Love Isn’t Always Soft and Gentle: Female Sexual Desire in ‘Secretary’

Written by Jenny Lapekas as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Sex and sexuality are complicated, whether we believe it or not.  Most of us have experienced some type of same-sex attraction or participated in some kinky activity in the bedroom.  Movies often help us to make sense of these feelings and experiences.  However, too often, female sexual pleasure and arousal are still deemed unfit for viewing by mainstream film and television.  America has a bipolar and hypocritical relationship with female sexuality.  Our culture consumes copious amounts of porn and then doesn’t hesitate to slut-shame the women who create and act in pornographic films.  Is this because pornography can be seen as objectifying women, while mainstream film humanizes them?  Why does the marriage of sexuality and human intimacy feel so dangerous?

The depiction of female sexuality and sexual desire in the offbeat romance, Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2002), is central to its themes of dominance and submission.  Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) can be read as “sexually uncontrollable” by some viewers and critics, but her sexuality complements Mr. Grey’s (James Spader), which is structured and contained.  Lee finds she cannot be sexually aroused or satisfied by the traditional man she’s set to marry; not only is their sex centered on his laughable spasms on top of her, Lee can’t even pleasure herself while his photo sits by her bedside.  We may say that he’s so bad in bed, he interferes with Lee’s orgasms even when absent.

Lee has just been released from a mental hospital, and she struggles to gain some independence as she moves back in with a hovering mother and a drunk father.  Among her masochistic tools, we find a hot tea kettle and the sharpened foot of a ballerina figurine, a rather melodramatic image as she sits in a bedroom that is reminiscent of early girlhood, rather than that of a 20-something young woman.  It’s no mistake that Gyllenhaal’s character has an androgynous name; when we meet her, she is not sexually realized, and the way the camera maneuvers around her small frame and conservative clothing communicates this very clearly.

When Mr. Grey (50 Shades, anyone?) is “interviewing” Lee, he forwardly observes, “You’re closed tight.”  Lee is so willing to do anything and everything Mr. Grey tells her that he cures her of her cutting simply by telling her that she is never to do it again.  We may be tempted to label Mr. Grey rude or offensive, but his character is much more complicated than that, and Lee depends on his behavior to further develop throughout the film.  He is seemingly cruel as he explains that her only tasks are typing and answering the phone, and yet she is incompetent since she routinely makes spelling errors and answers the phone without gusto.  Lee wants desperately to please Mr. Grey.   The film contains two masturbation scenes where we watch Lee climax at the memory of doing exactly as Mr. Grey tells her.  Considering some of the recent controversy surrounding the censorship of female sexual pleasure on television, it feels daring and refreshing to find these scenes in a film.  Gyllenhaal has also received criticism for playing the love interest in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) since viewers find her “cute,” and not “sexy” enough to take on such a role, which makes her portrayal of a sexually adventurous young woman all the more empowering.

While Lee is shown to be a sexually submissive woman–parallel to the sexually dominant Grey–she discovers her own agency as she blossoms into a more complete person.  She dramatically leaves her fiancé, Peter, and, while wearing her wedding dress, professes her love to Mr. Grey.  She also slaps Mr. Grey across the face as he fires her and successfully fights off Peter when he interrupts her sit-in.  Although Lee gets off on being subservient, she makes it clear that she isn’t afraid to let others know what she wants outside the bedroom; Lee literally runs to Mr. Grey and then screams at Peter to get out.  Paradoxically, Lee’s emergence as a “submissive” accompanies the forming of her newfound independence.

What this film shows us is that sexual submission is a legitimate practice of men and women alike.  During Lee’s “sit-in,” we even see a women’s rights scholar (most likely a local graduate student) visit her to lecture about her apparently anti-feminist choice to obey Mr. Grey by sitting and waiting for his return.  I think it’s unwise to dismiss Lee’s portrayal of a “sexual submissive” as inaccurate or ineffective since this is not an archetype we see very often on the silver screen.  This film is subversive, transgressive, and feminist in its message, its imagery, and its challenging the popular belief that feminist sexuality is a one-size-fits-all cloak we all quibble over and clamber into when it’s time to play academic dress-up.  We watch Lee masturbate, fall in love, and cure an alienated man of his debilitating need for space and order, so I think it’s safe to say that the more Lee embraces her desire to be dominated, the more she controls the events of her own life and discovers agency.

The desire to be told what to do or to obtain permission to do particular activities is undoubtedly linked to sexual arousal and gratification in both men and women.  Although Lee is sexually submissive, she alone pushes Mr. Grey out of his toxic bubble of isolation and shame; she declares her love for the brooding lawyer and kindly informs him that they are a match and can be themselves, together, every day, without embarrassment that their sexual preferences may be considered perverted or taboo by the dreaded status quo.

While this brand of complex female sexuality may not be readily understood by most, it would be reductionist to dismiss Secretary as a misogynistic film, especially when Gyllenhaal’s performance reflects a multi-layered persona and a powerful sexual identity that remains obscure in mainstream cinema.  Lee finds sexual agency, and we stand by to watch and enjoy the pleasure she finds, along with the man who becomes her husband.  The binary of dominance and submission, along with its negotiation of sexual boundaries, is what makes Secretary work.

Recommended reading:  Thinking Kink: Secretary and the Female Submissive

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Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University.  Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema.  You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.