When you're the Babygirl

Adventures in dominant-submissive dynamics: A memoir

Art by Luis López

Friendly reminder: I paywall particularly personal or intimate posts and this one is both. If you’re a paid subscriber I kindly ask that you do not screenshot and share excerpts beyond the paywall on social media without permission. (I realize you don’t know where the paywall actually is! It’s after the paragraph that begins “I think hearing a voice so clearly…”) You are, of course, always welcome to forward posts you love to others.

My commentary on Babygirl is in two parts. If you missed Part 1 (largely unpaywalled) you can find it here. If you don’t know what Babygirl is, you can watch trailers here and here. 🚨This post contains spoilers🚨 Also: if it gets cut off in email, just head to HONEY STAY SUPER to read in full.

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I love men. And when I was a girl I loved boys. I never thought boys were gross and I certainly never hated them. I liked being liked by boys and I liked liking boys back. I craved their attention and admiration, I always wanted their laughs like little fireflies I could keep in a jar. As early as elementary school I shaped my emotional life around crushes, as important as my friendships with girls, just with a different zing. Boys were a compelling reason to go to school.

As a teenager I always needed a love interest or more accurately, a crush, since my attention and desire were very rarely returned. Every college class, someone to admire; every job, a work boyfriend. At almost every age and stage of my life, I wondered “who will I like now?” Boys, then men, made my life more interesting.

Until they didn’t.

Marriage and motherhood, living in this country and soaking in politically venomous misogyny, did more to turn me away from men than all the years—decades—of male inattention, crushed crushes, rejection and heartbreak, and not being seen as “the right kind” of girl and then a “too much” “not really mother-material” “ball-buster” of a woman. I still liked men but sort of in the way you like ice cream or dogs.

I began to see a certain type of man not as the enemy exactly, just more academically, as if from a cool and disapproving distance. Something to be studied and judged. I saw most men separate from sex and intimacy, because I had become separated from sex and intimacy. I saw only the problem of men—how much even “good men” (by almost any reasonable standard) regularly took for granted, how they drained the life out of practically every partnered woman, and especially every mother, I knew and cared about. While almost no normal human woman can imagine being married to the actual Antonio Banderas, a whole lot of women know exactly what it’s like to be married to his character Jacob in Babygirl. Someone who (correctly! admirably!) set his compass pre-marriage and pre-fatherhood toward being a good and respectful husband and father in the future, but who declines to pay attention and evolve, to take the note once he’s there.

My separation from men ended after my mental health separated itself from me. I don’t like to revisit that period, when I was genuinely unwell and suddenly plunged into depression, unable to sleep or eat. Every emotional tripwire that had been laid down over the course of my entire life—abandonment, jealousy, lack of control, a deep and desperate feeling of being unwanted (possibly forever)—were all tripped simultaneously, suddenly, and somehow worst of all, without malice.

It’s too complex, too personal, and too humiliating to get into all the many why’s of that time, why I believed what I did. And I have no doubt that it all must have seemed baffling from the outside or, not to put too fine a point on it—fucking crazy. It doesn’t feel good to feel fucking crazy, I’ll have you know, just in case you were thinking of dabbling in it.

I remember the exact moment that my transition out of that deep, dark hole began. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, in my old bedroom that I still miss. I stared into the antique oval mirror on the wallpapered wall to my left. I had hardly eaten in a month, and this is neither a glorification nor an exaggeration. I was incapable of feeling hunger, of putting food into my mouth, of caring one way or the other. I had never understood how people couldn’t eat when under duress, if anything that always felt like a great reason to eat more. Then I felt it for myself and realized that this experience was true. One night I crawled into bed, and just as I turned the light out, I realized that all I had eaten that day was a single grape.

I was also barely sleeping, taking Xanax in the middle of the night to knock myself out, then I’d wake up again, groggy. During the day I’d hole myself up in the shower or soak in the bath and cry. I kept pushing myself to work out and move my body but would often be crying half the time while doing humpy Tracy Anderson moves in front of a mirror or downward dogging, peddling my heels while my tears plinked down onto my mat and I cannot begin to tell you how extraordinarily funny I find that all now. Being pathetic sometimes feels like being in your own sweeping film, a saga. THE DRAMA-LAMA of it all.

More charitably, I suppose I was experiencing an exorcism of sorts, although I couldn’t have clocked that back then. I had lived one type of life for twenty-seven years and apparently this was the way I would get it all out of me, to be able to emerge clear-eyed and most of all, busted open. I had to just cry and wither and purge every emotion I had ever had. I had to assault the punching bag in my basement with my fists and feet while listening to the angriest music I could find. I had to curl up into a tiny little ball next to my dog and hate myself then stare blankly at the wall for hours.

Anyway, I looked into that antique mirror’s smudgy, cloudy surface and saw within it my dark eyes and what was increasingly becoming my gray-ish complexion. I had been dwelling incessantly on how unfair it had been that I felt so thoroughly destroyed—and now also looked it—and the person who had accidentally set this destruction in motion got to be happy, carefree even. Flush!

That was the exact moment when a single crystalline thought came to me:

I need to feel good again.

I suspect that hearing a voice so clearly, or having what was essentially a vision during a moment of deep despair, is how a normal person might feel called to become a nun or a priest. In my case, though, in that moment I felt called to become a slut.