The Four Seasons - an SSL Review

Hello all - I’ve clearly been on hiatus since the fall, but I’m slowly getting back to more writing. I love this work. I just think after almost 20 years of it, I’m needing a bit more rest time. Enjoy a quick TV SSL Review.

Four Seasons

I watched the Four Seasons 1981 movie a long time ago. I’m kind of a sucker for 1970s and 80s “gritty/realistic” relationship movies. It’s a genre I’m always actively in search of. So, certainly, I checked this new 2025 Netflix TV series based on it. We binged it in one night. And to my great surprise there were some interesting lady-gasm references that I found interesting and were also quick and small enough for me to write about quickly.

The Four Seasons (2025 Netflix TV Series)

An SSL Review (for those that don't know about them)

Only depiction or discussion of female orgasm and/or female masturbation and/or the clit and/or cunnilingus are eligible for SSL Review. Nothing else counts, including plain 'ol sex if it doesn't include anything listed above. I specifically critique the realism (for instance, were the physical things happening to that women while she orgasmed things that could realistically cause orgasm for a woman?) and also speak on what the depiction/discussion reflects from and adds to the larger cultural discussion around lady-gasms and female sexuality.

You can see all the SSL TV Reviews HERE (and as always you can find all the movie SSL Reviews HERE).

The Ladygasm Scenes

Both scenes are in Episode 5 and revolve around the college-age daughter, Lila, of a main character who recently left his wife for a much younger women. She’s a bit upset about the whole thing and she’s created a play (I think it’s some sort of thesis play, probably) that her parents and their good friends are there to see it.

Surface-gasms

Before the play, one of Lila’s parent’s friends is talking about her college life and asks Lila if she prefers writing or acting. She replies with:

“Acting is fun, but it’s a surface pleasure, like a clitoral orgasm. Writing is more G-Spot”

I have to say when I hear things like this in media I get excited. Not because it’s a cool or good thing to say, but because it soooo clearly captures how NOT far our sexual culture has come from the Freudian times of gaslighting females into believing their normal orgasmic functioning is unimportant, silly, and lesser compared to another, completely made-up, type of orgasm gained from stimulating inside the vaginal canal Surprise, surprise - this ‘better’ orgasm coincides with a male getting orgasmic pleasure from stimulating his penis inside a vagina - who could have guessed.

I mean, how wild is it that both men and women have not only been convinced that at least some women can experience orgasm from stimulating inside the vaginal canal (this has never been physically verified as true in all of scientific literature), but that it’s actually a better and more important type of pleasure or orgasm.

It’s like if somehow we were able to convince men that penile orgasms were not that important - just basic and surface, but the real and deep pleasure/orgasms come from the tongue/lip stimulation they get from stimulating ladies’ clits. It’s just the greatest grift ever pulled on us ladies because we buy into it too.

I mean, in this TV series, this sentiment was spoken by a college aged woman in 2025. It is a clear reminder that we have not come very far from Freud telling women that the clitoral orgasm is immature and the vaginal orgasm in mature. It’s stuck around by wearing different wrappings. We might speak the word clitoris more often than we did 20, 40, 80, years ago, but we still do not have the kind of respect and understanding it deserves. We still underplay it’s importance in order to uphold the culture’s desperate obsession with the superiority of penetrative heterosexual intercourse. And we do it without even understanding how problematic and old-timey it is.

What I’d like to remind everyone here is that CLITORAL ORGASMS ARE FEMALE ORGASMS - NOT JUST A TYPE OF FEMALE ORGASM. It’s like describing penile orgasms (WHICH ARE MALE ORGASMS) as a type of ‘surface’ orgasm compared to the 6-course meal of prostate stimulation. Firstly, just like the g-spot for females, the male prostate has never, in all of scientific literature, been shown to cause an orgasm. An ejaculation, yes. But an orgasm is a different physiological event from an ejaculation. I’m actually surprised that Lila mentioned the G-spot, because it’s currently a bit out-of-vogue for discussing ‘inner’ female orgasms. More often now you’ll hear about the inner clitoral legs that swell against the vaginal wall. Some even describe that as the ‘actual’ G-spot. However, stimulation of neither the g-spot nor the clitoral legs through the vaginal wall have ever been shown to cause a physically verified orgasm - despite lots of scientific investigation hell-bent on proving they do.

McDonald’s Vibrators

The second SSL discussion in the movie was during Lila’s play. There was a montage of all the wild hard-core feminist stuff in it. During the montage, characters at a table, that I think were supposed to represent female-ness at different times in history, were speaking. Who I believe to be the ‘future’ female said, “By the year 2027, marriage will be illegal and vibrators can be sold at McDonalds.” In the context of the play it’s a sort of funny line related to the larger theme in it of women being fucked over by men and being better off without them.

I don’t feel a need to go far in-depth except to say it does align vibrators with a sort of extremist, anti-man sort of view on sex, and I don’t love that alignment.

Instead of a vibrator being seen as a sexual tool that could be enjoyed by all parties within a sexual experience, this scene kind of leans toward an older way of viewing it that is not cooperative and plays on old-timey men’s fears of getting barred from access to female sexuality (because the vibrator takes their place). The McDonald’s line also reminded me of further discourse I’ve heard about clitoral orgasms being ‘surface.’ In fact, a common thing one might hear related to clitoral orgasms - specifically with vibrators- is that they are like a McDonald’s meal compared to a “deeper inner-orgasm” that is more like a nutritious 6-course gourmet meal.

The Vulva Rating

People are often skeptical when I say that compared to the early 1900s there is a still just about as strong an undercurrent of disdain, discomfort, and discounting of any female sexual functioning that doesn’t cooperate easily with traditional male hetero forms of sexual interactions (mainly P-in-V intercourse). So, I appreciate lines like in this show that mirror this sad cultural stagnation - just because I have a simple contemporary line to point to.

Otherwise, I’m very sad lines like these are still put out there with no pushback. I imagine all the tween and teens out there that might see this. Out of nowhere, they just get this little infusion of information telling them that clitoral orgasm are lame. It reminds us how very far we have NOT come.

It also reminds me that, as a culture, we contort our experiences, science, and logic to assure everyone that we don’t actually need to do the tough work of fundamentally changing how we do sexual interactions in order to finally give women the space they need to find orgasmic pleasure in heterosexual interactions. We just need to BELIEVE, with little to no sensible scientific evidence, that doing what we’ve been advised to do for the 80 year, a little clitoral glans foreplay followed by intercourse, is actually the the way to achieve the deepest and most ‘not-surface’ female orgasmic response.

I give this show 1 vulva. At least it says the word clit and mentions a vibrator, so that brings it up from 0 vulvas, but the casual burn on clitoral orgasms it dropped was unnescesary and overall a shitty, backwards contribution to the cultural consciousness of lady-gasms.

(!)