Let’s talk about sex scenes on screen

The humble cinematic sex scene is in crisis. For a few years now, social media – X, specifically – has developed a bubbling hatred for fictional characters fucking. It’s ​“unnecessary”. It’s ​“pornographic”. It’s ​“unrealistic”. It’s ​“too realistic”. Sex scenes, and anyone who advocates for them, cannot win.

It may all seem like online white noise – and it is! – but, as critic and curator Xuanlin Tham outlines in their new book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene, the backlash against onscreen sex is far from progressive. Rather, there’s something noxiously conservative festering behind these simplistic, reductive criticisms. ​“Such utilitarian framing,” Tham writes of these complaints, ​“often seems to be working overtime to obscure a growing, deep-seated discomfort with sexuality that anxiously lies beneath the surface.”

Fascinatingly, this sharpening of pitchforks comes at a time when onscreen intimacy has never been more scarce. As Tham writes, since 2000, sex and nudity in films have decreased by almost 40 per cent. This hasn’t stopped current Hollywood heavy-hitters from at least attempting to depict on-screen intimacy. Halina Reijn’s Babygirl generated thinkpieces galore, and the glow has yet to fade from the Oscars’ Best Picture winner Anora, a film named after and energised by a sex worker.

Still, both came under heavy criticism: for not being bolder, for not being sexier, for not doing justice to the women they portray. These films are outliers in our generally sex-lite cinematic age, and the viral success of Babygirl and Anora​’s relative tameness, compared to the boundary-pushing sex of past decades (see: Secretary​’s kinky romance; Basic Instinct​’s lethally erotic femme fatale; Bound​’s stupefyingly hot sex), puts into perspective just how thirsty the cinema landscape is for rigorous, intimate, erotic sex cinema.

While the sex scene may no longer possess the same potency it once did (because, well.. widely accessible porn), the idea that it is somehow poisoning us is a particularly grim and regressive strand of thought. Handily, in Revolutionary Desires, Tham plucks this particular conversation from the toxic maw of social media and dissects it with great clarity and academic precision.

For the Edinburgh-based writer, defending sex scenes is something personal: In their younger years, it was the lure of risqué movies that formed the bedrock of their deep love for cinema. ​“I remember flicking through red 18 [certificate] DVDs secretly at the library or at Blockbuster (RIP),” they recall. ​“I have always been really, really drawn to things that can make me feel in a way that isn’t just about titillation but a reminder of how powerful this medium is.”

You write viscerally on bodies and our relationships to them. Why are they of such interest to you?

I think for a lot of people, we don’t realise how much of our daily life has become about disassociating from bodily experience. That’s necessary to keep us disciplined – as workers, as tenants, as consumers. Because as a disembodied presence, you can be enlisted into things like buying a lot of stuff, or feeling like it’s OK that your housing situation is crap because everyone else’s is. It’s the real starting point for what we believe is possible and what we’re owed.

Going back to Black feminist writing, like Audre Lorde’s, the body is a real site of knowledge – and it’s knowledge that’s suppressed. If it wasn’t suppressed then you would realise how much injustice sits with you materially, emotionally, socially. The sex scene materialises as something that reminds us, in a way that we often want to reject, that we do have a body and that the body is capable of response.

Where did your interest in sex scenes begin?

Some of my most exciting moments of watching movies when I was really young was understanding that there was something I wasn’t supposed to be seeing [and] that my parents would have to fast-forward. There’s always something exciting about feeling this amorphous blob of secrecy and illicitness. I’m really interested in how powerfully these moving images can spark feeling in us; feeling that, most of the time, is absent from our lives.

What aspects of viewing sex scenes in a public place – the cinema – interest you?

Watching sex with other people is an interesting dynamic because you simultaneously feel very aware of your own body and also of everyone else’s. Everyone experiences that, and that’s not necessarily a nice thing. For a lot of people it makes them uncomfortable. It’s why they choose to start coughing or looking at their phones.

