From Halina Reijn’s Babygirl and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu to FKA twigs’ EUSEXUA and Ethel Cain’s Perverts, sex is back in the mainstream. And it’s not just any kind of sex — as Emma Garland argues in her latest essay, “Everyone is Horny Now”, “there has been a pendulum swing not just towards sex, but towards deviance.”

With Nicole Kidman being dog-walked by her twenty-something-year-old male intern, Nosferatu elevating the conflict between repression and liberation to Biblical proportions and FKA twigs referring to the softer edges of her music as “the pussy,” music and media are depicting sex in ways that challenge socially accepted norms. But what makes these depictions so deviant? And eight years on from the height of the #MeToo movement, how has the cultural conversation around sex evolved, and what impact has it had on how sex is portrayed?

In our lastest episode, hosts Halima Jibril and Elliot Hoste are joined by Garland to unpack the latest and most provocative depictions of sex in popular culture, explore why pleasurable sex is often framed as transgressive and argue why everyone needs to let go and just be gross. 

Listen to episode eight of Dazed and Discoursed above, or find it on Acast, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.