Hidden gem | Minx review: When the dildo was a political statement

The HBO Max series is a feminist comedy.

Minx on Amazon Prime Video is one of the most political, yet breezy and fun series to have come out in recent times. A team of largely women writers and directors—with Ellen Rapoport (writer of Desperados, 2020) helming it as creator and writer—is behind it.

The HBO Max series is a feminist comedy. Does that sound oxymoronic? Can a feminist story also be a comedy; isn’t feminism all hectoring about what’s wrong with the way the world treats women? Well, that’s unfortunately been the standard narrative—or at least the standard perception. In between the binaries that rule cultural conversations today—opinions that are politically correct to a fault on one hand, and aggressive bullying and manipulative strategies associated with far-right belief systems on the other—being feminist has somewhat lost all complexity.

Minx, although set in the 1970s, the music, costumes, hairstyles et al., posits a feminism that feels real today. Its feminism is more 2022 than 1975; more feminist blogging than Germaine Greer. And that’s the show’s hooky credo. It harks back to the feminist slogan “Give me bread, but give me roses too”. Rapoport and her team of writers clearly go with the premise that dry hectoring treatises about gender equality people don’t necessarily seduce readers or listeners. What moves people is imagining the good life—and talking about desire and pleasure. Some of that posturing is shallow and unconvincing—sexy photos of nude men and “dick pics”, for example, isn’t the sugar pill that makes feminism go down easy.

These are the people hustling along the series: Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), a feminist graduate from Vassar University reluctantly agrees to edit a magazine for porn publisher Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson). Joyce’s original template for the magazine, with the strident-sounding title Matriarchy Awakens, would have articles about equal pay and marital rape written with the seriousness that she flashes everywhere she goes and anyone she talks to. But for obvious reasons, singular perhaps more to the 1970s than today, no moneybag wants to publish it. Doug is willing to back her with his company Bottom Dollar, a medium-sized pornography publisher in the West Coast. He believes women want to see pictures of sexy naked men and he hopes that padding the porn with Joyce’s high-minded writing will make it an easier sell. Joyce hates the idea of porn—in her head as well as in her own life, she finds the idea of sexual pleasure uneasy. Still, she goes along, because otherwise, her idea will never find an outlet.

The characters, besides the antagonist-cum-collaborator duo of Joyce and Doug who populate Bottom Dollar have signature flourishes: Bambi (Jessica Lowe) is a nude model for the company wildly popular among readers, but who is resourceful enough to know how to make Minx float in he face of hostile outrage among society and power groups; Richie (Oscar Montoya) is a photographer who is as driven by beauty in his art as by simple camaraderie; Tina (Idara Victor) is a black managerial genius whose race is more a reflection of her employer than herself; and Shelly (Lennon Parham), Joyce’s sister whose arc in the story proves that liberation of any kind is meaningless with pleasure and sexual fulfilment. All the actors efficiently hold the ensemble, but the stand-out performance is that of Johnson, as a megalomaniac hustler.

The characters are without elaborate back stories, and the first five episodes of the 10-episodes series breaks down the pleasure principle stridently, with lots and lots of penises in front of the camera. The overabundance of the penis is quite a misfire, and you’ll know what I am saying when you watch the show. Even Joyce, at the centre of it all, hardly has any kind of deep unraveling—we just see her go from puritan to orgasms proportionate to size and shape of the object of desire. Lovibond carries this one-dimensional expansion of her feminist self with enough brio and she makes it seem worth the fight. Joyless progressivism finds expression in New York, which Joyce visits after a fall-out with Doug, but her New York friends sneer at her little porn magazine and Bottom Dollar employees during a dinner conversation—probably true to its time, but the scene feels very now, with belligerent accents on trauma talk and self-care. Joyce, true to her transformation, decides to ditch the party and follow a cute guy to a bar and returns to her friend’s apartment with an eloquent love bite on her neck, unapologetic about her will to just have fun. This is after the hostility against and outrage over nude male centrefolds of Minx from various quarters, including a protesting group that calls themselves M.E.N Offensive whose agenda is to “Tame the Minx”.

Minx is also a very detailed portrait of the arduous process of brining out a magazine—a nostalgic ode, almost, to print journalism. The magazine as a format was at its prime in the 1970s; now it’s on the verge of being history. Joyce’s print-runs and dummies of the magazine would speak to journalists of a certain vintage.