Dissecting the female gaze and sexuality in Netflix’s Sex/Life with creator Stacy Rukeyser

Odds are you’ve heard of Sex/Life, one of the newest Netflix Original series that has dominated the Netflix Top 10 for weeks past its initial premiere. The series, which stars Sarah Shahi, Mike Vogel, and Adam Demos, is a fascinating look at female desire and sexuality. It’s no wonder the series has raked in awe-inspiring numbers for Netflix in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Despite the fact it’s 2021, it’s still rare to see genuine and compelling media that explores female sexuality without playing into the male gaze or desires. Creator and showrunner Stacy Rukeyser was committed to giving us a relatable character to who many women could relate, especially those who are also wives and mothers.

Sex/Life has a main character at the center who grapples with questions, can you have it all? Is it possible to get everything you need from one person? What’s also so great about this show is that it was brought to life with a female showrunner and directors!

Stacy comes from a fascinating family of writers and journalists, and we had the chance to talk to her about the show, her goals for creating it and what she hopes people take away from the first season.

Show Snob: How did you come up with the idea for the show? I know it was loosely inspired by the book, but what made you want to turn it into a series?

Stacy Rukeyser: I connected very personally with the idea of a wife and mom who misses her wild child single days and can’t help but wonder where that other girl went.

One thing I thought was interesting looking at feedback from people who watched the show was that many people were mad at Billie, but my first instinct was being mad at Cooper because he read her journal. What do you think about the reaction the show has gotten?

Stacy Rukeyser: We always knew that this show would be noisy. I deliberately set out to make a series that is fierce, gutsy, unapologetic, and that was the guiding principle at every turn in all the story choices and frankly even in the choice to tell the story in the first place.

What is so gratifying is the number of women I’ve heard from who feel that this series speaks to them in such a deeply personal way that they feel so seen because we are shining a lot on a predicament for women that no one ever talks about. Women are scared to admit these feelings because they don’t want to sound ungrateful.

But that is the point of our show to talk about how you can be grateful for all of these blessings and still want more, to be a wife, and a mom, and a ravenous sex goddess all at the same time. It doesn’t make you a bad mom to admit that while you adore your children, you also miss that wild, freer, more sexual part of yourself. That, for me, is where the show is coming from on such a personal level that I deeply understood.

What I’ll say about the ending is that the final moment is like the dam of desire has finally broken because Billie tries for so long to be “good” to deny her appetite to be satisfied with her many blessings to accept that she can have it all that she should be happy with what we call the 85% but then starting at Sasha’s book reading she comes to the horrible realization that it’s not enough.

And it’s really complicated because she’s married. I always knew that half the audience would be yelling at her and half would be cheering, and that’s what we always wanted. Billie will have to live with the consequences of her actions; God willing, we get a second season. And we don’t know what Brad says because it’s very different from what he proposed on that driveway. There is freedom in going after what you want, but there is also a danger, and the show is really about both.

I saw in another interview that you did, you were talking about how we’ve seen similar characters from men like you mentioned Don Draper in Mad Men. That’s something I really liked about this show, the fact she’s exploring those emotions and feelings. I thought it was so refreshing to see from a woman’s perspective.

Stacy Rukeyser: That’s so great to hear that. Don Draper is a great example; there is also Tony Soprano. We start to accept that men have appetites and desires. To make a show about female desire is quite dangerous, to make a show about a woman who not only admits that she’s had sex, but to also admit she wants more of it and better sex without making her the bad girl or the villain and punishing her for it, that in it and of itself is a revolutionary act.

It’s everything a woman is not supposed to want or not supposed to do. We’re supposed to wait; we’re supposed to accept, we’re the receiver, it’s dangerous to let the cat out of the bag, as it were. We look at these other shows, and those character’s “extracurricular activities” or what you want to call it, were never seen as threatening to the very fabric of our society in the way some people are up in arms about Billie.

It’s curious to me how her character is held to a different standard. Not just women but wives and mothers. We’re not supposed to want those things, but it has been exciting to open the floodgates on those examples.

Right, and in the very beginning, Billie hasn’t even done anything wrong at that point, but Cooper is depicted as this perfect guy, yet he also has faults. He’s been dismissing Billie until now, which is why she starts fantasizing about her past. So it’s interesting how some people are more willing to forgive him and think she should settle for what he’s offering.

Stacy Rukeyser: Absolutely. Let’s not forget that he reads her journal, which where I come from is a huge betrayal! And he hasn’t gone down on her in 18 months, and he’s watching the game on TV rather than having sex with her!

Some guys messaged me and even jokingly said, “so you’re going to make all of our wives leave us?” And I’m like, well if you just make love to her properly, she won’t leave! But Mike Vogel brings such depth to that role [of Cooper], and we always wanted it to be a really fair fight. If he was just those things that I just said, then everyone would say leave him! And if Brad hadn’t been a total a**hole at times in the past, then that would be easy.

Every single one of our characters makes a bad decision of some sort over the course of the season. That, to me, is real life. People are messy and complicated. Friendships are messy and complicated, marriages are, any relationship is. There needed to be no easy answers.

If you guys get more seasons of Sex/Life since the show focuses on female sexuality and desire, would you ever consider introducing queer women or characters? I’d love to see your take on lesbian and bisexual women on the show, especially with so many female writers and directors. 

Stacy Rukeyser: Totally, look, Billie is the center of our show, and she always will be. She definitely has an identity crisis, but her sexuality is probably the one thing that isn’t part of that. But I would love to expand the focus and expand the ensemble. It’s interesting, though, because when I started working on this project, I did a deep dive into the genre of female sexuality, and I found that the movies and shows doing the best job were lesbian stories like The L Word.

The thing about the heterosexual representations of female sexuality is that they are still about the kind of sex that the man wants and whether or not the woman is going to come to like that kind of sex or agree to it. It’s not truly from her point of view and her desires and her experience. It was important to me that we make it clear what Billie is missing and why she is fantasizing about [Brad].

It’s also in the way we show it, and there is a lot of slow motion, there is gorgeous lighting, lots of jewel tone lighting, it’s really about her experience. You don’t normally see heterosexual sex that way. Usually, the woman is the object. So I was really inspired by a lot of the lesbian television shows and films that are out there. But it would be really great to explore that too, in the future.

Sex/Life Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.