Washington - "I'm a crazy-sick sex addict like David Duchovny in that show and in real life," Ilana tells her best friend Abbi on the Comedy Central series Broad City.
But in a recent episode, Ilana won't let on that she's on her way to see a sex therapist because she hasn't had an orgasm since Donald Trump was elected president.
"Let it out, Ilana," the therapist says as Ilana bursts into tears. "You're not alone. Orgasms have been down 140 percent since Trump was elected. It's been horrible for everyone."
No, that's not a real statistic. Yet Ilana hasn't been alone in her sexual frustration. Several shows recently have been depicting women as unsatisfied. Like Ilana, they're determined to do something about it - and a finding man isn't necessarily part of the equation.
We know that the increase in female show-runners can lead to more diversity on screen, and all the series mentioned in this story have them. It's also leading to deeper looks at women's sexuality that are more explicit than ever before - and more critical of the status quo, where men are more likely to feel satisfied and women, frustrated.
Yes, yes, yes: We've come a long way since The Contest, the 1992 Seinfeld episode that revolved around masturbation but didn't dare utter that word. And since Sex And The City, where Samantha scheduled day-long appointments with her vibrator. A generation ago, it was groundbreaking to acknowledge that women and men took control of their own sexual pleasure if there was no one around to help. (Remember how Elaine had to convince the guys that she should be part of the contest?)
Now shows are taking the next step and saying that women deserve more in the bedroom. A recent episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for example, takes aim at male cluelessness about the female body. A millennial administrative assistant, Maya (Esther Povitsky), informs her colleague Tim (Michael McMillian) about the orgasm gap between heterosexual women and men. "Did you know that studies show that women only orgasm 39 percent of the time during sex while men finish 91 percent of the time?" Maya says. He did not. Tim is also shocked to realize that the "electric toothbrush" his wife loves so much might be another device making up for any deficits in the bedroom.
While Seinfeld danced around the notion of sexual release, today's language is a lot more explicit. Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, said on The Late Late Show With James Corden that she "had to have many conversations with legal about why it wasn't graphic or lewd" to say the word "clitoris" on the orgasm-gap episode.The body part has been mentioned on Family Guy and The Office, but Bloom says her show is the first on network television to explain the clitoris' function.
TV historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, who's written a book on Seinfeld, says current depictions of women's sex lives differ in two main ways since the Sex And The City era. "There's a little more female-centricity and a little more normalization," Armstrong says.
Female pleasure is seen as an important aspect of self-care and independence; on Being Mary Jane, for example, Gabrielle Union's character takes care of herself in her office before heading out for a date, the implication being that, however the night goes, she doesn't need a man to make her happy. And the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend conversations take place in West Covina, California.
"This isn't these exotic, wealthy, insanely thin, beautiful women of Sex And The City that felt a little untouchable," Armstrong says, adding, "Now it's a lot more just part of these fairly normal-seeming lives."