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'Giving Mom the Talk' turns one of the most mortifying situations imaginable into a warm, funny, and deeply moving conversation about female pleasure and motherhood. Through the relationship between a millennial daughter and her gynaecologist mother, the film explores how South Asian women have often been taught about their bodies but rarely given permission to prioritise their own desire.
"Have you ever had an orgasm, mom?" is not a question I would ever envision asking my mom anywhere except my worst nightmare. But in the short Giving Mom the Talk, we see a millennial daughter pose her mom that exact question. Awkwardly, but endearingly
To get there, though, the film first puts us through something I wouldn't wish upon even my worst enemy: your mother walking in on you mid-pleasure. Let's set the scene: you are mid-swoon, mid-something, mid-everything, when the door swings open and there she is, the woman who potty-trained you and packed your lunch for a decade. It's horrifying, even writing this makes my should leave my body. But this mortifying inciting incident turns into one of the tenderest, funniest conversations you'll watch a mother and daughter have on screen.
Meena, the mother in question — a gynaecologist, mind you, a woman who has personally guided women through childbirth — turns to her daughter with a sincerity that is filled with hesitation : how did you get him to do that?
Meena spends her professional life inside the female reproductive system. She knows the cervix like the back of her hand. And yet the concept of her own pleasure is filed somewhere deep inside. She can explain an orgasm in a clinical textbook diagram but she has never asked for one.
That's the joke, but it's also the gut-punch. Female pleasure in South Asian households doesn't get hidden because nobody knows about it but because knowing and wanting are treated as two entirely separate categories. Sex education (which is my school was teaching us about our menstrual cycles, us being only the girls because god forbid boys know how the female body works) , sanitation, fertility — sure, occasionally, with shame being the elephant in the room. But desire? Fantasy? Asking for what you want, out loud, to the man you've shared a bed with for years? That's a different kind of vocabulary that nobody gets handed out, particularly to the women of our moms' generation.
The film is disarming in its honest and successful attempt and not making this a tragic story of a repressed woman that somehow involves a tearful confession and families getting estranged. Instead, the daughter, even though she mortified, gives her mom the 'talk'. And it's kind of sweet? Kind of funny? She's invested and wants her mom to have this. She even gives her very accessible advice about how she can approach her fantasies without feeling shame. She answers Meena's initial question of how she got her partner to do what she wanted.
Because let's be honest, most of us were raised to believe our mothers materialised somewhere around our own birth, fully formed, with no interior life, especially involving anything as undignified as horniness. We built her a pedestal and then, conveniently, never checked what she might want to get down off it for. Giving Mom the Talk dismantles that pedestal with a crowbar, with a woman who's spent decades being extremely good at everyone else's needs and catastrophically undertrained in her own.
Because here is a gynaecologist who has answered every conceivable question a stranger could ask about her body, in a professional capacity, calmly, with a straight face, and she still can't get one sentence out to her own husband. If she can't ask, the film seems to say, then the problem was never access to information, but permission. Nobody told her that wanting something in bed after twenty years of marriage wasn't a betrayal of modesty; it was just Tuesday.
The film makes one thing very clear. Pleasure should not be a privilege, feeling good and having autonomy over our bodies, especially sexually should not be inaccessible. And 'Giving Mom the Talk', gives not only Meena but also its viewers 'the talk' in an extremely unique and endearing way, forcing us to think about the overdue conversations about the humanity behind experiencing pleasure.
Finally, on a not too far but random tangent, I never thought I'd watch someone masturbate on screen wearing a nightie, and I know all the grandmothers and mothers across India would feel deeply seen watching it. So if you're feeling bold enough, send this film to your mum to help her feel a little more liberated. You can watch it here
