We come from a world where it wasn’t until the mid-’90s, like 1992-ish, when Britain and the last United State made marital rape illegal.
What? How could that possibly be? Because when a woman sold her body to a man in marriage, it was as if it was a legal contract giving permanent consent for him to do with her body whatever he wanted. I apologize for this being so dark. But this is- It’s true … the reality, is that women’s bodies were property for a very long time under the law. My mother, when she got married, could not get a credit card without her husband’s consent.
CATY BORUM: Right.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Right? Yeah. Women- Same with mine … when the pill was first released, could not get the pill without their husband’s consent. Which means an unmarried woman had to find a way around that. So to see a show where a character is just straightforward, “This is what I want, and so I’m gonna go pursue it.” And the thing I love most about the show is not just Molly and her pursuit of what she wants and likes, but the fact that she’s surrounded by a crew of people who are there to help her get what she wants.
Which, even more rare than seeing a woman pursue what she wants and likes sexually, is seeing her be able to talk about it with people who are not her partners, who support her in that big, giant yes, and help her. The, episode 7, the vibrators, that was the thing that just destroyed me. To see a best friend so committed to honoring her best friend’s sexual journey and pleasure that she calls an ex-boyfriend, she talks to an ex-boyfriend to be like, “I need you to go to a sex toy store and buy me every clitoris-oriented toy there is and bring them to the hospital for my friend.”
And the fact that it was explicitly clitoris-oriented toys. Molly is not interested in vaginal penetration, has said so explicitly, and we are honoring that. Nobody is judging that. In a world where the reality is that only about a quarter, maybe a third, of cisgender women are reliably orgasmic from vaginal penetration alone, but the remaining two-thirds to three-quarters are sometimes rarely or never orgasmic from vaginal stimulation.
Here at last, we have a character who’s like, “Yeah, just no to vaginal penetration for me, please, and thank you.”
CATY BORUM: Yes. Yes. Oh, you’re so right about that. So in the show there’s a bookend in the arc of her story between the childhood sexual trauma and her raw adult sexual desire, how it all connects with the intimacy, and so, but what strikes us as this portrayal is the level of command Molly has over every one of the sexual situations she creates and seeks. She’s really in charge. Why is it important for her to take the lead in that way?
EMILY NAGOSKI: I’m gonna say two things. The first one is the long one. My very favorite pair of scenes that happen in a row is in episode, I think, four, when she is topped by Robby Hoffman’s character, I think named G, who… So one of the things I suggested to the writing team was, “Hey, when a person is new to the BDSM community and they wanna be a top, they identify as a top, they’re really drawn to that, it’s important that they experience bottoming.
They need to know what that head space is like so that they can be a responsible steward of a person who’s in that head space.” And they have this, I just said this one sentence, and I guess they, like, went and read the books and talked to people, and they have this gorgeous scene.
At first, Molly is resistant. She doesn’t want to submit to anyone. Fair enough. And G says, “Fine. When you’re ready to face your shadow self, come back,” which is just chef’s kiss. So Molly consents and submits, and it turns out her experience of submitting is mostly saying, “I want you to tie my hands, but I don’t want them over my head. That’s too much. I’m ready to stop.”
It is communicating, it is being aware and present in the moment of what her body wants and likes and being able to articulate that to a partner and have that partner listen and respect what she said. And then they show the aftercare where G holds her and says, “That was beautiful. You are so powerful.”
CLIP: Dying For Sex
You’re right. I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared of not being in control. I’m scared of not
being able to feel or move. I’m scared of losing my body.
Something happened to you, right?
Yeah.
I get it. Look, vanilla sex, you can disappear, right? You can fake it. Who cares? This shit, you can’t disappear, especially if you’re in control, right? That’s like driving a car, taking your hands off the wheel. It’s fucking dangerous. Right? You need to just learn to stay present. Stay right here.
Can you show me?
Do you want to submit to me?
Yes.
Good. Remember, you have the power to stop this at any time. I want to touch you now. Is that okay?
Yes.
EMILY NAGOSKI: And the very next scene, cut to Molly in the hospital saying to her doctor, “I want you to sit down. I want you to tell me your first name. I want you to tell me step by step what’s gonna happen with every procedure. I want you to listen when I ask questions and when my friend asks questions, and I want you to hear me when I say that I need a break.”
So she’s using the very boundary communication skills that she’s learning in a sexual context, in a medical context, because this is not a story about her sexuality ultimately. It is about her reclaiming autonomy over her body, even in the context of her dying. I sobbed so hard because it is so beautiful to see this positive representation of a power play in a sexual context enhancing and enriching a person’s life in a way that makes them feel more powerful, more able to be autonomous in the world.
CATY BORUM: Mm-hmm.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Oh, the trauma piece of it.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
EMILY NAGOSKI: The short answer is, so in the memoir, Molly uses the phrase blanket brain to describe her experience of being triggered, essentially, having her childhood sexual trauma triggered, especially in the moment of a sexual encounter. And I value that the show set that aside, and for their visual representation of the predator, spoilers, we see him, say, his body in a suit sitting in a chair, but his face is blurred.
CATY BORUM: Yeah.
EMILY NAGOSKI: We don’t see his face. We don’t learn his name. He gets nothing from us. So often if there’s a history of sexual trauma, they show the event. And it is right next door to impossible to show a sexual assault in a way that the viewer does not experience as erotic, which the eroticization of sexual violence is one of the most destructive, damaging tropes that there is in the media. And they just didn’t go there.
