Sorry, Baby - The SSL Review
Sorry Baby
I watched the movie Sorry, Baby at my absolutely fabulous local indie theater, The Varsity Cinema. It’s top notch, and I’m so very glad I live in a place that has a great theater like that. I also am grateful I got to see Sorry, Baby during its theater run, and For Joy!, there was also a lovely little sneaky SSL reviewable scene. It’s been a while since I did an SSL Review without doing a deep rewatch of the scene I’m reviewing. However, I’m doing it here. This will be solely based on my original at-the-theater watch. When I saw this scene, I asked Charlie, who was sitting next to me, if he perceived it the same way. He did. However, he’s basically got the same orgasm-in-movie brain I have, so I can’t fully trust it. A week or so later, I was talking with a friend that saw it, and she brought it up and also had the same understanding I did of what was happening. So,that gave me enough confidence to write something up without checking myself with a 2nd viewing. And here we are.
Sorry, Baby (2025) poster
An SSL Review (for those that don't know about them)
Only depiction or discussion of female orgasm and/or female masturbation and/or the clit and/or cunnilingus are eligible for SSL Review. Nothing else counts, including plain 'ol sex if it doesn't include anything listed above. I specifically critique the realism (for instance, were the physical things happening to that women while she orgasmed things that could realistically cause orgasm for a woman?) and also speak on what the depiction/discussion reflects from and adds to the larger cultural discussion around lady-gasms and female sexuality.
You can see all the SSL Movie Reviews HERE (and as always you can find all the SSL TV Reviews HERE ).
The Ladygasm Scene
I’m not going to give you a bunch of background and info about what’s going on in this movie. I prefer not to know much about a movie going in, and since I don’t need a lot of that to describe the SSL Reviewable situation, I’m going to keep it very simple and direct in case anyone reading will go see it later - which I recommend if you haven’t already.
Rubbing One Out - the specifics
Here’s the deal. A woman is having sex with a man. It’s closer to a one-night stand situation than a relationship, so it’s not two people who are deeply familiar and comfortable with each other. There is a scene where there is a decision to have sex and then it skips to a scene where they are in fact doing so. He is sitting and she is on top, facing him. We see their torsos, but not far enough down to see what’s happening at the waist/hip/genital areas. It seems like intercourse is happening, but you can see that the woman has her arm down in a way that her hand seems like it is between them and in the genital region. It’s moving around - the specific way the hand is moving off screen isn’t super obvious - it’s just obvious that something is happening. And then she orgasmsed before the scene cut. If I recall correctly it was a sensibly sounding, not over-the-top or pornified, fakey type of orgasm vocalization/action. It seemed realistic enough. But the questions is - what was happening when she came? Was she just having intercourse from a cowgirl position…or was there something else?
I honestly had a small wondering if, like, she was jerking him off or something, but then it really just seemed like they were intercoursing - and his dick would be inside her - not available for jerking with a hand. And then I thought, ‘Could that hand be doing what I think it was doing? Are all my SSL dreams coming true, and this lady is rubbing herself off during a bang?” And ya know what? It really seemed like that was indeed what was happening. Charlie and my friend both felt that was the case as well.
More scenes like this, please
Dudes, can I just tell you how much I desperately want to see that happen in a sex scene? It’s so simple and easy to add in, and imagine all the young folk who will see it and have, going forward, some sense that rubbing the clit during a bang is a normal, sexy, basic way that a man and a woman might engage in sex - and one-nightstandy type of sex at that. For the love of all things holy - it could change hearts and minds in the next generations.
As of now, I have only seen 1 other scene in a movie or TV show where this is happening. It was in the TV show Girls and involved the characters Jessa and Adam. I mentioned it in a Girls overview post once. but haven’t actually written specifically about yet. That scene, like this one in Sorry, Baby, felt subtle. If you weren’t paying attention (or don’t watch sex scenes in an obsessively focused way so you can pick it apart and write about it) you might not even have considered anything about it. That’s why it makes me think it’d be so easy to slip a little clit rubbing into more sex scene, but I digress. My point is that it is super uncommon to see that. I see plenty of good, realistic lady-bation scenes and a fair amount of cunnilingus scenes, a rare few scenes or insinuations of using a vibrator during intercourse (even though probably half of those make it seem wierd or scary to the male partner). The simple rub-one-out while you’re getting banged on is an uber rare treat though, and I am VERY here for it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reach-around from a man to the woman, though, which I’d also love to see.
The Vulva Rating
This gets a straight up 5 out of 5 vulvas. I’ve seen a trillion scenes of women orgasming during intercourse. Very occasionally, it might possibly seem like she could be getting some clit friction from his pelvis or bedding or something, but usually it seems like it’s from nothing more than a penis moving in and out of her vagina. That’s unrealistic as fuck, given that nowhere in all of scientific literature has there been a physical orgasm recorded from only stimulating the inside of the vagina. But even if we ignore that fact, and pretty much everyone who talks about sex does, still only about 30% (at the highest) of women in surveys say they even sometimes are able to orgasm that way.
And, I won’t get deep into it, but there’s lots of very sensible reasons women might say they orgasm that way when they actually do not (conflating ejaculating and orgasming, describing certain moments of high arousal as orgasm, describing orgasms caused by grinding the clit against something during intercourse as a ‘vaginal orgasm’, or a variety of other things). No matter how you cut it, the female orgasm is overwhelmingly depicted as happening due to nothing more than a penis banging a vaginal canal, when that is AT THE MOST, a rare situation for bringing about an actual female orgasm. It’s fucked up to be honest, and the more depictions of realistically induced lady-gasms we can get in media, the better off the next generations will be as they take their cultural assumptions about how sex and orgasms happen into their actual sexual relationships.
All that to say, thank you Sorry, Baby and director/star of the movie Eva Victor for putting a realism into their work that is rare and important. I know it’s not really as easy as one would think to get sexual realism into movies and TV. Honestly, Eva, if you read this (although I assume you won’t)…I would love to talk with you about how you thought about, planned, and implemented that scene. How intentional was that choice, and why did you make it?
(!)(!)(!)(!)(!)
P.S. I feel like I also have to get something off my chest about this movie unrelated to orgasm. There is a cat in the movie - a gorgeous perfect kitten that looks just like my cat Ramona when she was a kitten (the one up above in the movie poster). However, there were clearly 2 different cats that don’t look alike playing this 1 sweet cat, and I cannot imagine how the people making this movie just let 2 different looking cats play the same part and think nothing of it. One of them had white boots and one did not. I read that these were 2 foster cats that the crew loved, but the article it never addressed that they were clearly different looking cats, and I cannot get past it. It haunts me - like having a curly and straight haired kid play the same part and not acknowledging it. So, Eva, I’d want to discuss that with you too. And also everyone, do go see the movie. It’s a good one.
