Netflix Show ‘Explains’ Female Orgasm as ‘First’ One Airs on BBC

CYBERSPACE—The August 22 episode of the Netflix documentary series Explained attempted to explain a phenomenon that apparently still remains mysterious to millions of people—the female orgasm, which according to the show, even mystifies many women. The show, produced by Vox Media, not only interviewed scientists, it also highlighted comedian Remy Kassimir, who says that she experienced something that is surprisingly common among adult women. She never had an orgasm. But at the same time that Netflix and Vox were probing the ins and outs of the female orgasms, in Britain a well-known actress was claiming that she had depicted the first-ever female orgasm shown on the country’s public television service, BBC One—a claim that was quickly disputed by Guardian columnist Zoe Williams. Actress Toni Collette—best known in the United States for her lead role in the Showtime series The United States of Tara, which ran from 2009 to 2011—appears in the new BBC series Wanderlust, a drama about a husband and wife who decide to explore sexual relationships outside of their marriage. In the first episode of the show, co-produced by the ubiquitous Netflix, Collette’s character “Joy Richards” experiences an orgasm onscreen. “Someone told me I was the first woman to have an orgasm on the BBC, and I’m happy to take the accolade,” said Collette, according to IndieWire. “It’s so honest and fresh in the way the women are portrayed,” she said. “To be a middle-aged woman, to be in a long-term relationship and to be alive dealing with a lot of things—it’s tough. Certainly a middle-aged woman’s sense of self-esteem, of sexuality, is not often talked about.” But is the scene airing on September 4, in which Collette’s character masturbates following an unsatisfactory sexual experience with a male partner, really the first time the venerable “Beeb” has depicted a woman having an orgasm? Not quite, Williams wrote. She cites the 2017 four-part crime drama Apple Tree Yard in which a character played by Emily Watson has sex with a man in an alleyway—culminating in an unmistakeable climax. But even further back, as Williams notes, actor Sean Bean gave Joely Richardson’s “Lady Chatterly” what was an orgasmic experience in the BBC adaptation of the classic erotic novel by D.H. Lawrence. Those scenes would have proven instructive to Kassimir, one of the main figures in the Netflix Explained “The Female Orgasm” episode, which can be seen by Netflix subscribers at this link.  Kassimir earned a featured spot on the Explained episode thanks to her podcast How Cum, which is entirely devoted to how women experience orgasms—or don’t experience them. “Before I started this podcast I had a lot of different views on female orgasms. For a while before I started the podcast, I didn’t think women even had orgasms. Every joke in every sitcom is about how the wife’s husband can’t make her come and doesn’t even care,” Kassimir told Time Out magazine. “There are women who come and women who don’t. And working on it is really weird. Either you’re a sexual pervert or you’re doomed to a life of no orgasms, and that’s that. But it’s so untrue!” Kassimir’s podcast can be accessed from iTunes at this link.  Photo via Columbia Pictures "When Harry Met Sally" screen capture