The shame and pleasure of masturbation: Poor Things gets girls’ early sexual feelings right

This piece contains spoilers for Poor Things.

Poor Things can be described in one word: polarising. Yorgos Lanthimos’ film follows Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a scientist’s experiment created from a woman’s body and a child’s mind.

It won two Golden Globes and received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.

Yet others walked out of the Venice screening during its many sex scenes, one which depicts a father teaching his two sons the birds and the bees by letting them watch him and Bella in the act. (This scene has been re-edited for the United Kingdom release to comply with local classification requirements.)

While some critics lauded Poor Things as a feminist exploration of sexual liberation, others saw it as a male director and screenwriter’s exploitative attempt to portray female sexuality. Vulture writer Angelica Jade Bastién took the latter view, arguing the film:

is not interested in the sex lives of women as much as the ways in which a young woman’s body can be positioned and used […] I want to see what a grown woman thinks and feels about sex!

But I think it is wrong to read Poor Things as a film about grown women. Its most controversial scene involves children witnessing sex, and Bella begins the movie with a child’s brain. Poor Things is about the sexuality of girls. It accurately depicts girls’ early sexual feelings and shows us some more positive ways of understanding girlhood sexual desire.

Discovering sexuality

I have interviewed 23 Australians who were teenage girls between 1970 and 2010 about how they learned about sex, and their experiences were echoed in Poor Things.

Early in the film, Bella teaches herself to masturbate and is delighted by her discovery. Many of my interviewees had similar memories, often describing themselves as “exploring” their bodies and finding enjoyable sensations in the process.

Nicole* grew up in the 2000s and told me she did not know what she was doing when she first masturbated, but

somehow when I was pretty young […] [I] discovered that it felt good.

Interviewees, including Nicole, were normally aged between five and 10 during these experiences (which are normal and common among children).

Interviewees regularly described their early forays into masturbation as disconnected from adult sexuality. These were simply experiments with their bodies.

But this also meant my interviewees often believed nobody else masturbated. Sue, born in the 1960s, even created her own term for masturbation, because she had never heard anyone speak about it before:

It was my bobble wobble. I had no idea that it had a name.

Bella also thinks she is the first person to masturbate, and humiliates her maid by demonstrating her newfound discovery. This is the first of many incidents in which she learns “polite society” does not speak about sex, let alone perform it in public. While Bella mostly ignores these warnings, many of my interviewees were acutely aware of societal expectations about girlhood sexual desire.

Read more: 'Is it normal for girls to masturbate?'

Girls are interested in sex

In the recent past, the media depicted boys as much more sexual than girls, who were supposedly interested in romance instead. Even magazines like Dolly – which catered to girls and spoke openly about sex – assumed girls’ sexual impulses would be awakened by their boyfriends’ advances.