They did not give this guy the screen time. I love everything about that choice. It had to be there. It’s such an intrinsic part of the story. He had to be there, but they gave him as little as possible, and even with neighbor guy, they didn’t give him a name. Like, how to underscore explicitly this is a story about Molly and her body and her pleasure, not about these dudes. And by the way, if there’s anyone who’s listening who is a survivor of sexual trauma, there is a bajillion kinds of research showing that there are evidence-based, effective ways for survivors to heal from that experience and to move toward the kind of sexual empowerment and autonomy and pleasure that Molly experiences.
CATY BORUM: What was it like for you being a consultant on the show? I guess anything you wanna share.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Yeah. It started with me reading the memoir, falling in love with Molly, and wanting to help tell her story as well as possible, particularly around the trauma stuff and around the BDSM stuff because those are both the kinds of storylines that get represented so poorly and teach people like my students that they are broken and diseased because they don’t work like the people on TV or the people in the movies.
I wanted this to be like is this possibly a way to tell a story that’s going to help women in particular, but everybody, feel whole and empowered and not have to be confronted with a terminal diagnosis before they decide to do with their bodies what is right for them and not what they are told is supposed to be right.
I mean, they nailed it. It feels like this opens the door to more shows feeling like they could do so much of a better job of representing women’s sexual pleasure. Just as this is not just the story of Molly and her journey, it is a story of Molly and the group of people who protect her from the people who want to disrupt her pursuit of her sense of autonomy and pleasure in her body.
I feel like this project had a group of people around it who protected it from all the ways I know media can be watered down into mediocrity and same old, same old. The people involved had to care, had to know that they wanted to create something new and different and better that was gonna begin to change the cultural context in which people have conversations with their partners about sexual pleasure, in which young people learn what it’s like to be a sexual person.
It required this whole group of people surrounding the project to protect it from all the forces that could cause it to be meh. The fact that, like, I got to be just like a cheerleader on the path of that group of people who wanted to make something brilliant, it makes me feel so good And after I watched Dying for Sex, I was like, “Okay, so I’m gonna take advantage of my theater background and being raised by a family of musicians. I’m gonna write Orgasm: The Musical.”
CATY BORUM: Have you done that?
EMILY NAGOSKI: I am in the middle of doing it now. I’m gonna perform a show. I wanna take it to the Edinburgh Fringe with the ultimate goal of getting it on a streamer. I am learning to play the ukulele, ’cause Dying for Sex taught me, I’m like, if I wanna have a bigger impact, maybe I could.
CATY BORUM: Okay. My jaw is open to learn that Emily has written Orgasm: The Musical because of this experience. That’s incredible. I could not possibly dream up a better way to wrap up our interview. Emily Nagoski, you are a treasure and a real gift, and we just appreciate you being on this show in addition to all that you did to shape Dying for Sex, so thank you.
EMILY NAGOSKI: Thank you so much. Truly my pleasure.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Kinksters rejoice. We’re eating good on the representation front. I am so excited Emily was able to join us today to talk more about the sex in Dying for Sex. First, to emphasize the importance of community on the show, not just how important it is for Molly’s journey, but how rare it is for women to even have that in her situation, to be able to explore herself and her sexuality without judgment and with the support of those around her.
And second, how to explore a character’s trauma without it feeling exploitative. The show embraces the honesty of Molly’s experiences, including her trauma, but doesn’t force us to witness or relive that experience for the sake of so-called dramatic effect. We know what this means to her and how much it’s taken to overcome.
And look, on paper, Molly is the type of person our culture tells us couldn’t possibly enjoy or prioritize sex. She’s 45. She’s living with cancer. She’s a survivor of sexual trauma. Most TV doesn’t seem interested in exploring what sex is like for characters who aren’t young, healthy, in big air quotes, and carefree, which is probably why Dying for Sex feels like such a balm. Death and sex aren’t glamorous. They’re experiences that can be messy and funny and sad, but most importantly, deeply embodied. They push at the bounds of our perception, our sense of self, our deepest insecurities. But embracing that doesn’t have to be scary. With community and intention, embracing the uncomfortable can be liberating.
Thank you again to Kim Rosenstock, Elizabeth Meriwether, and Emily Nagoski for joining us today, and thank you for tuning in.
Before we let you go, we’ve got one pending matter. Because the Peabodys are decided unanimously, every episode we’ll bring you the quote that we chose unanimously as our most disruptive moment.
KIM ROSENSTOCK: Shenanigans can get you through a lot of dark times. Shenanigans are necessary.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Join us next time on We Disrupt This Broadcast, where we’ll be talking to Megan Gallagher, creator of the Hulu series All Her Fault. The thriller takes you on a pretty wild ride in search of a missing five-year-old, while also exploring the inequitable and unspoken challenges of modern motherhood.
MEGAN GALLAGHER: People who have money, there’s just no question in the world that having more socioeconomic power, being higher up on the socioeconomic ladder makes everything easier, makes childcare easier, makes everything easier. There’s one thing it can’t fix, that money just can’t fix when it comes to motherhood, and it’s the guilt.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. Managing producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producers Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Bethany Hall. Researcher, Riley McLaughlin. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Drayer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.