How ‘I Love Dick’ Tackles Female Sexuality

I Love Dick, Amazon‘s latest original series, is supposedly a sex comedy, but there’s a lot more to it than that. The remarkably uncomfortable show explores the typically taboo nature of female sexual desire head-on in the form of a woman named Chris (Kathryn Hahn) and her obsession with brooding artist Dick (Kevin Bacon). While zany Chris is married to the neurotic Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), she can’t help but find herself completely enamored with Dick, the silent, gritty cowboy that won’t give her the time of day. She openly plays out her sexual fantasies about Dick with her husband, who seems to enjoy it just as much as she does. Dick has unknowingly rekindled the couple’s sex life, but that doesn’t mean Chris is giving up on her pursuit of Dick – no matter how many times he rebuffs her.

As Dick continues to reject Chris, she becomes consumed with writing him lustful, obsessive letters that she hangs above her and Sylvere’s bed. “I was born into a world that presumes there is something grotesque, unspeakable about female desire,” she writes. “But now all I want is to be undignified, to trash myself. I want to be a female monster.” These lines just about sum up the entire series – we have been conditioned to believe that it’s weird and inappropriate to indulge in female sexual desire, but I Love Dick tells us otherwise, loud and proud. Female sexuality is acceptable – and worth celebrating – in all its forms, and over the course of the series first few episodes, we are presented with the existence of the incredibly wide spectrum of female sexuality.

Chris, who revels in her seemingly unorthodox sexual desires and admits to Dick that she doesn’t care if he wants her – it’s enough that she wants him. Even if her wildest, dirtiest fantasies involving him are never realized, she’s had a spark ignited, and her newfound, desperate sexual consumption of her husband can be attributed to said spark. She’s the initiator in many sexual situations with Sylvere; she even attempts to solve a contentious situation between the two of them with a domineering handjob. She’s insatiable, she’s horny, she’s moody, she’s all over the place – and it’s all totally okay. There’s not a formulaic, tired femininity to her sexual needs – she’s simply herself, and that’s all we need. As messy, frantic, and ravenous as she is – she’s a fascinating, unusual protagonist to behold. And an absolutely necessary one.

This spectrum of female sexuality is also explored in the storylines that involve Devon (a stellar Roberta Colindrez), a local artist who also happens to be a lesbian. When she intercepts one of Chris’ letters and plans to stage a dramatic reading of it, she can’t help but also find herself consumed by the hot-n-heavy words penned by Chris, and the letters fuel passionate encounters with Toby (India Menuez), one of the actresses in her staged interpretation of Chris’ letters. Soon, the letters begin to affect everyone in Marfa – strange things are awakened in every single body, and notions of the traditionally swept-under-the-rug notion of female sexuality and desire and obsession are evidently exposed and deconstructed. Time and time again, women have been portrayed as predatory or as stalkers when they’ve openly expressed their sexuality, objectified men, or pursued sexual encounters, but on I Love Dick, anything goes. Chris is permitted to breathlessly pen her wild letters, approach Dick in the most cringeworthy manner she’s capable of, and engage in a fixation that is usually made a joke of. There is no punchline here. Obsession is a real phenomenon, women are allowed to be horny and unlikeable, and we’re allowed to talk about all of these things. Chris may have felt like female sexuality and desire was “unspeakable”, but I Love Dick has ensured that we’ll definitely be speaking about it for the foreseeable future.