"Severance" is what happens when we treat men's bodies the way we treat women's
The show asks: Who is considered a person, and who is considered property?
Warning: Spoilers abound!
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Severance is about the fulfillment of the patriarchal-capitalist dream to create a perfect worker, one that has no life outside work and is completely exploitable. It’s also a show about bodies, and which bodies are considered human, and which bodies are considered property.
Specifically, it’s about the loss of bodily autonomy within patriarchal power structures. It asks: who is considered a person, and who is not?
Of all the aspects of the show that have had me sitting on the edge of my couch every Thursday night —the goats, the bittersweet shipping between Helly and Mark or Gemma and Mark (or shipping for John Turturro and Christopher Walken, the cute couple that we didn’t know that we needed!) this is the aspect that hits closest to home.
In a post-Roe world that’s stripping women of their basic rights under an increasingly rigid patriarchal political regime, this doesn’t sound like the premise of a spec fiction dystopia. It feels very familiar.
For the uninitiated, Severance takes place in world pretty much just like ours, but where a technology has been created that can split one person’s consciousness or “mind” into two by inserting a chip into the brain: one person who goes to work and knows only work life inside the office (an “innie”) —and the other who lives outside work (an “outie”). A switch flips at the entrance to the workplace that makes it so that the “outie” has no knowledge or memory of work life. The “innie,” meanwhile, spends every waking hour of their lives trapped at work, where they are institutional property.
Significantly, three of the four main severed characters in Severance are men. Through their innies, they are subjected to surrendering their bodies. Whatever happens to their body while in its “innie” state behind closed doors can never be known to anyone on the outside, and their bodies become institutional property. This leaves the door wide open for coercive exploitation usually experienced most by women—psychological and sexual exploitation, and reproductive and medical experimentation.
I think part of what makes Severance so resonant right now is that it depicts coercion and control that is normalized for women’s bodies, but applies it to men too. And only then do we see how messed up and diabolical it is.
If men want an idea of what it's like to live in a woman's body, look no further than Severance.
The show literalizes the mindfuck (pardon my French, but that’s actually what severance is) that is surviving in a woman’s body.
The fact that Severance is about bodily autonomy is not really subtle, given the whole “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” meets “Get Out” premise. But it’s a message hiding in plain sight that’s almost easy to overlook, given all the themes from Severance that can be mapped onto our modern lives—corporate cults, grieving, technology hell, finding love in a hopeless place.
But there's an especially memorable scene in Season 1 that makes the point that Severance is exploring disturbing notions of who is considered a person and who is not—that puts it out there in all caps.
In this scene, Helly, the only female main character, hates her innie life of corporate servitude so much that she threatens to cut off her fingers. She sends a message to Helena, her “outie” that she wants to resign, or essentially have her innie life ended. Helena, her outie, is revealed to be a high-ranking member of the family that runs Lumon and is its heir ascendant. She sends a video message in response to her innie that goes like this:
I understand that you’re unhappy with the life that you have been given, but eventually we all have to accept reality.
Here it is: I am a person. You are not.
I make the decisions.
Up until this point, there has been a sort of benevolent paternalistic façade that Lumon has created the technology to improve people’s lives, and that innies are considered whole people, too. But in this scene Helena says the quiet part out loud: the authoritarians running the company expect nothing less than total control of bodies, and innies are considered institutional property and assets.
There will be harsh punishment for tampering with or harming company property—meaning their own bodies.
It can’t be coincidence that creators of the show wrote Lumon, the creepy biotech company at the center of the show, as not just any biotech company, but a white patriarchal-culty one. Lumon’s company culture is based on a belief system that reveres and worships its founder, a man named Kier Egan. This is especially resonant in our political climate of white Christo-fascism, and institutions built on patriarchy, especially culty ones, tend to be obsessed with controlling bodies and women in particular. Women’s lives and freedom are usually severely curtailed within patriarchal cults.
