From FKA twigs and Ethel Cain to Babyratu, it seems like the stifled sexual expression of the last decade has finally breached containment – and it’s filthier and messier than ever
A vibe shift has taken place over the last year or so. For me, the turning point came when a journalist took an enormous print of one of Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein ads to the 2024 Golden Globes and presented it to the cast of The Bear for comment (“What went through your mind when y’all saw this?”), but there have long been signs. From Saltburn to Challengers, film marketing has leaned into erotica even if the film doesn’t. From Billie Eilish’s “Lunch” to Doechii’s “NISSAN ALTIMA,” the chart presence of songs about eating pussy has been remarkably consistent. In June, an unknown young woman who worked at a bed spring factory in Tennessee made a blow job joke in a TikTok video and ended the year with one of the most popular podcasts in the United States, her own cryptocurrency, and an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. The people have spoken: sex is back, and it is selling like never before.
For much of the 2010s and early 2020s, sexual desire – heterosexual desire in particular – was deemed too loaded to contend with. The intent behind #MeToo was to lift the lid on Hollywood’s exploitative practices, which left workers (predominantly women and young men) open to harassment and abuse by power players, and silenced through intimidation. The goal was for greater equality and protections in the workplace. However, it also introduced fresh anxieties around sex into the entertainment industries and pop culture at large. Suddenly everything from the Jumanji sequel to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” video was being pushed through a pop feminist lens that sought to redress the balance by “dragging” things for sexism and assessing their value by how much they reinforced the “male gaze”. Art and entertainment began playing things safe in fear of backlash, audiences found things to complain about regardless, and the dance continued until all that was left at the box office was live action Disney remakes and Superhero franchises that placed a larger-than-ever premium on physical optimisation but none on intimacy. Writer Raquel S Benedict accurately diagnosed the trouble in a viral 2021 essay titled “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”. “No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful,” she writes. “And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.”
Recently, that has changed. Now everyone is horny. Everyone is attracted to everyone, be they rat boys, muscle mommies or short kings. Sexual appetite is so ravenous you can’t open a single social media app without being hit with a stream of content memeifying kinks ranging from praise to piss. After a decade of prudishness and moral sanctimony, the sexual expression that #MeToo put a lid on has breached containment, and it’s coming out in interesting and extreme ways. From the box office to the music industry to social media, there has been a pendulum swing not just towards sex, but towards deviance.
Like ‘Barbenheimer’ for people who like being spat on, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl are often invoked together. One a variation on the most famous vampire story ever told, the other an erotic workplace drama, they centre female desire and subjugation at a contentious time for both – the fallout of #MeToo still holding sway over the creative industries, and social conservatism holding sway over political life. Both hinge on power imbalances, with Babygirl interrogating the dynamic between a high-flying female CEO getting dog-walked around a hotel room by her 20-something male intern, and Nosferatu ramping the conflict between repression and liberation up to the Biblical level of good versus evil. Both provide a degree of filth that, depending on your perspective, is either uncomfortable, unintentionally funny, or “unrepentantly for adults”.
Regardless of which side you come down on, the fact that they’re such prominent and critically celebrated tales of forbidden pleasure reflects how absent that theme has been in pop culture for the last decade or so. Independent films Throuple, Birder, and The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed also fall into the same category with their depictions of non-monogamy, cruising and BDSM respectively. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, too, is a tale of taboos. An adaptation of William S Burroughs’ book of the same name, it follows American expat Craig Lee (Daniel Craig) as he lives cheap and easy in 1950s Mexico City, knocking about bars and picking up younger men while drunk and/or high on opioids. He becomes infatuated with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a young GI who appears to be straight but attracted to Lee. A push-pull ensues, with the obvious broad topics like age gap relationships and closeted homosexuality taking a refreshing backseat to matters of the heart – male vulnerability, ambiguity of intent, and what happens when desire is, in Guadagninio’s words, “unsynchronised”.
There’s an “edgy” appeal to the new wave of so-called sex films, which have been welcomed as “provocative” and “subversive”. Esquire recently stated that discussions about sex onscreen are now “as fervid (and often as unreasonable) as they were in the early 90s”. Babygirl especially harkens back to the erotic thriller boom of the late 1980s and 90s; it’s basically a gender-flipped take on The Secretary for the delivery apps era. However, few contemporary offerings can be called transgressive in the way that, say, David Cronenberg’s Crash or Brian De Palma’s Body Double could. For all the charged glances across the office, there is no danger in Babygirl. One review actually suggests that the film’s “hottest and most subversive kink” is that “successful, driven, married mother in her fifties” might get to have a workplace affair and face zero personal or professional consequences.
