Porn Set Women Up From the Start

Late last year, when the streaming platform formerly known as HBO Max announced the abrupt cancellation of Minx a week before Season 2 finished filming, the news struck me as grimly ironic. Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is a buoyant, ’70s-set comedy about the first feminist porn magazine, loosely based on the real-life publications Playgirl and Viva. It’s a sweet, funny, shrewd show that also features plenty of full-frontal male nudity. The effect is hard to categorize; Minx isn’t “raunchy” or “smutty” or “filthy” or even “risqué.” Unlike Euphoria or The Idol, it’s not interested in hollow provocation. And the penises that proliferate on-screen aren’t there to titillate, exactly, although a montage in the first episode brings to mind what the French film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli once described as “the frenzy of the visible.” If anything, the show’s insistent focus on male nudity feels impertinent, as though we’re all participating in a ritual desanctification of dicks. The show’s clever inversion of subject and object makes erotica seem faintly absurd: Here are men’s bodies exposed for us to look at. Take away the novelty aspect, and what’s left? What does the act of looking actually make us feel?

is about Joyce. Her side project is the antithesis of sexy. (“Why is she so ?” a bewildered executive asks, looking at Joyce’s cover subject, a frizzled activist, mouth agape, raising a fist.) But at a pitch conference, Joyce meets Doug (Jake Johnson, pulling off genial scuzzbucket as only he can), the publisher of a stable of pornographic magazines with titles such as and . Doug is venal but smart; he senses a sea change in the sexual landscape—and an opportunity. To get people to pay attention, he tells Joyce, “You gotta hide the medicine. It’s like, when you give a pill to a dog, you dip it in peanut butter first.” The medicine, in case it isn’t totally clear, is radical feminist ideas, housed within a magazine the pair name . The peanut butter? Naked men.