How to please a woman - in cinemas now

At 50, Gina (played by Sally Phillip) isn't being listened to. She's pulling more than her weight at work, where her younger, more attractive colleagues get all the credit; at home, her husband has stopped noticing her. Her only joy comes from an early morning ocean swim with her girlfriends who feel her pain. So they hire her a stripper for her birthday. (Friends!! Are you reading? Forget those day spa vouchers and I don't need anymore candles.)

Enter Tom, a hunky young guy who turns up at GIna's house, telling her he'll do anything she says for the next two hours. So she gets him to clean her house. It turns out that Tom works for a removalist company that Gina's business is about to liquidate so she buys the company and goes to the lads with her idea. Sure, things get a little dirtier from there. As well as paying said man to clean the bathroom, the negotiation might include the unblocking of pipes, so to speak, or perhaps the novel use of a feather duster that doesn't involve a sideboard.

For in the end, this is what the film is all about. About women learning to ask for what they want. In life, at work, in the bedroom.

It got me to thinking about how terrible I am at asking for what I want. In so many aspects of my life. Don't want to cause too much trouble, don't want you to be inconvenienced, don't want to be seen as too aggressive. How many times have I just gone along with something rather than cause a stir. In life, at work, in the bedroom.

I had an interesting conversation with some young friends the other day about the whole idea of consent. Back in my day, I was telling them, consent wasn't really a thing. Well it was. But it was more implied. If I was there, naked in bed with you, it was okay if things happened. This whole idea of "an ongoing and mutual conversation" - which is at the core of the recently reformed ACT sexual consent laws - was just completely foreign to me. Imagine someone asking you, in the midst of the act, if it was okay for them to do this, or did that feel good. I was a long way into my sexual experience before anyone even bothered to ask if something felt good, or what it was that I wanted.

But as I sat there and watched this film, enjoying a choc top, I began to see that it should have been me setting the tone. I should have had the confidence to ask for what I wanted, to ask someone to slow down, or speed up, to ask someone to leave, or to even ask them to come back.

There's a few delightful scenes in the film where Gina arranges for her girlfriends to teach the young removalists a few lessons. Whether it be how to clean a bathroom mirror efficiently or how to listen to a woman's body, how to become more intuitive to her needs and desires. They didn't know how. One woman asks if they've learned everything from watching porn. Porn is the opposite of what women want, she tells them.

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But how do we learn how to please a woman, or a man, for that matter? For all the lessons on consent and sexuality, how do young adults learn about pleasure?

Perhaps good sex starts with being able to ask for what you want, with being able to ask what your partner wants, what works for the both of you there in the moment. Perhaps this concept of an ongoing conversation will lead to better sex for future generations. I hope so.

But I hope it does for my generation as well. The best thing about this film was that it concerned a group of women my age. Stuck in sexless marriages, single, exploring their own sexuality and freedoms. They all found the confidence to speak up and ask for what they want. We need to as well.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to come around and clean my house, perhaps shirtless with lots of bending over to dust the skirting boards, you know how to find me.