Dying for Sex is about a fortysomething woman leaving her husband and having lots of experimental sex after she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s about so much more than that. By the end, the sex scenes – many and varied though they may be – are just a bagatelle.
Partly this is because there is no false hope offered here. None of the sexy set pieces are a full escape from reality. The series is based on a true story and the podcast made about Molly Kochan’s decision to cram years of sexual experience into the little time she was told she had left before metastasised breast cancer killed her. Whatever Molly does, whatever we see her do – enjoy or not enjoy – we know it will not change the ultimate outcome. This is the frame in which all the scenes of sex parties, age-gapped hookups, discovery of “pup play” and mastering the tricky latches on cock cages in Molly’s pursuit of her first partnered orgasm are set.
And partly it is because, thanks to a clever, tender – and blackly comic – script by Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, and a deeply nuanced performance by Michelle Williams as Molly, it increasingly becomes a meditation on what it means to live well and die well. It expands definitions as it goes on. First of sex itself. “You early millennials are so tragic,” says Sonya, a gen Z member of Molly’s care team. “You think sex is just penetration. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said?” You’ve gotta love a show that contains the casual slaughter of a sacred Sex and the City cow. Her perspective helps Molly move into a wider world of sex and gradually discover the answer to the question – asked by one of her early, young hookups, which stymies her at the time – what does she like? It is thanks to her neighbour – never named, but brilliantly played by Rob Delaney – that she learns what she really likes is kicking men in the dick.
But the definition that most interests everyone involved in the making of Dying for Sex is love. The marital kind – which has faded since Molly’s initial diagnosis of breast cancer, as her husband became unable to see beyond the patient. When they are in bed together, he says that her breasts remind him of death. The maternal kind – Sissy Spacek, on fantastic form, plays Molly’s mother. One of her boyfriends molested Molly when she was seven and it is this that makes her dissociate during sex, preventing the intimacy that breeds and is born of orgasm. “I think he knew he was taking joy from me,” she says. How much responsibility her mother bears and how much love is needed for forgiveness is a potent question. There is the love – or something – that grows between Molly and the neighbour. For that we may need a new word, but it is clear that it doesn’t need to be labelled to be worth having.
Above all, there is the love between friends. Nikki (a magnificent Jenny Slate) is Molly’s best friend, her “beautiful flake” who takes over her care (as much an administrative as emotional burden – the US health system is a form-filled nightmare) and must fight her natural inclination towards chaos every step of the way, alongside the mounting fear and grief. “I don’t want to die with him,” says Molly of her husband. “I want to die with you.”
Dying for Sex is about the courage of that decision, the laying aside of convention and the joy – that no abuser can remove – of truly knowing yourself and fulfilling not selfish desires but genuine needs. And if one of them is to kick in the dick a man who himself deeply desires to be kicked in the dick – well, that’s a delight all of its own.
