Parents' Guide to The Year I Started Masturbating

The premise of The Year I Started Masturbating could be a great spark for important conversations about gender roles in society, but this is too inept and feeble to do any such thing. Given its title and frequent use of graphic sexual language and descriptions that suggest women let their "vaginas do their thinking," this is a peculiarly unsensual, dull story. The hapless woman at its center seems to learn almost nothing from her troubles, except that she wants "to be mediocre," not exactly a destination designed to thrill an audience. Not only does this character feel unbelievable -- a woman who is a star at work but who seems incapable of making an intelligent decision in every other realm -- but the world she lives in does not feel real. No one who quit her job one minute and is dumped by her live-in boyfriend and father of her child the next would not call her boss immediately and get her job back. No one in her upper-middle-class position would agree to leave her child and the apartment she has lived in for years until securing another place to live with a space for the child. There is no universe in which she wouldn't instantly cancel the purchase of an expensive sofa she can no longer afford before it's delivered. But as plot points, each of these massive errors brings her to the next misadventure and another opportunity to make another idiotic mistake.

Beyond that, the movie's fundamental premise is offensive. Imagine a male protagonist embracing the notion that he should "do the thinking with his penis." It would be widely mocked, boycotted, and canceled. Telling a man, "Prioritize your penis," is just another way of saying, "Live your life without using your brain." Does anyone find that useful or liberating? For generations, women have decried men who put urges dictated by their genitals first and everything else second. Those men are widely thought to be self-centered, chauvinistic, uncivilized, and insensitive. Yet if a woman does the same, it's supposed to signal her enlightenment and liberation? Talk about double standards. Healthy sexual pleasure is certainly important. Instead of encouraging the thoughtlessness that can accompany the pursuit of random sexual pleasure for its own sake, perhaps a real friend could tell Hanna to imbue her life with more thought-full-ness.