Have you ever wondered what The Notebook would look like if it were rated NC-17 and had about one billion dollars dumped onto it? Well, it still couldn’t come anywhere close to the throbbing, lusty relationship between Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker being depicted on The Kardashians from week to week—though I’m sure Gena Rowlands would give it the old college try.
Kourtney and Travis—“Kravis,” as the media has so lovingly yet unoriginally dubbed them—have been throwing themselves all over each other for the last nine weeks of Hulu’s docuseries. Not an episode has gone by without several scenes depicting them feeling each other up, making out hardcore in front of the cameras and their kids, and talking about just how sexually compatible they are.
At first, it was refreshing to see the eldest Kardashian sister so visibly happy in a relationship after spending nearly two decades in the public eye bereft of stable love. Her life pre-Barker was not an easy one, as anyone who caught even an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians here or there could probably attest to.
“Kissing and hugging is not a bad thing,” Kardashian states to the camera early in the season. “I’m actually grateful that my kids can see a loving and affectionate relationship because they haven’t seen that their whole lives.” And that’s completely true! It’s great that Kourtney’s young kids can see and understand what a healthy relationship between two adults can look like—too bad the editors are working overtime to betray them.
Not 15 minutes into the first episode of The Kardashians, Kourtney stands from her own chair and sits in Travis’ lap, and moments later he’s rubbing her ass through her shorts and she’s putting her thumb in his mouth in the middle of a family barbecue that includes everyone from the blended Kardashian family’s youngest offspring to the grand matriarch Kris Jenner. And the kids don’t seem to love it much either, as they've been repeatedly shown kindly asking the two to stop French kissing in their eyeshot.
Bizarrely, scenes with Kourtney and Travis are hushed and intimate, which makes experiencing them through your television screen all the worse. So many other moments in The Kardashians are cloaked in shitty TikTok-trend-adjacent, royalty-free songs that make it easy to half-watch the show while scrolling on your phone, but then there will be a smash cut to total silence, jolting the viewer back to the show just in time to see Kourtney and Travis kissing one another while waiting for an elevator, the sound design so amplified you’d think that they were trying to pass a microphone from one mouth to the other with their tongues.
More often than not, their saccharine aura will prove to be so strong that I feel like I’m peering in on moments I was never meant to see. Sometimes, there will be nothing sexual about it and I’ll still come away feeling like I just stumbled into someone else’s bedroom.
Barker will coo, “I love my baby, my baby’s the greatest, my baby’s the strongest,” while they press their foreheads together, staring into each other’s eyes for prolonged periods of time while the camera holds on them. I get the feeling that the producers are expecting me to be moved by this as if it’s akin to the scene in Titanic where the old couple holds each other in bed while the freezing cold water fills their cabin. “I’m OK for a bad day or a rough day with you [rather] than a day without you,” Barker says at one point. Sometimes I’d almost rather see them tongue each other for an hour than talk to each other like characters in a John Green novel would.
But the PDA between Kourtney and Travis doesn’t stop at just a public display of affection, it’s also a very gross Public Display of Affluence. Somehow, the two lovebirds have managed to turn their touchy-feely relationship into a secondary show of just how fun love can be when even a fraction of your combined net worth is more than most people can expect to see in their lifetime.
The Kardashians makes no attempts to tone down the family’s ever-present air of unattainable wealth, and in fact, it has only exacerbated it. One of the greatest and most visible examples of the wealth disparity between the 1 percent and everyone else is Kourtney and Travis’ effort to conceive a child together. Getting pregnant has been more difficult for Kourtney this time around, so she and Travis have been exploring an array of fertility methods, and no expense will be spared in their desperation to make a physical product of their unyielding love.
Now, I have no qualms about anyone who wants to try any possible route that they can to have a child. I think it’s an admirable goal, one that takes a measurable toll on your body. It’s not for the faint of heart! But I also think that there is a fine line between the benefits of being open about the difficulties of conceiving a child in your 40s and fully throwing caution to the wind by going to an Ayurvedic spa that costs tens of thousands of dollars to help your chances of conceiving through holistic methods and talking about drinking your husband’s cum.
Sorry, did I gloss over that? Oh, yeah, Kourtney has been guzzling.
While speaking to Martha Soffer, an Ayurvedic guru and the founder of Surya spa, Kourtney very brazenly states, “[The doctor] told me that the thing that would help [my thyroid levels] was drinking his cum like four times a week.” These two freaks off the leash are really putting it all out there for everyone unlucky enough to cross their path and leaving immeasurable amounts of cash in their wake.
To drive a few hundred miles to a fertility center so doctors can perform an egg retrieval, Kourtney and Travis hop on the Blink-182 tour bus, chauffeured by a driver so they can make use of the bed in the back, which she’s sure to note. With the price of gas in California alone, their trips back and forth between doctor's offices, health spas, and fertility clinics in the show’s first nine episodes are enough to cover the cost of a middle-class American family’s commute for a month.
Before the egg retrieval, the clinic needs to collect a sample of Travis’ sperm, which is a fun chance to have another medical professional be privy to their twisted little world. The woman at the clinic tells them that they need to collect only Travis’ sample in the cup, with absolutely none of Kourtney’s bodily fluid.
The couple then spends the next few minutes probing this poor woman about whether they can use spit to help the process along, and is it OK if some spit gets in the cup? “No spit,” she has to repeatedly tell two people in their forties wearing matching skeleton onesies, just like that one weird couple we all knew in middle school who loved The Nightmare Before Christmas and wouldn’t shut up about it.
These two heathens are obsessed with bringing unwitting strangers into their den of iniquity. In another episode, while viewing gorgeous, multimillion-dollar mansions to pack their combined families into, Kravis retreat to the palatial estate’s backyard, where Barker asserts, “I just think people have trouble understanding how two people can be so in love and affectionate because they’re fuckin’ miserable.” And he might have an argument for that if he wasn’t saying it while he’s feeling Kourtney’s breasts and reaching around to squeeze her butt and thighs while she straddles him on the outdoor furniture in the backyard of someone else’s home.
I am extremely pro-horny—it’s primordial, it’s natural, it’s cool—but these aren’t normal displays of love and affection. Kourtney and Travis are making their poor realtor part of these sick and twisted, voyeuristic games. And then not even moving forward with the property! Their realtor had to stay behind and wipe down all the patio furniture and didn’t even make any commission from it!
But that’s just Kourt and Trav! These two are on a mission to make their lives into their own version of their favorite film, True Romance. They want to paw all over each other and throw money around and live the hedonistic lives that only lovers with no moral boundaries can do. It’s Kravis’ world, and we’re all just living in it. Maybe the heat will die down a bit now that the couple has officially tied the knot, but it seems doubtful.
Their energy is simply too strong. It’s a shock they haven’t conceived six children already just by the sheer force of their absurdly hyper-sexual connection. But who knows, it may happen yet. Kourtney Kardashian having the first immaculate conception since the Virgin Mary feels appropriate for where we are as a society anyway.
