A friend mentioned that he watched 40 Year Old Virgins, a TV documentary clearly titled to exploit the success of the Steve Carrell comedy, and it immediately piqued my interest for several reasons. While reductive and clearly played for laughs, I resemble that title—I’m older. I watched The Sessions, which included a dramatic representation of the real life sexual surrogate, Cheryl Cohen-Greene, whom I was intrigued by, but frustrated that the film tried to reframe her job into a conventional Hollywood romance instead of unflinchingly representing her profession. 40 Year Old Virgins features the real woman at work, which is precisely what I wanted.
40 Year Old Virgins was more like a reality show than a documentary. It focused on two virgins, a man and a woman. The documentary’s entire premise was that they came to the US to work with a sex therapist for a specific period of time. The goal was to lose their virginity before they had to return to the UK. The British narrator is a woman, and her tone is saucy rather than neutral. I was fairly shocked by the incongruity that the guy, who was depicted as painfully shy and wounded, would even allow cameras to film him. Was he pulling our leg?
40 Year Old Virgins feels exploitive and not well-intentioned, but I did appreciate learning more about the logistics of the sessions. There is nudity and sexual situations, and it is a documentary, not porn. Remember that the Brits have less hang ups about sex and nudity than we do so that part of the documentary is rather matter of fact and straight forward and not played for laughs. The male sexual surrogate was amazingly professional because the woman pulled no punches in how she responded to him, and a more fragile man would have peaced out, job or not.
Cohen-Greene, who is in her 60s and is a breast cancer survivor, deserves a documentary profile. How did she get into this work? How did she live in this American society and have zero hang ups about her body, sex and her profession? Usually women feel great or awful about some of their features, but she presents as neutral as any other living being that isn’t human. What is her daily life like? How did she meet her husband? She has sex with her patients. I would love for her to be the main feature at some point.
40 Year Old Virgins is not a must see documentary. It has a somewhat mocking tone and feels like it is laughing at the subjects rather than with them. If you are adverse to the idea of real life sexual depictions, run the other way. 40 Year Old Virgins does have some value because it does show how the sessions work and what a sexual surrogate does. I hope that the subjects are satisfied with the results.