What is your fantasy, Babygirl?

If someone starts to boss me around, even if I were in a really fun place—say, a yacht in the Mediterranean—I will jump off. I can swim. I will swim somewhere where I am not being dominated.

I am bracing myself for Babygirl, but I don’t want to watch it. I love Nicole Kidman. When I come back in my next life, I want to look like her. I want her back, her legs, her flawless skin, her piles of hair, her accent! I have seen all of her movies (even that one with Zac Effron, what was that?).

I loved Eyes Wide Shut. I got it. It was about fantasy. Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) had many intense fantasies that he didn’t act on, and Alice (Nicole Kidman) had fantasies of orgies and wild nights of the past, but in the end, they remained married and monogamous. His fantasies were kinky and wild. So were hers. But the implication was that fantasies are free, and you get to have them, but you stay with your partner.

In Miranda July’s Substack, she argues that monogamy shouldn’t last forever. Women didn’t invent it, don’t need it, and if they stick with it, they’ll be taking care of an old man in a house alone.

It’s a great image, though I wonder: what about your family carousing around you? What about your children, your grandchildren, and your friends? What about your glorious, self-constructed Blue Zone life of community and creation? What about that possibility? That’s what I lean into.

Back to Babygirl.

The statistics show that the film’s director, Halina Reijn, is on to something. About 60% of women fantasize about being dominated by men. About 53% of men fantasize about being dominated by women. Approximately 59% of women fantasize about other women, while only 20-25% of men fantasize about other men (or admit to this in surveys). And at the top, about 98% of men fantasize about women who are not their wives.

Our fantasy lives can vary drastically from our real lives.

One of the reasons Babygirl is popular is because women want to watch media that plays into their fantasy lives. My own reluctance is that although I have my own fantasy life, which I am not going to spill here, it does not include being dominated. If someone starts to boss me around, even if I were in a really fun place—say, a yacht in the Mediterranean—I will jump off. I can swim. I will swim somewhere where I am not being dominated.

Some are made for flight, some are made to fight, some are made for negotiation. My first instinct would be to run, fly, jump, get the hell out of there.

When I watch the trailers and the kid says, “Get down on your knees,” I’m thinking:

“Leave, don’t go back. Go.”

No part of me thinks,

“Fun, exciting!”

A lawyer said to me, “Most marriages end because of sex and money.”

But there are other issues for divorce post-millennium. These include troubles like substance abuse, mental health struggles, and a lack of shared values. Post-election, there has been an uptick in divorce filings.

In the lead-up to their marriage, my daughter and her wife did couples counseling to build a solid foundation for communication. I like to think that this helped them have a shared dream of what their life together would be, complete with pets, a garden, a growing family, and lots of love.

Fantasies aren’t inherently sexual.

As a professor, I used to have my students write an essay on the theme, “What is your big dream?”

The essay that still stands out to me started, My dream is to be a secret agent who is known all over the world, and when I am, I’ll drive my car up the Shaw and everyone will see me.

When my student got up in front of the class and read his opening paragraph, another student said, “So you’re a Black James Bond, but you’re still driving up Crenshaw Boulevard?”

“Why not?” he said. “What’s wrong with Crenshaw Boulevard?” It made sense to me. He wanted to be someone and to be seen by his tribe. Don’t we all want that?

We have dreams we act on, and we have dreams that remain in our heads. I like that movies, books, plays, and music—like Pan’s Labyrinth and Shape of Water—give space for those dreams to be played out. And maybe right now, after falling out of the boat, we need a bit of escape as we flail in the water.

I will go see Babygirl to watch Nicole, to peek into someone else’s fantasy life. We aren’t towers. We aren’t brick walls. We can change our minds.

A fantasy is an open door that allows us to try on someone else’s life for a moment. With a safe word. With a way out.

In the fantasy of my life, I am ready to be anything. I am finishing my memoir, Sailing the Milky Way. My first novel, Under a Neon Sun, is still walking around the world. Red Hen Press is about to be the biggest indie publisher on the West Coast.

We are changing the world, one story at a time. And when we do, we’ll drive down Lake Avenue in my Honda (with its 200,000 miles) and celebrate. I will buy another safer vehicle.

We have a saying at Red Hen: “What matters is how we walk through fire.” We didn’t mean literal fire. After the Los Angeles fires, the staff came back into the smoky air and all got pneumonia. Soon, we are going to fix Red Hen's roof, which blew off in the storm. (Give us a literal break.) Now, we need to come back like we’re storming the canyons.

I have told the Red Hen staff: I have skin in the game. When we sell 25,000 copies of a book, I get a tattoo. When we sell a book to a movie, I get a tattoo. When we get a million-dollar donation, I get a tattoo. By the end of 2025, I’ll be posting pictures of my first tattoos.

My bedroom fantasies are too crazy to print, but make no mistake—success, tattoos, and all this joy are hurling toward me.