“'The Kids Are All Right' and 'Sex at Dawn'”

We saw the new movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the other night on DVD, and I thought of “Sex at Dawn,” the book I’ve been blogging about lately. The movie is about a lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) with two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15. Joni searches for the man who was their sperm donor; she finds him nearby, and the plot thickens, mainly around Jules. She is the stay-at-home mom, who begins to work as a landscape designer for the donor, Paul, (Mark Ruffalo), and also begins to have sex with him. Jules is horrified by what her body is doing. She doesn’t love Paul; she doesn’t even like him very much, but she can’t stop. But, of course she does stop, and abruptly, when, at Paul’s during a dinner party with the whole family, Nic confronts Jules after finding Jules’ red hair in Paul’s shower and bed. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, Jules admits her affair, but also blames Nic for being busy at work and distant.
At this point, I yelled at the TV, urging Jules to get in touch with her inner ape and proclaim that she came from female ancestors who had multiple partners and who called for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV) (The sex scenes were fairly noisy). Not surprisingly, she didn’t do this but continued to apologize and seek forgiveness from the family. Also, not surprisingly, they were very angry at her and furious at Paul, who is portrayed as a guy just going along for the ride. Although in the end, Jules and Nic seem to reconcile, Paul apparently is thrown into outer darkness and will never again be included in the family despite his reaching out to the kids. So, we’re left with a bruised quartet, rather than a possible quintet that might have included Paul. How sad.
And how sad that the five didn’t have insight into their ape natures, as discussed in “Sex at Dawn.” If they had realized that Jules was behaving naturally, they might have acknowledged similar feelings in themselves, understood, forgiven both her and Paul, and have begun a tentative search for an expanded family that included him.
Perhaps the moral is that we don’t always have to act out of our biology, but if we don’t know and accept our biology, we are likely to act, like Jules, without understanding and with much grief.