Locked within many of us is a list. A list of everything we’ve ever dreamed of doing — or having done to us. You know: a sex list.
Yet most will never experience any of it, whether it’s a matter of timing or shame. Monogamy. Fear. Inertia. And so the check-boxes go unfilled, the list growing dustier every year.
Molly Kochan’s own list had faded. But one day, she learned a single fact that would change her life. Or, rather, end it. Her cancer had returned and she was going to die. Soon. But this hideous revelation brought with it one blessed thing: clarity. She knew she didn’t want to die with her husband; she wanted to die with her best friend, Nikki Boyer. She knew she didn’t want to die without having great sex; she wanted to pursue pleasure at last. So she left her husband and spent her final months exploring her sexuality, one wild new experience at a time.
Boyer and Kochan documented this journey and their BFF-ship with a podcast, “Dying for Sex.” It was a huge hit and now it’s been turned into a brilliant, heart-tugging show starring a luminous, hilarious Michelle Williams as Molly and a poignant, also hilarious Jenny Slate as Nikki.
“Dying for Sex” is a rare jewel in how it deals with sexuality: Molly’s adventure eschews intercourse altogether, reframing sex as less penis-in-vagina and more pleasure exploration.
“You early millennials are so tragic,” says Sonya (Esco Jouley), Molly’s counsellor. “You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said?”
Viewers have become conditioned to expect sex to look a certain way onscreen, the same way most (straight) people have been brainwashed to expect sex to be a certain way in life, with intercourse (and the male orgasm) the mandatory grand finale. But, as Sonya insists, “sex is a wave.” In “Dying for Sex,” traditional coitus is off the table, freeing up Molly to discover many forms of sex, not just one.
Like, say, kicking someone in the dick. Or a little bondage. Or water sports. Or puppy play. These acts are not seen as some cringe punchline. Some scenes are played for comedy, but they elicit empathetic laughs as we ride the wave alongside Williams versus the cheap snickers depictions of kink often court. As Sonya tells Molly, “There’s a whole world out there, if you want it.”
Molly is lucky to have a Sonya; there is a remarkable lack of resources around end-of-life sexuality. You’d expect some crossover in sex therapy and death doula services; Google searches yield, however, very little, leaving horny terminal folks potentially struggling for support.
Los Angeles-based Vanessa Carlisle is one of the rare examples, an author, coach and educator in gender, sexuality and trauma, and an end-of-life doula. “Many presume that those with terminal illness couldn’t possibly be concerned with something like sex, because sexuality is generally stigmatized and trivialized; deemed less necessary or virtuous of a human concern than, say, getting right with God,” Carlisle said.
“So there’s a double whammy of stigma around sexuality at end of life. Near the end of life, a person is supposed to be dignified, calm, courteous, and women especially are supposed to be nice about it. Not a burden. Not gross. But again, we are talking about human bodies and they do bizarre gross things when they are in extremes. So, ultimately, I do see these taboos against sex and death as the same: they are about control. And women who experience a lot of pleasure are definitely considered to be out of control.”
Watching the “Dying for Sex” trailer made pleasure enthusiast Kaleigh Trace burst into tears. A former sex educator and registered psychotherapist in Toronto, and author of “Hot, Wet, and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk About Sex,” she also has terminal cancer.
“When I found out that I would die and die soon, having sex was an obvious portal to pleasure and aliveness,” she said.
It’s not without its unique roadblocks. One scene in “Dying for Sex” shows an unfortunate side effect of the aforementioned dick-kicking when cancer has spread to your bones. Trace has had her own mishaps, from the challenges of performing oral sex in an ill-fitting wig to suffering the laxative effect of cancer drugs. “You might imagine this makes me more self-conscious, but the opposite is true. I feel a deep reverence for my body and this makes sex even better,” she said. “And lube. Lube helps.”
In the end, all the sex Molly has is actually a bit of a red herring. “I’ve spent my whole life being scared of what I feel,” she says.
When their generation was being raised, Boyer said in an interview, “it was always like, ‘Put your big girl panties on, don’t show your feelings, be strong’ … And I feel like we weren’t allotted time and space to just have our feelings ever, whether it was on the playground at school or in the classroom or in the boardroom. We’ve always been taught that emotions and feeling things deeply requires you to be vulnerable, and somehow that equals shame for women.”
Molly’s quest may have been for sex but, really, it was for wanting itself. For life: the marrow of it, the juice.
The saddest scene in “Dying for Sex” doesn’t take place on Molly’s death bed but early on, when she realizes she doesn’t know what she feels, what she wants. Molly’s act of bravery is to fan that tiny flame of desire. For more. “I want to feel things,” she says. This way nirvana lies.
As Trace says, “The act of truly facing our desires and our deaths without shame is a pathway to being unbridled: if we refuse to believe that we should hate ourselves for wanting, for deviating, for being sick, for needing others: could you even imagine? How much energy would we have to live differently, to create a better world?”
So Molly feels the snug embrace of restraints, she feels a hunk’s chest under her high heel, she feels the fingers and tongue of her crush (Rob Delaney). And when she experiences an orgasm, the camera lingers not on a sweaty tangle of pumping bodies, but on Williams’ face, as she changes, transforms, transcends. As she feels.
“To quote Molly, I feel like for her, sex was the antithesis to death,” Boyer said. “It made her feel plugged into her body, it made her feel alive, it reminded her that this body that was ‘failing’ her and fighting hard to stay alive could also experience deep pleasure and erotic feelings at the same time. And I just thought that was really magical.”
Molly is such a charming character and Williams gives such a fearless, funny performance that you go a little delusional right alongside Nikki, hoping that somehow, miraculously, she will survive. But “Dying for Sex” is also refreshingly unflinching in its honest depiction of not just the titular romps, but the titular transition, too.
Paula Pell steals the finale as daffy hospice nurse Amy, who is alarmingly gung-ho in detailing the different stages of dying. But while Molly does experience the standardized steps, like any other human, she is jubilant in knowing her journey has finally been her own, complete with long-awaited orgasms (and a hospice-room dance party).
Carlisle said there is no right way to be a sexual person and there is no right way to die: “I love the idea of the show because it reminds us that we are all still and always discovering ourselves, even up to the end.”
So there is sadness, yes, at the finale, but there is also so much joy. “I want to feel everything, right to the end,” Molly says. And she does. Working through her sex check list woke her up to the importance of desire — not just for sex, but for it all.
All eight episodes of “Dying for Sex” are now streaming on Disney Plus.
