Beyond ‘Babygirl’: Why We Need New Stories About Desire

In other words, go watch the movie 'Slow.' Right now.

Mar 01, 2025

One reason I still subscribe to the ever-shrinking print version of The New York Times is that I like looking at a vast variety of articles that an algorithm, even one who knows my data intimately, wouldn’t have thought to put in front of me.1 Based on my recent web searches, for instance, one might assume I only want to read about obscure words in old dictionaries and the seasoning of carbon steel pans, yet in today’s paper I found great satisfaction in reading about a single mom’s search for a new home in Nashville, domestic violence laws in Greece, and a Harlem actress’s Sunday routine.

Lately, however, the balance of articles even in my print edition of The Times has felt off-kilter with regards to the paper’s enthusiasm for Babygirl, the new A-24 movie2 in which Romy, an older woman played by Nicole Kidman, comes to accept her sexual preferences by having a kink-heavy affair with Samuel, a young male intern (Harris Dickinson). The Times’ coverage of this movie has included a 895-word movie review by chief film critic Manohla Dargis (12/25/24)3; an interview with Dickinson (12/25/24); an interview with Kidman (12/11/24); an opinion piece titled ”The Surprising Sexual Politics of Nicole Kidman's Kinky Babygirl” (12/21/24); another opinion piece: “Neil Gaiman, Babygirl, and the Ethics of Social Liberalism" (1/17/25); writer and director Halina Reijm’s 3 minute 37 second video narration of a sequence from the film (1/10/25); and the article “Women Really Want To Talk After Seeing Babygirl” (1/16/25). In addition, there’s been a series of trend articles that feature Babygirl as both a pioneer and a participant of something bigger than entertainment: the front page article “Midlife Women, Sex? Pop Culture Catches Up” (1/6/25), as well as “At the Movies, the 'Older Woman' Is Growing Up" (1/8/25) (growing up here means having sex with younger men) and “Sex Scenes Are Back, but Not So Sexy” (1/26/25).

A woman in a pink suit flutters her eyes closed as a man in a blue shirt whispers in her ear. — Just to be clear, for those who don’t read this entire essay: this photo is from the movie ‘Babygirl.’ Don’t see this movie. If you have seen it, forget about it. Go see the movie ‘Slow.’

This is a lot of space to devote to one movie, even for one with a big-name Hollywood star. But it’s not just The Times —see Variety’s “How Babygirl, The Substance and The Room Next Door Fight Against Society’s Standards for Women,” or Harper’s Bazaar: “Why the Older-Woman, Younger-Man Couple Dominated 2024,” or Rolling Stone’s “2024 Was the Year of Sex Onscreen,” or Vox’s article in which Babygirl is used to talk about the “deep humiliation of desire,” or The Atlantic’s article where Babygirl is used to talk about “wives on the edge,” or Salon’s article in which Babygirl is called “a landmark piece of mainstream erotic cinema that, like Samuel and Romy, relishes the opportunity to push the boundaries.” These are more than just reviews. Each of these articles elevates Babygirl to a position of both social commentary and social importance. The amount of attention that this film has taken up is substantial4, which is puzzling to me because I find Babygirl ultimately to be a conservative film, conservative in the Merriam Webster definition of “tending or inclined to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions.”

Here is where I’m coming from. I identify as asexual, also known as ace, meaning that I don’t experience sexual attraction. I neither need nor want sex in my life5. (Head’s up: asexuality exists on a spectrum so there can be a lot of variation in how someone experiences it.) And for me, Babygirl offers nothing new. In fact, at its center, I see the same predictable social script that I’ve seen repeated over and over in movies, TV shows, books, and in my own relationships, a script that assumes sex is necessary for love, intimacy, and self-understanding.

It’s a script that is blatantly untrue.

The more radical thing, in my mind, would be to tear this script up—I’m using script as a stand-in for social conventions by the way—and allow relationships, romantic or not, sexual or not, to create their own definitions of love and their own rules.

There is a movie that does this, by the way.

A movie that truly pushes boundaries.