And as I’ve written about before, bizarre levels of sacrifice, especially for women, are often encouraged or even required by patriarchal organizations. This scene with Helly that says the quiet part out loud captures a pattern within patriarchal organizations that use a veneer of benevolence (or benevolent sexism) as cover for their hierarchies that grant privileges to some, while treating others as subservient.
But. It’s interesting to see a woman in this role of dictating someone’s personhood instead of a man. Does it hit different when a woman is the one controlling bodies and wielding paternalistic coercion? Does the injustice become more apparent when it’s presented in a different context? These gender role reversals in Severance help reveal how heinous these normalized practices are (and highlight the role of white feminism in upholding them as well).
And of course, this scene captures a lot of what it feels like to be a woman in 2025. The “I am a person, you are not” dialogue has very strong “Your body, my choice” vibes. In our current moment it’s not just spec fiction– or even rapey frat boy podcasters on X floating this claim. It’s also the guys running the federal government. The broligarchs running a patriarchal Christo-fascist regime are at the same time claiming that they want to “protect” women—all while they push through abortion bans and forced birth policies, and let women bleed out at hospitals.
Nothing says “your uterus is property of the state” like arresting women for miscarriages after turning them away from the hospital, and then charging them with “concealing the death of another person.” This is happening in states with abortion bans across the country right now, as
keeps valiantly reporting.It also has to be said here that all of this has chilling resonance with the use of Black bodies and Black women's bodies, in particular under enslavement for the use of coerced breeding. (And women of color continue to be impacted most by abortion bans as well as maternal mortality rates). Severance only touches lightly so far on issues of race, but there is certainly a whole separate analysis to be made that use of white characters in the show brings to light the horrors of what has been historically normalized for the bodies of people of color. A whole separate piece could be written exploring that connection! Scholar Pamela Bridgewater unearthed the largely erased history of women under enslavement and systemic forced reproduction in her book “Breeding a Nation,” that could certainly be mapped onto Severance themes. She argued that the pursuit of reproductive freedom and civil freedom need to be seen as one and the same.
Coercion and men’s bodies
The way that Severance depicts the physical and psychological impacts of bodily control and coercion put me in mind of the work of
, a physiologist who writes the fantastic Substack The Maternal Stress Project (subscribe here!). She researches and maps the way that stress relates to women’s health and how it impacts their bodies, including cultural, societal, and structural stressors.
One of the most stressful aspects that she documents is the effects of coercion on women’s bodies. Abortion bans are inherently coercive— they exert physical control and legal control, while also leveraging social controls like shame and stigma.
It’s not, um, surprising that coercion is highly linked to trauma responses and psychological distress. Most of the worst things that can happen to a person are versions of bodily coercion!
Yet, we don’t often use that word to describe what’s happening to women and girls when they are forced to carry a pregnancy and give birth. But that’s exactly what it is. Interestingly, the plot of Severance revolves around people who are subject to bodily coercion for half of their waking lives, and we immediately recognize it as an unjust hell-life that its subjects are desperate to escape. The fact that not all of us recognize it as such for women and girls is…telling !
There is a scene in Season 2 that clearly illustrates the kind of psychological coercion often used on women in real life—but it’s used against a male character.
In Season 2, the male main character, Mark, also begins to question whether he wants to remain severed (a procedure that he underwent after losing his wife in order to help him “forget” his debilitating grief). His Lumon manager pays him a manipulative visit to convince him that having his body controlled and treated like property is good for him.
You chose this, his manager reminds him. This is good for you—we are doing this for your wellbeing and your peace of mind. As though giving up his bodily autonomy was therapeutic.
I emailed stress physiologist Molly Dickens to get her take on this (and it turns out that she is a big Severance fan!) and she saw the connection to real-life coercion typically used on women immediately.
She pointed me to an argument that is frequently used by anti-abortion activists that makes the fallacious claim that withholding abortions from women that seek them is good for women.
Yes, this is a real (false) argument that has been used against women by anti-abortion activists and Supreme Court Justices. They make specious claims that abortions cause mental distress to women who receive them (and therefore women are better off having their bodies controlled by the state. Ahhh!).
