As you know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, sometimes I get obsessed with things. Currently I am obsessed with Severance, the sci-fi/thriller/speculative-fiction TV show – because, among numerous other reasons, it makes me think more deeply about sexuality. All my favorite media does.
A brief rundown on the premise of Severance for those unfamiliar: it’s set in a world where a mega-corporation called Lumon has created something called the severance procedure. They implant a chip in your brain, which basically splits you into two selves: your work self, and your personal-life self. These two selves have no memory of each other, and no knowledge of the other one’s activities. When you go to work, your consciousness switches to your work self, referred to as an “innie,” and when you leave work, your consciousness switches back to your personal self, or your “outie.” This creates a situation where the innie is essentially trapped at work forever, since all of their experiences occur at work – while the outie has zero awareness of what they do at work all day, allowing Lumon to get up to some shady shit.
(If you haven’t seen Severance and don’t plan to, you can go ahead and skip this piece, because I think it’ll sound like unhinged gibberish to you and also it’s loooong, but thank you for being here! I appreciate you!)
Anyway, with that being said, sex was barely discussed in season 1 but is becoming more of a thing in season 2, and I’m (obviously) massively nerdy about sex, so I have lots of questions about how it functions in this universe. There are spoilers ahead for all the episodes currently released, so don’t read this yet if you’re not caught up and would like to be. Oh, and (content note:) I will be discussing some dubious-consent-y and non-consent-y stuff, as that is the nature of this show. Let’s dive in.
How is pregnancy handled?
There’s a throwaway line in an early episode where we learn that an innie once got pregnant at work, presumably from having sex with another innie (or a staff member, I suppose). We haven’t seen any Lumon-branded condoms on the severed floor, and I don’t think innies get sex education anyway, nor do they have any particular incentive to care whether their outie gets pregnant or not – so I imagine that on the rare occasions innies manage to have sex, they’re doing it unprotected. Naturally, an ensuing pregnancy would be upsetting for the outie, who neither consented to, nor even knew about, the sex that her innie had. (More on consent stuff below…)
One wonders how the innie was able to find the time and privacy to get pregnant in the first place, given that innies tend to be heavily surveilled and monitored. But then, once she did get pregnant, how did Lumon address this with her outie? Did they give her a gift card as an apology, like they do for Mark when his innie gets injured at work? Would a pregnancy warrant a cash settlement instead? (For that matter, what do they do if somebody gets an STI during a sexual encounter at work?)
The other part of this question is: How do they handle it when outies get pregnant? Surely the innie notices their body changing in this unignorable way. Doesn’t that clue them into personal information about their outie, which is supposed to be kept from them? What happens if their water breaks on the severed floor? Or does Lumon just require employees to take pregnancy leave?
Do the innies know how to have sex because of muscle memory, or are they kinda clueless about it?
The severance procedure strips an innie of their “episodic” memory (i.e. specific experiences from their own life), but allows them to keep their “semantic” memory (general knowledge about the world) and their “procedural” memory (how to do physical processes like typing on a keyboard or tying their shoes). We can see this, for instance, in the season 1 finale, when Irving’s innie gets into a car for the first time in his life, and discovers that he knows how to drive. Likewise, we see that Irving is a skilled artist as both innie and outie, showing us that his procedural memories have indeed been kept intact across both states.
It stands to reason, then, that if an outie has had a decent amount of sex and amassed some sexual skill, their innie would benefit from that skill as well, via muscle memory, should they ever encounter an opportunity to use it. (To use an example that tooootally isn’t in one of my fanfics and that I toootally haven’t jerked off thinking about and that toootally doesn’t turn me on in any way, if Mark’s outie was great at eating pussy, probably his innie would be too.)
To be fair, though, a lot of what makes someone “good in bed” is their mental and emotional approach to sex – and a lot of that comes with experience, making mistakes, trial and error. So, while innies might be physically able to have great sex, I have a feeling that many of them would find it emotionally overwhelming, confusing, or awkward, in the same ways teens can sometimes feel when they first become sexually active.
Are the innies having their consent violated when their outie has sex, and vice-versa? (Content note for discussions of sexual assault in this one)
There was a recent plot point that involved an outie deceiving an innie into sex by pretending to be another innie – and I’m comfortable saying that that’s straight-up sexual assault by deception. The other character wouldn’t have consented if they’d known who they were actually having sex with.
But what about more benign, day-to-day sexual encounters in an outie’s life? For example, if someone came into work shortly after having sex with their partner at home, their innie might notice some residual sensations from that encounter, like lingering engorgement, wetness, the feeling of having been recently penetrated, etc. It was their body which had sex, but they were not present for that sex, nor did they have the opportunity to say ‘no’ to it. Certainly I think this could be a violating and even traumatic feeling for some innies, and justifiably so. I imagine that some other innies (people like Dylan, maybe?) would instead be happy or excited about it, because it would mean their outie is cool enough to be getting laid, or whatever. So it’s not totally clear-cut, although overall, I think it can definitely be considered a violation.
This question also makes me ponder the ways that capitalism, as a whole, violates our right to bodily autonomy by requiring us to do labor we otherwise wouldn’t consent to, sometimes back-breaking or soul-sucking labor under horrifying conditions.
And it raises the question of whether it’s possible to violate one’s own sexual boundaries, since the innie and the outie are separate people mentally but are treated as one person legally and ethically in this universe. I’ve certainly had sexual encounters where it felt like I’d violated my own boundaries by having sex I wasn’t thrilled about having, and I’ve even experienced retroactive anger at my past self about it; I wonder if innies and outies feel anything similar about the sex being had with their body on the other side of the severance barrier.
Would it be considered a throuple if you were dating someone’s innie and outie at the same time?
