Dying for Sex is a Dance Show

Another cold take

Slate and Williams in their best thrift scores.

Warning: The following contains many spoilers about the full season of Dying for Sex, now streaming on Hulu.

Dying for Sex tells the story of forty-year-old Molly (played by Michelle Williams) who, after being diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, leaves her immature, self-absorbed husband Steve (an eminently punchable Jay Duplass) to figure out what turns her on and heal from the “core wound” of childhood sexual abuse, with the support and love of her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate). Based on the true story of Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer, and their podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex is queer, kinky, earnest, gross, funny, heartbreaking, tender, and brutal. It is flooded with joy – and, often, lube – and is a love song to the transformative power of intimate female friendship. It is also one of the best representations of the emotional truth of illness, and the dehumanizing oddness of a suddenly medicalized life, that I’ve seen in mainstream media.

The actors are fantastic. Not just Williams, Slate, and Duplass, but the epic Rob Delaney as the sad-sack neighbor who gets Molly to kick him in the dick (and falls in love); Esco Jouley as Sonya, the magical lesbian social worker who guides Molly through the twinned mazes of kink and incurable cancer; David Rasche, aka “Karl” from Succession, as Molly’s hilariously awkward doctor; Robby Hoffman, in an unforgettable two-episode cameo, who I think I have a massive crush on now. And Sissy Spacek as Molly’s chaotic, unreliable mom, who does have a point when she yells at her daughter not to toxic-pee on the guy in a dog onesie right after she’s had chemo.

I was reluctant to watch it, sure that I would hate it or it would just be too triggering. And indeed there is a community of Reddit commenters and cancer patients out there who think it’s trivializing, unrealistic, or, god help me, “unrelatable.” But won over by a friend’s recommendation I did, and I am so glad. No, tamoxifen didn’t make me horny – as Steve asserts has happened to Molly, a plot point with which online critics take much issue – but I accept that it can be a rare side effect. I mean tamoxifen gave me crippling leg cramps, a condition that hits about 15% of those who take the drug; who am I to doubt? More to the point, it’s beside the point: Molly is horny because her husband has infantilized her in her illness and refuses to touch her because, as she puts it, her post-mastectomy boobs make him think of death. That’s why she’s horny, not because some drug flipped a switch. The libido-diminishing and vaginal-secretion drying effects of the estrogen-blocking or -suppressing drugs like tamoxifen, anastrazole, and letrozole that are prescribed to ward off recurrence of hormone-positive breast cancer are well documented, but human sexuality is a lot more nuanced than plain biology allows.

At just eight half-hour episodes, Dying for Sex is compressed and focused, with no extraneous plot or characters. It starts as dark comedy and ends as light tragedy, and the fulcrum on which the shift pivots is episode six. The episode is a perfectly crafted piece of television that revealed to me something hidden in plain sight: this show about sex, friendship and mortality is also a show about dance.

Titled “Happy Holidays,” episode six takes place over a span of a winter, from November through April. The first half of the episode moves through the holidays as she and Rob Delaney’s character, who’s just named “Neighbor Guy,” let down their defenses and start to catch feelings for each other. Woven through these scenes is the B-plot, in which the members of Molly’s Stage 4 support group are charged with writing the story of what scares them and then, as another member reads their words out loud, they are asked to express the words in movement.

“I feel so stupid,” complains Margaret Cho, playing a skeptical member of the group. “I mean she’s reading what I wrote, but I’m dancing?”

“She’s gonna read what you wrote out loud and you just gotta move along with it,” says Sonya, leading the group. “Try to find where the fear lives in your body. You got this.”

I’ve done this exercise before; it’s a common choreographic tool – using a narrative, or even just random words, to generate movement that becomes the raw material of a dance. I’ve never experienced it in a therapeutic setting but I’m not surprised it works to foster mind-body connection, even if it surely often generates eye-rolling responses like Cho’s (whose character name I can’t remember). Dance/movement therapy is well-established to increase body awareness and agency in clients whose relationship to their bodies has been ruptured by trauma, and to strengthen interoception, or the ability to perceive the signals the body is sending, like hunger, thirst, and pain, and identify how they affect one’s emotional state and well-being.

Cut to the next scene, which involves a Hanukkah celebration on the floor of the hallway of Molly’s apartment building. Nikki (who has by now lost her job and her boyfriend and moved in with Molly) and her sister are out in the hall with a menorah because Molly is in her apartment fooling around with Neighbor Guy. All is going well … until he tells her he loves her, and she dissociates, her ears ringing. A blurry figure of a man – her abuser – appears over her shoulder and, with the voice of her seven-year-old self breathing “go, go” in her ear, she locks herself in the bathroom.

Back in group, it’s Molly’s turn. “The first person who told me he loved me was my mother’s boyfriend,” Margaret Cho reads, as Molly stands frozen. “He made me say it back to him. He made me say the words. I think he knew he was taking away love from me. He’s there every time love is there.”

Molly shakes her head. “I’m sorry this isn’t going to work for me. I don’t need to dance about something that happened 30 years ago,” she spits. “It isn’t going to change anything.”

“I don’t want to be happy,” she later says to Nikki, after she’s been hospitalized for deep vein thrombosis. It’s New Year’s Eve now, she’s wearing a hideous 80s party dress Nikki found at the thrift store, and she’s about to check herself out AMA so that she can go give some loser a handjob in his truck, which goes about as well as you’d expect.

Later, in a wrenching scene back at her apartment, tears streaking through her glitter makeup, she confesses to Nikki that she thinks the abuse was her fault. “I tried to hold his hand, and he told me to stop being a child,” she sobs. And then … she starts to dance – tentatively at first, trailing her finger across her face and then moving into her arm and shoulder before rising to move with her full body, shaking, heaving, punching the air, arching her back, kicking and stretching to the ceiling.

Throughout the show, we get glimpses of Molly’s younger self: watching, listening, questioning at times. Every time she appears, she’s wearing a baby pink leotard, tights, and ballet shoes, her hair pulled back in a bun. It’s never discussed – no one ever mentions she took dance lessons as a child – and I think in this context the costume is as much a signifier of “innocence” as it is the universally recognized dress code for Beginning Ballet. But it’s hard to ignore, once you notice it. As a child, Molly was a dancer, who believed in her body’s innate ability to generate beauty, and joy. And her abuser – her mother’s boyfriend – took away not just love but that as well.

Watching Williams dance around Molly’s apartment in her bad red dress was more moving, to me, than the inevitable scene of her death. It is the emotional release of the show. In this moment of weird expressive dance she forgives herself and starts to heal — something signaled by the very next scene, in which she reconnects with Neighbor Guy on the street, on a beautiful spring day, after avoiding him for months.

As she says to Nikki, near the very end of the series, dying, “My body did a good job.”

It’s easy to feel, like Margaret Cho’s character and like Molly, that dance is embarrassing or pointless. I still fight that feeling every time I open my mouth on the subject. But here’s this huge mainstream show – which will probably win everyone involved heaps of Emmys – that has the audacity to depict the trauma of abuse and illness as something that can be made whole by going all in on embodied experience, be it kinky sex or improv dance. It’s truly a remarkable thing.