Dickens breaks down the whole thing brilliantly in this post, and points out that Justice Kennedy repeated this fallacious argument when the Supreme Court struck down a case that would have expanded federal abortion access. In his majority opinion he included the statement: “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” [Emphasis added.]
And here’s the real kicker: As Kennedy himself indicates in his statement, there was no data at the time to support his evidence-free statement when he made it in 2007. But now there is. A longitudinal study called the “Turnaway Study” tested the results for women who were denied an abortion (turned away) and those who had one. It ran for ten years4, and resulted in more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and a book. So, like, a LOT of data.
And can you guess which was much, much more damaging to women: having an abortion, or having an abortion withheld from them?
Those who did receive abortion care had better outcomes across nearly all parameters compared to those who did not receive abortion care.
Having an abortion led to better financial outcomes, better health outcomes, better family outcomes.
One of the factors that made being denied an abortion especially harmful to women in the “Turnaway Study” was this aspect of coercion. I asked Dickens about the harms of coercion as a stressor, and here’s how she connected them to the show:
“Lack of control is a key element in how our brains translate outside challenges/threats into "stressor!" that sets off a stress response. Coercion, in some ways, is a false sense of control, right? As in, "you chose this. You had control." The tension between the guilt of "you chose this. You had control" and "this isn't what I wanted/expected/believed" is a big stressor, feeling out of control over something that you theoretically should be in control of.
This absolutely applies to the men and women in the show. What did they sign up for when they got the severance procedure? What were they actually told about innies' lives? The innies that work IN THEIR BODIES all day?”
She also points out that the manipulation of severed characters in the show, including the men, mirrors the medical gaslighting that’s often related to birth trauma, where women are pressured to do “whatever is best for the baby,” and then that opens the door for doctors to do almost anything to your body.
“The weaponization of “isn’t this what you want?” can be used to make it seem like self sacrifice was the patient’s idea all along,” says Dickens. This especially applies to Black women and women of color, who have much higher maternal mortality rates.
“Essentially “Isn’t this what you wanted” becomes “we’re doing this for you,” says Dickens. This infantilization that’s used against women commonly is interesting because we see it used against men in the show. There’s this notion that taking control of their bodies is a favor to them because they don’t know what’s best for them—this is a very common stressor for women in medical settings in real life.”
Dickens made the fascinating point that “Twilight Sleep”—the 20th century practice of giving women drugs to put them to sleep during childbirth, thus surrendering all their agency, and inducing amnesia to “forget” the experience —is VERY Severance. As Dickens explains, the practice of removing consent from someone, having your way with their body, and then inducing them to forget about it—the dystopian premise of the whole show— was a real life medical practices used on women:
“For decades, the standard “best” medical option for birth was forgetting. I’m not an expert in this, but the general gist is that before medicalized birth, it was women who primarily attended birth with a focus on midwives in the home. Then patriarchal medicine came along and the men said “we can do this better!” and brought birth into the hospital while demonizing (and outlawing!) midwifery and home birth. (It was especially demonized for Black midwives and other marginalized communities).
Without modern pain medication, doctors relied on morphine but also another drug that caused amnesia. Technically women were “awake” during childbirth (and experiencing all of the things that the doctors were doing) but they felt like they “woke up” after all of it. Not surprisingly, twilight sleep was associated with much higher rates of forcep births and other complications related to all the ways doctors might remove a baby from a woman’s body if they don’t need consent.”
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Coercion and Relinquishment
I would be remiss to leave out the other psychological aspect that jumped out at me from the Turnaway Study research that seems VERY Severance relevant: Systems that rely on coercion and forced birth also rely on relinquishment—or the practice of separating children from their families.
The research of Dr. Gretchen Sisson, author of “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood” is a decades-long study of women who were untenable parents and gave their children up for adoption. She finds that the anti-abortion “solution” of carrying to term and putting a child up for adoption is not a solution at all. The proper word for this, she argues, is “relinquishment.”
A system that relies on relinquishment, she notes, is “our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level.”