To me, that feels like its greatest cop-out. Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a woman with it all: a wife who fucks her husband, packs her kids’ school bags and gets Botox before clocking in for a long shift running a corporation in a pussy bow blouse. If the one thing she lacks doesn’t change anything when it presents itself, then what’s the point? If her secret desire is unleashed without reconfiguring her life into something new, it can’t be as strong as the film wants us to believe it is. “Something has to be at stake,” Romy says repeatedly, and yet nothing is. Nosferatu, too, finds its conclusion in venerating desire rather than getting under the skin of it. When Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gives herself willingly to Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in order to destroy him, her appetite is reverse-engineered to be the thing that saves the world. It becomes Orlok’s undoing, not hers.
These are films about desire, but they stop short of abjection. They play it safe by introducing deviance as a potentially destructive force and leaving us with the idea that it’s a positive one. If the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s exposed societal pressures around technology, gender roles and the nuclear family through sex (Videodrome, Basic Instinct, Eyes Wide Shut), the erotic thrillers of the 2020s respond to our anxieties around sex by attempting to assuage them.
If the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s exposed societal pressures around technology, gender roles and the nuclear family through sex, the erotic thrillers of the 2020s respond to our anxieties around sex by attempting to assuage them
Music is doing a slightly better job at grappling with the existential war of it all. So far 2025 has seen the release of two albums deeply rooted in sex and its related feelings of pleasure and shame, loneliness and power. Arriving off the back of her wildly successful 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark ambient sprawl – a lot of prolonged drones, dusty slowcore and abstract noise that recalls David Lynch’s fascination with the strange murmur of power lines, radio static and ceiling fans. The lyrics, though minimal, treat love and sex as sources of anguish. Everything is wrapped up in religion and questions of agency, caught between the need to be pure versus the reality of being human, the desire to be seen versus the fear of exposure. Intimate actions (“I could make you cum 20 times a day”) are contrasted with hostile sentiments (“If you love me, keep it to yourself”), the vocals feel close and unnerving, like she’s whispering directly into your ear.
FKA twigs’ latest album Eusexua is similarly erotic, though it takes a more outward-facing approach and works with the club-friendly sounds of trip-hop, trance, and experimental electronic music. Where Perverts is alienated and cold, Eusexua is radiant and sensual. Arguably the only British pop star (avant-garde as she may be) of the last 15 years to be genuinely interested in exploring sex as an energy as well as an act, twigs has long explored desire as it relates to self-expression and the body. Her 2014 breakout single “Two Weeks,” a breathy declaration of lust delivered with the subtlety of Adam Levine’s sexts, helped lay the foundations for a multi-disciplinary career that views sex as a dance between emancipation and control.
Eusexua is a term twigs developed to encapsulate a feeling of transcendence. It’s “a moment of pure clarity when everything moves out of the way, everything is completely blank, and your mind is elevated,” she told Wallpaper Magazine, like the one directly before inspiration or orgasm. This philosophy would be a fitting one for twigs regardless, but it’s no coincidence that Eusexua – in which pleasure is a positive force (“A girl feels good / And the world goes round”) and movement is spiritual – comes off the back of a long and public battle with her former boyfriend Shia LaBeouf. She filed a lawsuit against him in 2020 for sexual battery, assault and infliction of emotional distress (the case is due in September). “It’s a miracle I came out alive,” she told Elle. The tone, then, is one of personal reclamation as well as a rallying cry for pleasure – though, like Perverts, it’s not without the necessary foils of emptiness and pain (“I tried to fuck you with the lights on / In the hope you’d think I’m open”).
So: sex is back in the mainstream, and it’s filthier and messier than ever. But something is still missing. Clearly the answer to sexual violence in reality isn’t to litigate what we encounter in art or entertainment, but it’s also not that exciting to present sex without any real interrogation of it either. Perverts and Eusexua dive head first into the erotic, finding deviance in thought and relief in action while feelings that are often uncomfortable to sit with. For whatever reason, visual storytelling isn’t quite managing to do the same. Though Babygirl taps into sexual power dynamics in the zeitgeist, The Secretary has more to say about feminine abjection and workplace politics. Nosferatu, a classic horror rooted in deviance on multiple fronts, comes across as bloodless as its villain. It’s certainly progress that we’re seeing these kinds of stories at the box office again, but if Nicole Kidman eating a boiled sweet out of Harris Dickenson’s hand and smacking her head for enjoying it is considered taboo then we still have a long way to go before we can reckon with anything disruptive enough to stand the test of time.
“Ugliness in a way is superior to beauty, because it lasts,” Serge Gainsbourg once said. Fundamentally what we have at the moment is people with perfect teeth catering to desires expressed on TikTok. If we’re going to see a return to the erotic heyday of the 80s and 90s, things will have to get a whole lot uglier than that. In the meantime, there’s always Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IMDb page.
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