The Ugly Truth’s Cynical Rewrite of Sally’s Fake Orgasm

Everyone remembers when Meg Ryan operatically faked an orgasm in the middle of Katz’s Deli in When Harry Met Sally [2]. She did it to prove to the cocky Billy Crystal that, even with his apparently prodigious sexual experience, he couldn’t tell the difference between a real orgasm and one that was expertly faked. Sally’s open-air climax was an effort to puncture Harry’s cocky assumption that his partners “have a pretty good time.” Meanwhile, Sally replaces the pleasure she’s apparently not getting from sex with the satisfaction of making Harry squirm. First, she gets the upper hand. Eventually, after finally hooking up with Harry, she presumably gets her real orgasm and true love.

Twenty years after Harry and Sally’s lunch date, a hit, R-rated comedy is broadcasting a decidedly different attitude regarding the intersection of male ego and female pleasure. The Ugly Truth, a deeply bitter twist on the romantic comedy, has its own restaurant orgasm scene. This time the woman, played by Katherine Heigl, has a real orgasm. But it’s manipulated by remote control and happens in entirely embarrassing circumstances. The point is not her humiliation, exactly; it’s even more cynical than that. Whether it’s real or fake or manufactured doesn’t matter. It’s the good performance that counts. “A fake orgasm is better than no orgasm at all,” her love interest, played by Gerald Butler, tells her.

The plot of The Ugly Truth hews pretty closely to When Harry Met Sally. Heigl plays Abby, the uptight, blonde producer of an unsuccessful local morning show. In an effort to goose ratings, her station manager gives a regular segment on her show to Mike (Butler)—a Neanderthal whose specialty is recommending that women who want to land a man should focus chiefly on appearances. “If you want a relationship, here’s how you get one,” he advises on-air. “It’s called a Stairmaster. No one falls in love with your personality at first sight.”

The crux of Mike and Abby’s relationship is established in an early scene where, over coffee, he explains in detail What Men Want—and begins molding her into the woman he wants her to be. He tells her that it’s important for her to flatter a man with positive responses, but cheerfully admits that the authenticity of that response—whether she’s laughing at a man’s jokes or quivering at his touch – is “irrelevant.”

Sally broke through Harry’s apeish tendencies by teaching him to see past “first sight.” In the end, when he is trying to win her back, Harry makes a laundry list of all her faults and explains that he loves her because of them. In The Ugly Truth, the opposite happens. Like Sally, the Heigl character initially resists the oaf who is trying to seduce her. But then she begins to absorb his lesson. At one point in their coffee conversation, she giggles and he says, “That’s good! Real or fake?” With a dead-serious game face, she responds, “You’ll never know.”

"Real or fake" is the question that hangs over the movie. A real orgasm happens in fake circumstances, and a fake one during real sex. After she makes the mistake of admitting a lack of familiarity with orgasms, Mike buys her a pair of vibrating panties, which she “accidentally” wears at a dinner in the presence of Mike, her hunky would-be boyfriend and a number of business superiors. The remote control to the panties “accidentally” ends up in the hand of a curious child. Poor Abby is left trying to explain marketing initiatives mid-shudder, as Mike smiles bemusedly at the convulsions he’s indirectly responsible for.

Later, Mike poses the question “fake or real?” in bed, while he and Abby are still having sex. Again, she responds, “You’ll never know.” Both laugh like it was silly for him to ask in the first place. In the moment of her fake orgasm, Sally was being more honest with Harry than she’d ever been. She was taking control of the sexual dialogue and demanding that Harry—and by extension the entire male audience—acknowledge that female pleasure has to matter to both partners. In The Ugly Truth real pleasure is beside the point. There is no authenticity, only performance.

The Ugly Truth is just the natural next step in the disintegration of the romantic comedy, which lately seems queasy about overt female sexuality. Juno [3] and Knocked Up [4] tell us sex necessarily results in unplanned pregnancy and general chaos; Forgetting Sarah Marshall [5] and Superbad [6]show women who aggressively instigate sex getting brutally rejected; (500) Days of Summer tells us that women with a healthy appetite for sex are ultimately heartless and out to ruin the lives of sensitive man-boys. In Judd Apatow’s world, Sally would be the loser.

When Harry Met Sally has a happy ending because a man and a woman repelled by their first impressions of each other break through their mutual façades and fall in love with the truth, ugly or otherwise. The Ugly Truth has a "happy" ending because neither partner has an interest in breaking through. Abby takes control of the sexual narrative by submitting to his vision, and refusing to make her sexual pleasure a roadblock to a good relationship. Mike happily submits to a relationship based on deception. In The Ugly Truth’s dark vision of contemporary heterosexuality, neither partner wants to truly connect.

The Ugly Truth was written by three women, and produced by Heigl. Surely they didn’t want to just offer a retrograde vision of sexual roles. The generous reading of the movie is that Abby's willingness to take her actual pleasure out of the equation seems reasonable in a world where so many female movie characters are punished or vilified for genuinely wanting sex. In the new romantic comedy, preserving the right to fake it counts as some form of power.