Maximum pleasure guaranteed

Can a woman get off without being killed for it?

The sensational Tatiana Maslany in the ride of her life.

I LOVE THIS SHOW. So far, seven out of ten episodes have aired. I love the star, Tatiana Maslany, and the supporting cast, all of them, there isn’t a clunker in the batch, and the jangly pace of the plotting and directing. I love it all. It’s funny and deathy. Big stakes all the time. I don’t know why anyone liked Widow’s Bay, which also offers a mix of grim and scare and comedy and is as boring and inconsequential as dirt flaking off a decomposing log. The only thing I’m uncertain about regarding Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is if it’s stupidly following a long, long tradition of punishing women for tampering with sex. Tampering with sex outside the boundary of sex with a man in an actual body, who decides things.

I am born, and in a jump cut I’m at Barnard College in 1965, and my English teacher turns out to be Kate Millett, who will go on to write Sexual Politics and will help launch the women’s movement in the United States and everywhere else on the planet. What do we want? So many things. What is one of the things we don’t shut up about? Being divided into virginal, good-girl door mats and raging, man-eating whores. We want the sexual revolution to be about us getting off any way we can and with whomever we feel like doing it with, the same way men want these things and people just say about that, Well sure.

The women’s movement is five minutes old, and right away coming at us are movies showing sexually out-front women as killers, lunatics, losers, and sad girls no one will ever love. Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, on and on. You like sex and you are a girl, you get punished for it. You like sex and you are a girl, you force the formation of a society, all of whose laws are organized to control the sexuality of female humans. I’m referencing Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, a six-season love letter to the porn of watching females suffer. You thought I was talking about America, now. That, too.

Tatiana plays Paula, a divorced single parent, who is so loving and on it with her smart-mouthed daughter (Nola Wallace), this kid will never need therapy. At night, alone or when her daughter is sleeping, Paula dials onto a porn site, modeled on OnlyFans, and masturbates with the hot-and-tender assistance of her cam boy Trevor (Brandon Flynn). For about three breaths, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed lets you drink in the handy kink available to women, courtesy of the web, before Paula’s techno-pleasure sweeps her into so much violence, threat, and spaced-out mayhem, you can’t help wonder if you are smelling a rat in all this. Is the show another cautionary tale, meant to scare women into keeping it in their pants? By it I mean their fantasy lives, their erotic preoccupations, and their completely unsecret enjoyment of masturbating?

I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe it is another rap on the knuckles to women. It’s the brain child of show runner David J. Rosen, who wrote most of the episodes, and director David Gordon Green. It’s their baby, two men. Men understand zero about what they may unconsciously be saying to women about masturbating to porn—an activity a gazillion men enjoy daily. You pay a cam boy, and watch out, ladies, the next thing you know you will discover a dead body, you will be accused of two murders, your ex-husband will have ample grounds to assume full custody of your child, and your job will be on the line because you are preoccupied with a murderous lunatic (played brilliantly as always, by Murray Bartlett), a murderous lunatic who is blackmailing you for more money than you have and, while you are out of your apartment, feels free to eat the food from your fridge you were planning to have for dinner that night.

In the show’s defense—I mean the case for it not containing a censorious, woman-punishing rat—there’s the fact that Paula’s life was a wildly unstable mess before her entanglement with cam boy Trevor. We’re meant to feel that Trevor is a time-out for Paula from all the mess she can’t control. So there is that.

Do my reservations about the possible, dimly-misogynist minds of the show’s creators dampen my pleasure in the acting, the story, the humor, the tense ride, the surprises? Not for one second. Why is that? Because the casting is genius. This show really sharpens your alertness to casting. Take Dolly De Leon as Detective Sofia Gonzalez, who has to be very smart and also wrong—because there is no thriller without mistaken detective work—and she pulls it off with her hard-boiled and absurd one liners. Sofia to Paula: “Thank you for seeing me. You want some cashews?"

Pleasure is pleasure. You feel it, or you don’t feel it. It has nothing to do with anything else. There’s no way of knowing for sure if the rat I smelled is there or isn’t there. What I would put money on—although it can’t be proved—is that it didn’t cross the minds of Rosen and Green that I and other women would have to smell a rat in a story that pairs a woman getting off to porn with a woman’s life going down an enormous crapper. Art seduces you into its world, and sometimes, as in the case of this show, with your reservations intact. I remain seduced, and my reservations remain intact. That this is possible is also a deep pleasure. Why? Because art doesn’t need to care about anything but seducing you.

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I used to feel thrilled

on a weird and heightened scale when someone I thought was way out of my league took an interest in me, took me up, liked me, was attracted to me, befriended me. It was a mighty thrill, however long the connection lasted. Maybe I thought such experiences were lifting me up in my own eyes, saying that life is unexpected and full of possibilities you can’t predict. Something like that.

I am thinking in particular about a man who was vastly more talented and glamorous than I would ever come to be, who took an interest in me in my early thirties. It didn’t last. I always felt star struck or something like that and couldn’t keep up with the brilliance and seriousness and smarts and fabulousness of the people he knew. I liked it. I felt nervous. I made mistakes. I liked all of it then, and I like all of it now, the fact that it happened, I mean.

This kind of experience can’t happen again because I’m no longer in that category of person to whom such a thing can happen. I’ve aged out. I begin to see there can be such a category. And then you have to think: How do I feel about having aged out?

To be continued . . .

Cole, one of the great dogs of Warren Street, Hudson.