For me, loving movies and loving sex scenes is about running towards that collective experience and that kind of feeling. If you push through the discomfort, you feel like you’ve crafted a weird psychic bond with everyone who’s gone through this similar bodily experience and surrendered themselves to it.

What are some of your favourite sex scenes?

The book formed around The Matrix Reloaded sex scene [because] I think it speaks a lot to what the book is trying to say about [the sex scene’s] revolutionary potential. Also, In the Cut, the Jane Campion film – they’re the hottest sex scenes ever, which is twisted to say given that it’s about a serial killer case. But that’s why they’re really sexy: they don’t really shy away from the edge of violence that bleeds through the frames.

Any that didn’t make the book?

One of my favourite sex scenes that I didn’t get to write about is Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala. A beautiful sex scene, very lush and so in love with the bodies of its two beautiful stars. It really feels like you’re being touched at the same time – which brings me to Claire Denis’ Friday Night. Those sex scenes have a real subjectivity. The hands, the napes, the collarbones, those are the parts of the body she really focuses on. It transports you inside the body of the film. You feel like you’re being touched in the same way those characters are touching each other.

Do you think onscreen sexual violence has become easier to absorb for people than intimate, consensual sex scenes? I often think about how Game of Thrones seemed to have graphic rape scene every season and it was considered watercooler conversation.

Anecdotally speaking, my feeling is that sex hasn’t had the same decline on TV, it’s just changed forms. It’s because people don’t want to watch sex in the cinema anymore. If there’s a place for it, it’s at home where I can fast-forward it, or watch it and not feel uncomfortable because I’m not doing it in the presence of other people.

But I think it’s true that people sometimes only feel able to tolerate sex scenes under [the banner] of violence. I talk about Showgirls in the book, [which features] examples of lurid assault scenes. But I don’t see those scenes as inherently immoral to watch. They’re doing very different things. The infamous scene in the pool – in any other film it would feel incredibly horrific to watch – [works] because the whole point of the film is to satirise and illuminate how sex has become a tool of exchange and commodification. So it felt right in this universe.

To build a complete picture of the sex scene, more problematic ones had to be included in your book, presumably?

I initially thought I would gravitate towards positive and utopian examples of sex, where [characters] have found something freeing and liberatory. But that wasn’t really the picture I was being called to paint. A lot of sex scenes that fascinate me are ones where sex is a lot more complicated, when sex is being used as a tool, explicitly or satirically, in order to show us something beyond what we’re prepared to see.

I’m quite suspicious of some strands of sex positivity narratives today, where sex positivity wants to project us into an alternate universe where we’ve solved all the problems and we’re already liberated. That’s why it’s important to talk about sex scenes that are troubling and complicated.

I would have assumed complicated sex scenes would be what you’d immediately focus on, so that’s interesting to hear.

I guess because I was trying to make an argument for why they should exist, right? I really wanted to show that sex scenes are a good thing, without adhering to overly simplistic and reductive understandings of what sex can be. As a viewer, the sex scenes that stick with me the most are the ones that are thorny and have gnarled themselves into a complicated shape.

I don’t want to walk away from a sex scene feeling like it’s porn. Porn has an instrumental purpose: to get you off. A sex scene can do that, too, but it can often do a lot more. I’m interested in sitting in those feelings of complexity and ambivalence.

Revolutionary Desires packs a lot of ideas into its slim frame – would you consider expanding it?

It’s been very nice that everyone’s had time to read it and add some of those movies to their watch lists because of me. I don’t know if there will be an extended version of it, but it will always be a topic I’ll love to write about. There are so many other scenes I’d love to discuss in this specific way. Maybe if I can find a way to do that on an episodic basis…

Like a podcast? I can see it.

Yeah, that would be really cool, wouldn’t it? The Cinema Pervs podcast.

Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene is available now from 404ink