A movie that most people, at least anyone I’ve talked to really, haven’t heard of or seen.

A man in a gray T-shirt sits next to a woman in a red shirt and white shorts. — This photo is from ‘Slow.’ See this movie.

Slow is a Lithuanian film about an asexual man and an allosexual (another word for not-asexual) woman that premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. There it won the Best Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category (Sundance called it “a stunningly singular exploration of asexuality”), and recently it was Lithuania’s official entry for the Academy Award’s best international feature film. But even I, as someone who’s asexual, had a hard time discovering it (I stumbled across it for the first time two months ago on a Reddit forum). I can find only a single mention of Slow in The New York Times archive, a 304-word review by freelance critic Beatrice Loayza that was buried on page 6 of the arts section (5/2/2024). Coverage elsewhere has been spotty: a paragraph mention on Vox in a Sundance round-up of 17 films, a favorable review in Variety, and an intelligent interview with writer/director Marija Kavtaradze in Salon. Still, nowhere is the breathless and elevating interest that I’ve seen for Babygirl. There are no trend articles written that include Slow because Slow, unfortunately, isn’t part of a trend at all. Rather it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before. To me that makes it all the more worthy of our attention.

Slow is the first film where I’ve seen something resembling my own mixed-orientation marriage mirrored on the screen. It was the first time I’ve seen asexuality exist in a realistic film. It was the first time I’ve seen asexuality treated with deep seriousness, curiosity, respect, and realism, not as a side plot or a punchline but sitting at the very center of the movie. It was the first time I saw a mixed-orientation couple falling in love and trying hard to understand each other and make things work. It was the first time I saw a couple holding hands and the film allowing that touch to be sensual, connecting, and loving, letting the camera linger where their skin touches for 32 seconds (I timed it). I’ve watched this scene a dozen times. It still takes my breath away. And then there’s how the scene ends: without physical escalation. Two people holding hands are allowed to be the climax (for lack of a better word) of that moment. I literally couldn’t breathe the first time I watched it. Maybe there have been scenes like this in TV shows or in other movies, but not in the shows I watch, or in the movies or the books I read. It’s a groundbreaking scene. Earth-shattering, in fact, much more for me than any scene in Babygirl.

I don’t disagree with everything about Babygirl. I actually admire the impulse underlying the film. “My movie is sort of a letter to myself to kind of encourage myself to be more unapologetically my authentic self, without shame,” said Babygirl’s director Halina Reign in an interview on The Daily Show. I believe in this idea deeply, that we should be and act like who we truly are, so it worries and disappoints me that the discussion about women being our authentic selves has narrowed so quickly in the mainstream media to women expressing and exploring their sexual desires in what I’ll argue is a pretty traditional form.

The theme of how we can become our authentic selves without shame happens to also be the center of Slow. But the resulting question that Slow asks throughout the film is more nuanced and vital: how can we love another’s authentic self when that self seems incompatible with the dominant narrative? Essentially, how can these two characters in Slow who are falling in love continue in a relationship if one wants sex and the other doesn’t want it? It’s been a question I’ve been trying to answer in my own relationship for 20 years now. There’s no easy answer.

I wish Slow could have gotten half as much attention— a quarter — a hundredth of the attention!—that Babygirl did. One thing I find beautiful about asexuality is that it offers everybody, not just aces, a new way of existing in the world. You don’t have to identify as asexual to experience sexual attraction differently or to a different degree. Likewise, everybody feels romance differently, and this includes not feeling romantic attraction at all (see aromanticism). It turns out there is no one right way to love and care for each other. It turns out every relationship is unique and every relationship is important. It turns out there are an infinite amount of ways to love people that require neither sex nor romance.

I want to end on that spectacular handholding scene in Slow. Part of that scene’s beauty is, for me, getting to watch two people try to truly understand each other and then love whatever they find. To truly understand each other as well as ourselves, Babygirl says over and over, requires sex, and a lot of it. Slow respectfully disagrees, insisting there are so many other possibilities. Let’s start exploring them.

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