This point is directly raised by the show early in season 2, where Milchick says (untruthfully, I’m sure) that Ms. Cobel had developed an “erotic fixation” on Mark and that she “planned to pursue both [his innie and his] outie, in what might be termed a ‘throuple.’” (Anyone else stoked to see a non-monogamy reference in such a great and popular show, no matter how oblique?!)
Me and some of the other polyamorous folks in the Severance subreddit (#YesWeExist) chatted a bit about this usage of the word “throuple,” because for some of us, it didn’t seem quite accurate. Usually (as far as I understand it), a “throuple” is a trio of people where all three of them are in a relationship with both of the other two – as opposed to a “V,” where one person has two partners, and maybe the three of them hang out together a lot. Or maybe they don’t. Because maybe two of them can never be in the same room at the same time. Because maybe they’re the innie and the outie of a severed person.
So, while I think it’d be more accurately termed a V or perhaps a triad in this case, some form of consensual non-monogamy could definitely exist between a severed person and their unsevered partner (or, hell, I guess between two severed people too; why not!). And for the same reasons, it would also be possible for someone to cheat on their partner with that person’s innie (or outie), as we’re already seeing this season. Would you feel guilty if you were having sex with your partner and you started fantasizing about their innie? How would that fantasy even differ from what their outie would do instead? And would you tell either of them about it?
Are there people with a severance kink?
I mean this on two levels: within the universe of the show itself, and in our real world. Knowing what I know about human sexuality, I’m certain the answer to both questions is yes. From my involvement in the hypnokink community, I know that there are many, many people who fetishize mindlessness, drifty dissociation, or the perception that they’re not in control of their own mind and body. In our world, that manifests in kinks like erotic hypnosis, intoxication play, and sleepy sex – and in the Severance universe, I can easily see how severance could be fetishized for similar reasons.
How one would actually act on this fetish is a different question. I’m picturing a very rich couple, like the politician Angelo Arteta and his wife Gabriela who we meet in the show, having a literal switch they can flip in their own home, which can turn outie to innie or vice-versa. They could flip back and forth several times over the course of one session, even. I wonder if that would feel like a threesome for anyone involved, or if it would still feel like one-on-one sex, since only the innie or the outie can be active at any one time. I also wonder who would get to be mentally present for the orgasm, and how the other one would feel about that!
I wonder, too, if there could be a cuckold-y angle there. Some people might find it exciting to know that another version of their partner exists somewhere, and could be doing all kinds of hot/sweet/wild things down on the severed floor, unbeknownst to their outie or their outie’s partner. Scandalous!
Is sexual orientation fixed?
Okay, I wonder this in the real world too, but I especially wonder it lately when I watch Severance. From what we’ve seen so far, it seems that sexual orientation does transcend the severance barrier. If an outie is attracted to men, their innie will also be attracted to men, for instance, and likewise for the inverse.
This makes sense to me – but my casual study of human sexual psychology has led me to believe that our orientations are fixed in some ways and malleable in others. I think far more of us are technically bisexual than are presently identifying as such, for example, and I think the lure of compulsory heterosexuality has made many a bi person (and even many a gay person) think they were straight, sometimes for their whole entire life, because any other possibility seemed unthinkable or unworkable. Similarly, I know many bisexuals who tended more toward conventional, “heterosexual-appearing” relationships early on, and later came to identify as gay and date people closer to their own gender exclusively, sometimes because of abuses or miseries they’ve endured in straight dating culture. I know some asexuals who are certain they’ve been asexual their entire life, and I know some other asexuals who started to feel that way in response to a trauma or a medical condition, and came to embrace that identity for themselves.
I see these as cases where someone may have a more-or-less fixed sexual orientation that nonetheless differs from how they decide to live their life sexually and romantically. Their life experiences, values, cultural influences, and acquired preferences create a whole other layer that sits on top of their foundational orientation, and can influence how they choose to date, fuck, and self-identify. I think this is true for things like polyamory and kink as well. And so I think it’s entirely possible that some innies might describe their sexual orientation differently from how their outie does, simply because their life – and mind – has developed independently along its own path.
Do attractions transcend the severance border?
By which I mean: if your innie was to meet your outie’s current mega-crush, would your innie find them sexy, too? Are there pheromonal cues, appearance preferences, personality preferences, or other aspects of attraction that would carry over from outie to innie?
There’s evidence on both sides of this argument within the show. Helena seems to be thirsty for both innie Mark and outie Mark; Dylan’s wife Gretchen shares a mutual attraction with both his innie and his outie; Irving and Burt seem attracted to each other on the outside like they were on the inside. But on the flipside, innie Mark says that he never felt attracted to Ms. Casey, even though (major season 1 spoiler alert!!!) Ms. Casey is actually his outie’s wife Gemma, who he was very attracted to and in love with. And, while innie Mark is super attracted to Helly, outie Mark seems low-key repulsed by her outie Helena, mostly because he knows her company is doing fucked-up shit to his wife.
When I look at these examples, though, what becomes clear is that the closer an innie’s personality is to their outie’s, the more likely it seems to be that the same people will be attracted to both versions of them. Innie Mark’s not attracted to Ms. Casey, because she’s robotic, meek, and nothing like the Gemma his outie loves. And outie Mark’s not attracted to Helena, because she’s insincere, arrogant, and straight-up evil – nothing like the Helly his innie is crushing on. This suggests to me that in this show, as in life (at least for me), having a base-level physical attraction to someone doesn’t remotely guarantee you’ll be attracted to who they are as a person – and if you discover that you’re not, then the physical attraction may well vanish on the spot.
…Okay, I’ll stop myself here, even though I could probably come up with dozens more of these. Feel free to hit ‘reply’ and tell me your thoughts, fellow Severance freaks!