A Reflection on the movie “Friends With Benefits”

The following reflects my older sister Nzingha Sibongile Job’s thoughts on the summer movie “Friends with Benefits” starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

I found myself tearing up while reminiscing on the events of this movie. I guess it reminded me of my own struggle to accept the reality that I have not been able to earn the undiluted, unafraid love of a man who could also satisfy my physical desires.

I found myself thinking of Mila’s cute-as-a-button Ukrainian-American face, distraught, cracked like a Picasso cubist painting, after having valiantly struggled to be tough, vivacious, not needing compliments or emotional support; after bending over herself like Elastagirl of The Incredibles to protect herself from her own arguably natural feminine desire to mate for life, finally snapping back into that inexorably vulnerable female shape we all know so well.

I found myself fragmented into selves: the young, spoiled one who cried, inconsolable, unaccepting of reality, bitter and sore at her parents and elders who were not bothered to devise a pseudo-marital scheme by which she could find a way to acquire physical companionship on a regular basis when her hormones felt most ready for it, and so exposed her to the degrading option of friends-with-benefits proposals, and to the horrible realization that without seriously considering them, she could possibly never experience a nude hug before her death; the one who, jaded, sneered at that self, saying “Grow up. What did you expect? An arranged marriage? Then you’d be crying about how they should have given you your freedom”; and the one who said: “I don’t even want to write about this—everything I can say has already been said, and I won’t add anything to this that isn’t already there.”

I was right not to go into my past prosaic soliloquys about the insensitivities of current elders and parents to their children’s vulnerability to the sexual imperative in a whole new world where marriage isn’t done as quickly after puberty as it always had been until about a couple hundred years ago. I recently got a dog, and I’ve learned it’s just hard to prioritize anyone else’s needs as highly as yours. We’re naturally self-interested.

And I think a lot of the time those of us who are disappointed about love are simply not self-interested enough. I feel that way about myself. If I had been a better, fuller, more intensely coloured flower, some best bee would have insisted on having me for his own exclusive nectar source by now. What’s more is this: if I had been a better, fuller, more intensely coloured flower, I would feel happier, prouder, more content with myself, satisfied that even if no one ever claimed me, and I was indeed ‘born to blush unseen’ and ‘waste [my] fragrance on the desert wind’, that I was also, indeed, quite a bloom to reckon with.

Further, it’s not unattainable, my perfection as that bloom. There’s a way for me to be the best I can be. And achieving it can make me more visible to, and more capable of dealing with, anyone who really deserves to claim me. I’m happy to take the opportunity to make myself feel better about myself and to make myself a better relationship partner on my own.

But when it comes to sex, I feel that I am a whale…I can go very long periods without it; I must eventually come up for it. Everything in society and religious upbringing tells me to feel guilty about feeling like celibacy is a long period of holding my breath, or exhaling, and feeling that sexual intercourse, properly done, is like an opportunity to inhale fresh air, to be held, naked, vulnerable, not out of pity or concern, but out of love for myself and love for life itself.

I would prefer to experience it married, safe or supported, in the event of a pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. But there is no one going down on one knee for me. And my ‘type’, a not at all unreasonable profile involving health, hygiene, fitness, intelligence, manners, and financial acumen, is usually taken, or not in my geographical area. In the meantime, my face, buttocks and breasts sag a little more each year, and self-served orgasm tastes more and more like a hot dish gone cold.

My spoiled hopeless romantic idealist inner self may look at romantic movies or read romantic books and think: “All these beautiful rapturous images, shall I experience them when I am old and grey? Shall I never feel love as thunder rolling through my chemically stormy youthful frame?” And tears come to her eyes, while my jaded inner self says: “Oh what melodrama. Small t’ing. It is what it is. You just wasting energy bothering with any of this.  When yuh dead, it ain’t gonna matter how many orgasms you had or with whom, just what kinda work you leave behind, and that will only be to a very few people anyhow. It is what it is.”

At the end it all comes down to what you believe about life and its nature. If you believe in an afterlife where you’ll go to hell for fornicating, then no amount of torturous skin hunger will cause you to fornicate. You’ll tell yourself as many times as it takes that it’s only for a time. And it probably would be, because, as we all know, this, too, shall pass. But if you believe that life is to be lived now, while you’re conscious of it in the temporal realm, and since you don’t know your day or hour of departure, you’ll try to breathe in as much clean air as you can…nobody likes inhaling smog, and we all know it’s bad for you. But intimacy, the real kind, the kind that lets you be yourself and inhale your love of yourself and life, in body and mind, that’s something you won’t be able to pass up for an indefinite amount of time, with no reprieves or guarantees. It would be like forgoing breathing.