‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ Weaponizes Period Sex in a Deliciously Cruel Way

FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans opens with quite the bloody mess. No one’s been murdered, but someone has taken delicious revenge on a cold-hearted lover and his frigidly beautiful wife. In the first few minutes of Ryan Murphy’s latest dramatization of real-life events, we learn the wild tale of how then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s wife Happy (Rebecca Creskoff) timed an illicit rendezvous with powerful television mogul Bill Paley (Treat Williams) while on her period. Her goal? To get back at Paley by leaving bloody smears of their indiscretions all over his bedroom so his wife, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), couldn’t deny his adultery. Babe tearfully recounts the horror of coming home to such a tableau to her best friend Truman Capote (Tom Hollander), unaware that years later he will spill this sordid tale to the world…or that this sequence is just the latest way in which Hollywood has been weaponizing period sex onscreen in the last year.

While films like Fair Play and Saltburn have used a man’s delight going down on a menstruating lover as a ploy to mask his crueler ambitions, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans flips the script on the situation. Happy Rockefeller is the one playing possum until the reveal of her period blood everywhere signals her true intentions. What’s even more fascinating about the way period sex kicks off all this drama in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans is the fact that this event allegedly really happened!

Feud: Capote vs. the Swans recounts the sordid saga that got American writer Truman Capote exiled from his beloved high society. Capote, a brilliant raconteur and gossip-monger, published an excerpt of his unfinished novel Unanswered Prayers in Esquire in 1976. The chapter, titled “La Côte Basque 1965,” wasn’t so much an elegant work of fiction, but a gross betrayal of trust. Capote had very clearly revealed the most embarrassing and squalid details of his powerful friends’ personal life to the masses. Specifically, “La Côte Basque 1965” delves into how Babe Paley came home from Paris one day to find Happy Rockefeller’s menses all over her bedroom furniture.

Naturally Babe Paley had told her close friend Capote all this in confidence. The betrayal spent Babe spiraling. Capote’s shameless insistence on sharing such intimate gossip in print put him firmly on the outs with Babe and the rest of the “Swans” who ruled the upper crust in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. That’s the meat of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. However, I can’t stop thinking about Happy Rockefeller’s audacity to trick Bill Paley into such a stunt in the first place!

Period sex is a subject that is still largely taboo on screen, although there have been quite a few pointed uses of it in recent years. Michaela Coel’s incandescent 2020 limited series I May Destroy You uses period sex in an early episode to solidify the connection between Coel’s Arabella and her sweetest love interest Biagio (Marouane Zotti). 2023’s Fair Play establishes the unbridled passion secret lovers Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) feel for each other by showing Luke going down on Emily during her period. (Luke later turns out to be not such a nice guy!) Saltburn, another 2023 film, features an intense seduction scene wherein antihero Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) woos his best friend’s sister by pulling a similar stunt, referring to himself as a vampire. (Oliver also is later revealed to have dark ulterior motives! Huh!)

I’m of two minds about Feud: Capote vs. the Swans big, bloody sex scene. On the one hand, it’s pretty refreshing to see a female character take control of the situation. The aforementioned period sex scenes all are designed to reveal something about male characters, whether it be vulnerability or villainy. This sort of makes sense insomuch that menstruation is something that simply happens to many women, rendering them passive. The male characters become the ones making the decision to still have sex despite the extra cleanup that might have to happen. Not so with Happy Rockefeller. She is the one actively using period sex to set into motion a wild series of events that ultimately ruin one Truman Capote. I think that reversal is kind of juicy and cool!

What nags at me, though, is the reality that period sex is still understood to be a squeamish subject in all of these scenarios. Luke’s ardor in Fair Play is meant to be romantic, his enthusiasm remarkable. Oliver literally casts himself as boundary-breaking “vampire” in Saltburn, writer/director Emerald Fennell framing the blood on his face as monstrous and gory. Even the sweet period sex scene in I May Destroy You is sweet because Biagio responds so gently to Arabella’s tampon. It’s an exception to the rule that period sex is weird, is gross.

The period sex that sparks all of the drama in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans is fascinating because the disgust Babe feels is less about bodily fluids and more about emotional betrayal. She’s lost her husband’s interest. Even worse, she assumes that Happy Rockefeller specifically used her own menstrual blood as a dig at Babe’s age. (Babe is postmenopausal.)

Period sex is usually weaponized in Hollywood features to tell us something about a male character. In Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, it’s used to destroy a male character. The ironic twist is that ultimately Happy Rockefeller doesn’t destroy Bill Paley…but Truman Capote.