In the pilot of The CW’s Reign , Caitlin Stasey’s character Kenna shocked audiences with a controversial masturbation scene . Since then, she has remained an unapologetically sexual character — and, according to Stasey, an essential representation of female sexuality for young women.
The CW
The way Caitlin Stasey talks about her Reign character Kenna, a fictional lady-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots, is enough to make even non-Elizabethan era audiences blush.
"I call her the clitoris of the show," Stasey says after a quick glance around at her surroundings at Insomnia Café in Los Angeles. "Almost consistently for every episode I was doing something sexual. I was naked, I was doing this, I was making out with this person, I was having a threesome here, and I realized that was my position. Which is fine. I'm totally fine with that. It's great."
But while Stasey's frankness might shock the more inhibited among us, it reflects the kind of sexual openness the 24-year-old actor celebrates. The more we talk about it, she reasons, the less weird it's going to be. And for a generation of young girls embarking on the complicated journey of self-discovery, just knowing they're normal can make all the difference.
"The more normal it is, the more it's perceived as just an everyday way of being, the less scary it's gonna be for girls, obviously," Stasey says.
Of course, it's not as though Kenna has any trouble expressing her sexuality. The most liberated of the ladies-in-waiting trailing behind Mary (Adelaide Kane) on The CW's period drama, Kenna has wielded her sex as a weapon, been subjugated by those who seek to control her body, and finally discovered mutual respect and love over the course of Reign's first season. She's gone from being a virgin to the mistress of King Henry (Alan van Sprang) to the wife of Henry's bastard Bash (Torrance Coombs).
"She's kind of done it all," Stasey says, taking a sip from her iced coffee. She manages to come across as both charming and matter-of-fact as she discusses touchy subjects, lowering her voice ever so slightly when using words like "orgasm" and "masturbation." The other patrons at the coffee shop don't seem to notice.
The CW
"Masturbation" is, in fact, a major topic of conversation: Reign raised eyebrows with its pilot, in which Kenna — so sexually charged from watching a newly married couple consummate their relationship — ducks into a hallway to pleasure herself. It was a rare depiction of female masturbation on network television — and with a teenage girl doing the deed, no less.
Even for Stasey, who doesn't shy away from much, filming the scene was a daunting prospect.
"I was kind of horrified at the thought of having to masturbate on screen," she admits. "Masturbation was such a sensitive issue for me as an adolescent, as a young woman, the thought of doing it publicly, albeit very tame, it felt like it was going to be an insight into me and my desires and my methods, I guess you could say. Because a little piece of you has to find its way into those situations, into those scenes."
When the pilot finally aired, the masturbation scene had been cut down significantly: While it was obvious what Kenna was doing, the act itself was mostly just implied. As showrunner Laurie McCarthy put it, "With The CW's concern, we all came to a creative decision that allowed us to keep the bulk of the scene, but to make it more suggestive. It felt like the right way to do it."
Stasey is somewhat less understanding.
"I was disappointed," she admits. "It's always a little bit personal when your work is cut down for whatever reason. And when it's for reasoning that's as antithetical to my views as this was, it's even harder to swallow. It would be like if you were a gay man on television kissing your lover in a scene, and they had to cut it down because of network sensitivity."
Stasey's disappointment was compounded by the fact that she went through with it, despite her initial discomfort — and she was proud of her performance when all was said and done.
"I fucking did it," she adds. "I did it in front of all those men that I didn't know and all those women I didn't know, and now people got to edit it and watch it and fucking dissect it. There have been conversations over boardroom tables about my masturbating, so why couldn't you just let it happen?"
Editing choices aside, the simple inclusion of a scene of female masturbation on a teen drama remains a bold one. Particularly as the depiction of female pleasure on the whole is far more restricted than that of male sexuality. The response to scenes like Kenna's clandestine masturbation speak to a double standard in terms of what audiences are comfortable with. Variety's senior TV editor Brian Steinberg found the scene in question so distasteful that he wrote, "There's pushing the envelope, and there's dunking that envelope in a sink full of bourbon and trying to light it on fire."
It's a response that may disappoint Stasey but does not surprise her.
"We are the fairer sex. We are pure. We are not earthly creatures," she jokes. "And I think to put us in the midst of all of it, to see that we are in fact just as sexually driven as men, is kind of confronting. Also the fact that we are largely, nowadays, not reliant on men to provide pleasure for us."
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