Abortion may not be the “perfect topic” for Mindy Kaling's sitcom, but anal sex is another story – Catholic jabs included.
Mindy Kaling, who came to fame with “The Office,” writes, produces and stars as an OB/GYN in the Fox comedy “The Mindy Project,” now in its third season. The Oct. 7 episode, “I Slipped,” focused on a new topic: anal sex. A topic not complete, as Kaling showed, without jokes that sexual “intent” means “they promote you to a Cardinal” as well as an eventful night of roofie-ing oneself.
To introduce the episode, Dr. Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) gushed, “I just happen to have found the most romantic boyfriend in the world.” But while, “every date is full of surprises,” she explained, “Not all surprises are equally romantic.”
Such as, the following scene suggested, anal sex. As the camera focused on a darkened room with clothes thrown about, Mindy and her “most romantic” boyfriend, Dr. Danny Castellano (Chris Messina), moaned in an adjacent room:
Mindy: "Oh my God, Danny, this is heaven. Wait! Danny, Danny, that doesn't go there! Oh my God, Danny!”
Danny: "I slipped!"
The Catholic “humor” came the next morning, when Mindy and Danny argued in their office building over their sexual encounter:
Mindy: "Okay, so you're innocent? You had no intent?"
Danny: "Of course no intent. I'm Catholic. Even if I think about that –"
Mindy: "They promote you to Cardinal?"
Danny: "Hey! Hey! That is all over. It's over. Pope Frank is on the case."
The conversation continued:
Danny: "Can we please just go talk about this in your office, please?"
Mindy: "I don't know, Danny, because my office only has one entrance and I don't know if that's enough for you anymore."
In a move that should outrage feminists, the episode continued as Mindy turned from the offensive to the defensive, whimpering, “Danny is so sexually experienced, he’s been with a ton of women. I’m worried I’m boring in bed. Is that a big problem?”
Her colleague, Dr. Peter Prentice (Adam Palley), responded, “He just expects you to know everything because you’re old.” To remedy her situation, he begins a “Banging in Bed Booty Camp” where he demonstrates sex positions for Mindy with a skeleton.
After the “camp,” Mindy concluded, “I’m going to do it [anal sex], because Danny is an amazing boyfriend, and I don’t want to lose him. So what if he wants to go to fifth base?”
To calm her fears for the big night, she turned to (what else?) a roofie. Going to the nurse practitioner in her office, she pleaded, “I need you to prescribe me something. I’m about to do something that I cannot be awake for, but I also legally can’t be asleep for.”
But when she tried to seduce Danny, he clarified, “We don’t have to do that stuff,” because, “when I’m with you, it’s enough." As a couple, he said, they were “comfortable” – like an “old shoe.” How sweet.
He went into further detail as Mindy lay in a hospital bed after her roofie consumption:
“I just tried something, all right? That’s it. Because America was built on trying things. When the pioneers went out West, on the wagon train, they didn’t know what they were going to find: bears, scorpions. But they just tried it out, and you know what they found. Gold. In America, you just go for it… yes, sometimes you pay the price, but other times, other times jackpot. Sometimes a guy just has to try something.”
“If you want to try something freaky, just run it by me first,” Mindy responded – before agreeing that “asking sucks,” when Danny asks about sex in her hospital bed. (So much for the feminist angle.)
The show closed with Danny and Mindy trying “our first freaky consensual adventure,” which consisted of whipped cream, and Mindy biting Danny (not consensual) while tied to the bed headboard with pink handcuffs (consensual).
And they lived happily ever after…
The liberal feminist sites agreed in disagreement: the show didn’t go far enough with anal. Jezebel’s Clever Hope expressed, “It's completely fine for fictional Mindy to dislike [anal sex] as a personal preference, but doesn't she know there's a booty revolution afoot?”
Expressing similar sentiments, Cosmo’s Patti Greco wrote, “Maybe I wanted to see Mindy have anal sex, though I suppose I was fine without it in the end.” Still, she found the event a “shocking treat.”
In contrast, The Catholic League President Bill Donahue responded in a statement: “Binge drinking, like anal sex, is potentially lethal, but Hollywood only has an interest in promoting the latter” and attributed the move to “homosexual writers.”
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter.
