Dying for Sex showrunner Kim Rosenstock talks about all of the communities affected by the FX on Hulu limited series as well as the love stories within it.
FX on Hulu’s Dying for Sex is about more than one woman’s sexual quest while living with terminal cancer: It covers sexual abuse, divorce, disability, and female friendship.
Showrunner Kim Rosenstock says of all the communities the limited series overlaps with, there’s one that has been the most responsive: the breast cancer community, especially Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer.
“One woman in a message board said, ‘I can’t believe people who didn’t have Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer wrote this,'” says Rosenstock. “It feels like it’s written for us, and it’s our language. And I feel like that response has meant the world.”
Rosenstock says the kink community has also felt really seen and represented by the show.
“Honestly, that has meant a ton to us. That the actual communities we are portraying are watching it and are seeing themselves in it, possibly seeing themselves represented in a way that feels truthful for the first time for some of them, it means everything.”
That was the whole goal, after all, when Molly Kochan started the Dying for Sex podcast with her best friend Nikki Boyer more than five years ago. She wasn’t hearing about the kind of experience she was going through, being a woman living with a terminal illness who still wanted to experience sex and love.
“Life continues to be many things and you continue to laugh. You continue to have weird, bad days. You continue to have funny days. You continue to have joyful moments, and you do sometimes continue to have sex. And in some cases you get really horny and you don’t know what to do. Or if you’re single, you still want to date. You still want to meet somebody. You still want to fall in love. It’s not dying with this disease: It’s living with this disease.”
Why Dying for Sex Does Not Focus on Penetrative Sex
For the real-life Molly Kochan, penetrative sex was not enjoyable. Because of this, Dying for Sex examines the many different ways to experience sexual pleasure.
“I think we’re very used to on-screen seeing one kind of sex and one way of achieving ecstasy or orgasm, or there’s one, and it’s A to B. The woman falls down on the bed, the man lies down on top of her, cue amazing song, look, gazing into eyes, cut away to the next morning where they’re like cuddling and talking about where they’re going to go get coffee. That is one kind of sex, but by no means is it the only kind, and actually it’s really, it can be really limiting to think that’s the ideal or the only goal. We wanted to change the conversation, and we’re not the only ones doing this, but I think we had this opportunity to put on-screen a lot of different kinds of ways of having sex. There are infinite numbers of ways.”
On a lesser show, Neighbor Guy (Rob Delaney), the man who enjoys being kicked in the balls, would be seen as a “freak”; here, he’s Molly’s love interest.
“We worked with this amazing sex researcher, Emily Nagoski, who wrote this incredible book, Come As You Are. The number one question she receives from her students is, am I normal? And it’s, can we get rid of that question? It should be, what do I like? What feels good? How can I find that? Not, what is normal? What’s wrong with me? How can I make myself like what’s normal? How can I change and figure out how I can like what’s normal? That is such a damaging way of framing sex.”
Treating the Act of Death like a Romantic Comedy
Rosenstock and showrunner Liz Meriwether also wanted to change the way we look at death. For the finale “It’s Not That Serious,” she was reluctant to write it.
“I didn’t want to write it because I didn’t want her to die. And I think both Liz and I had worked on this for five years. We lived with this character who is again, inspired by a real person who we never got to meet. She died before we started making this, not long before. Certainly Liz and I, we fell into this fantasy world where maybe, maybe Molly doesn’t die. Maybe she lives, even though we knew that was actually a really important part of the story. We were never going to not end it that way, but I think it was like, well, once we write this episode, she’s, she’s gone. And we love her. She’s so alive.”
Rosenstock says they went into the episode knowing they wanted to portray death with the same level of truthfulness as they did sex. While it is a love story between Molly and Neighbor Guy as well as the friendship between Molly and Nikki (Jenny Slate), it’s also a love story between a woman and her body.
“It’s like this wake-up call that happens. It’s like the running-to-the-airport scene at the end of a rom-com where she’s like, wait, I never got to know my body. I don’t want to die not knowing myself. Her body was just waiting for her to turn towards it again and start listening to it again.”
Dying for Sex is streaming on FX on Hulu.