There is a boatload of research devoted to the damaging effects of relinquishment on birth mothers and children. Many birth mothers experience anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder from their crisis pregnancy, the anticipated relinquishment of their child, and the horrible treatment they experience in the process.
In Severance, systemized relinquishment is a theme, and it’s properly portrayed not as a “solution” to anything, but as part of an authoritarian hellscape. To be clear, I’m not saying here that adoption can’t be a beautiful thing. It definitely can! But can any of us reasonably argue that systemically coercing/forcing women and children into crisis pregnancies and births that then feed into a system of relinquishing those children is anything but…extremely messed up?
For evidence of the damage of relinquishment within Severance, we need look no further than the characters Harmony Cobel and Miss Huang.
Oh, Harmony Cobel. Does this look like the face of a well person?
In the show we learn that Harmony Cobel was separated from her beloved mother by Lumon, possibly in a child experimentation/child labor project connected to the mysterious Myrtle Eagan School for Girls—an all girl’s school run by Lumon that hints at possibilities for coerced child relinquishment as well as forced breeding. What is clear is that Cobel and her mother were distraught that they were separated and never re-united, resulting in a core lifelong wound for Cobel.
Being separated from her mother is Cobel’s core trauma, and motivation as a Lumon mastermind/villain (and possible ally as she starts to recognize all that Lumon has stolen from her.) One especially haunting scene takes place in her basement bedroom where she keeps a shrine and a breathing tube that was attached to her mother at her mother’s death (which Cobel was not present for).
And then there’s Miss Huang, the girl child who mysteriously shows up on the severed floor at Lumon in Season 2 and is put to work as a “Deputy Manager.” Workers at the floor are only momentarily flummoxed by the appearance of a child on the floor in a management-adjacent position. But then they quickly accept this situation, apparently, in a culture where children are frequently removed from their mothers/parents.
The world of Severance, unlike our own in many ways, depicts systematized child relinquishment as an evil practice —one of the most damaging things that can be visited on people and has long-lasting effects. And also: indicates that it has terrible outcomes for society as well as individuals.
At the end of the season, we see Miss Huang, holding all her belongings, waiting alone for a Lumon bus to take her to the same school that Cobel once attended. It’s one of the most haunting images of the show, and it’s hard to watch without silently screaming Where are are her parents??
The sense of dread that the show attaches to relinquishment and separation is one that should resonate with us, as we are already seeing that abortion bans are sending more children into an already overburdened U.S. foster care system. According to federal and state level data. States with abortion bans have an 11% increase in children entering foster care, and as abortion crackdowns become more rigid and brutal in states with abortion bans, we can only expect those to rise.
As someone who reported on sex work and trafficking for years, I can attest that children in the foster care system often end up just as lonely as Miss Huang, and worse. It is estimated that 60% of minors that are trafficking victims have histories in the child welfare system.
This is dark stuff, I know! I ruined many a dinner party by talking about my work as a reporter. Most of us can’t stomach watching a documentary on the fallout of child separation and relinquishment, but we will watch a sci-fi version wrapped in a mystery box. We don’t want to think about the real version of this that played out during enslavement in the U.S., or in indigenous communities and Indian schools that separated kids from their families for almost a century. I think that’s part of what Severance illuminates, if we let it.
The things around us that are normalized are dark—and they don’t have to be that way. Many of the systems and attitudes that we have allow for coercion and bad outcomes—but unlike Helly and Mark, we are not trapped inside Lumon. We are only victims of the systems as long as we allow the systems to operate this way.
We could make something that treated everyone like humans. We, too, could break into the sub-floor and stop the madness.
Some other really good reads on Severance and women that you might enjoy:
On Severance, desire is radicalizing—and oppressive, too by
Find
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This essay is such brilliant cultural criticism Lane!! I have not been watching Severance and this essay makes me want to, simply so I can watch for this analysis — you’ve really given us a whole new way of thinking about control, manipulation and the body.
Holy shit. This is incredible. 👏🏼👏🏼