There’s a scene in the current season of Sex/Life that set my group chat alight. Actually there are lots of scenes in Sex/Life setting my group chat alight, but—as my friends and I made our way through the second season of the ridiculously steamy Netflix show which spotlights female desire—one of us posted, with euphoria of a different kind, about a kitchen moment in Episode 2.
Billie, the show’s protagonist and a mum of two who is having and instigating great sex, stands naked but for her underwear on a second date. The actress who plays her, 43-year-old Sarah Shahi, a mum of three, looks hot as hell as her new love interest traces his finger down her stomach, touching her crinkled skin and passing the stretch marks that she picked up from having twins in real life.
My friend messaged on WhatsApp: “This woman is ‘of an age’ and her body is obviously one that has had children and she is not perfect but still full on naked and stunning with these amazing flaws.” We’re all in our 30s or 40s and we’ve all had kids.
“Honestly made me look at my own rapidly descending boobs and I’m ok with it,” she added.
“Totes agree,” said another. “I loved this too,” chimed a third.
To show the telltale signs of motherhood through the lens of what is sexy is still so rare, on screen, as to be a talking point. Like model and mother Ashley Graham, who has celebrated her stretch marks in photo shoots, or Kourtney Kardashian, another mother of three, who bats away Instagram followers asking if she’s pregnant every time the shape of her perfectly normal and healthy stomach is on display, Shahi is pushing the envelope in a Hollywood that still, typically, asks its actresses to erase or hide the physical transformations that stem from pregnancy. In doing so, studios send a message, with the rest of society, that these are flaws, undesirable, especially where sex is concerned. That is not the case here.
Shahi tells me over the phone, from LA: “With aging comes embracing who you are and what you look like, particularly those reminders of motherhood. For years after I had my twins I didn’t appreciate those parts of myself and tried to hide them. It’s been a long journey to loving my body.”
She credits the part of Billie, a mother who does not curb her desire yet bears her vulnerabilities, with helping that acceptance, including the “no-brainer” decision to allow the camera to close in on her own so-called imperfections: “When I played younger Billie, in Season 1, we had to cover some of those mom parts; in the present it’s really been a conscious decision not to. The beauty of this show is that it shows us you can be the Madonna and the whore. If the ‘price’ of creating my children is a bit of excess skin or a few stretch marks, I’d feel very superficial saying I felt uncomfortable in my body because of that.”
Her natural post-baby boobs were the talk of the group chat too. Shahi knows that baring them in sex scenes marks another departure from Hollywood’s idea of sexy (read: not boobs that have nursed babies): “I don’t want to just see perfect, perky tits,” she says. “It was important to show natural, relatable boobs.”
Shahi’s frame is tiny and, to many, enviable. But as my friend said when we picked up again on WhatsApp: “I wasn’t looking at how thin or not she was and I’m not saying her body type is how we should all look after a baby but I loved seeing a woman on screen, naked, and having sex who clearly had [given birth].”
Those markers of carrying children are the same irreversible changes that are etched on to the bodies of women of every single size—slim, curvy, plus—once we become mothers. They fuel the same insecurities in all of us who have been fed societal, male-held messages that our sex appeal diminishes as a result of them, so, to see them decisively on display, on a top-streamed show about desire, reminds us that, actually, yes, women’s bodies are still sexy AF after we become mothers.
Sex/Life creator, Stacy Rukeyser, remembers writing the kitchen scene: “I knew we wanted to make a story point of Billie feeling insecure to show her body, in all its allegedly ‘imperfect’ glory, to a new man after having kids, but I didn’t know if Sarah would go for it and let herself be vulnerable in that way—especially in today’s Hollywood. When I described what we wanted to do, she gave an enthusiastic yes, immediately understanding the important statement we would be making.”
Rukeyser adds: “It’s been a rallying cry for us, that it is possible to be a wife and mom—and a ravenous sex goddess—all at the same time.”
In the BBC iPlayer documentary Sex on Screen, which traces the evolution of women baring all on screen, Rukeyser explains how radical it remains to see a mother want and enjoy sex, let alone be appreciated for her body and bearing children.
The film’s director, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, associate professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, puts it in context. She says: “It is refreshing to see women who have clearly borne children on display and seen as sexy and desirable. I love that, seeing the landscape of scars that are imprinted on [Shahi’s] body and that she’s still hot and sexy and also has desire, the way she looks at the man as he unzips her. Both of those things are still, simultaneously, fairly radical for mainstream film and television to this day.”
As we know, what we see on screen replicates and shapes what we experience off it. “The more we limit who gets to be sexy and by what standards, the worse women feel about themselves when they don’t meet those metrics and the more straight men think that’s the only way women can be sexy. If we don’t see ourselves with our flaws, with the realism that comes with a lived life, it’s hard to see ourselves as beautiful and desirable,” says Guevara-Flanagan, of mothers. And on portrayals like Sex/Life? “I wish we had more of it.” The group chat agrees.
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Deborah Linton