A Manifesto for the Modern Cinematic Sex Scene

The sex scene is statistically disappearing from our screens, in parallel with the rise of increasingly commonplace anti-sex scene sentiment. This is a political phenomenon inextricable from our widespread immiseration and violence under late capitalism – one which illuminates the borders of what we are allowed to feel and experience today. It speaks of the cultural suppression of the erotic: its power to eject us from apathy or resignation, and crucially, to connect us to the bodies of others.

The case I make in my new book, Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene, is that the sex scene’s intimacies, transgressions and dedication to pleasure can be recuperated to disrupt capitalist narratives and the violence that flows from them. All is not lost. Referencing recent glimmers of invention and possibility, here is a manifesto for the sex scene in the anti-sex scene age.

Sex scenes do not need to have a purpose

The common claim that “sex scenes are unnecessary” begs the question, “unnecessary for what?” Usually, this claim refers to the argument that sex never furthers the plot. Although many examples of sex on screen being an essential storytelling device contradict this, from the sauciest of telenovelas to films like Passages, this is beside the point. Plot has become revered above all, and on the sacrificial altar lies sensuousness and feeling, amorphous feeling, the kind that exceeds any attempt to merely dissect a film into its composite attributes. A fumbling blowjob in Daniel Garber and Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline does not further its sabotage plot, but it goes a hell of a long way as a metonym for the excitement of imminent, phallic explosion, of ecstatic and disobedient spillage. Movies should not aspire to be plot-conveying vessels. 

Some actors have in recent years explained their amenability to filming sex scenes (why does this need explaining?) by justifying the scenes in question as necessary and not gratuitous, as if sex must either be subsumed into some higher artistic purpose or be disavowed with suspicion. Let us do away with this ill-defined dichotomy, which posits that sex for its own sake is itself not worthy of attention. As in real life, sex does not need to have a purpose. We should liberate both from the strictures of a capitalist value system.

Sex scenes are not (all) utopian

In making the case for the sex scene, we should avoid exclusionary notions that overemphasise it as a site for pure pleasure, joy and liberation. This is not to say that there is no space for uncomplicatedly happy sex, or that the utopian feelings we sense through a sex scene are false prophets. But we should not close down other avenues through which the sex scene can still be incredibly moving. The discourse of ‘sex positivity’ indeed leaves many of us feeling not at home, not at ease, even less so because of how much we are told we must already be – but this is where the sex scene can be a uniquely powerful intervention. From the stomach-turning weaponisation of sex as scandal in Todd Haynes’ May December to the bleak familiarity of blurry sexual encounters in Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, cinema is able to express the unsettling ambivalence of sex – which is often where truth rears its head. Sex is not already liberated, freed from violences both interpersonal and systemic. By not dulling the sex scene’s fangs, we might begin to see a liberated future more clearly from where we stand.

Sex scenes are not always pretty

There is a certain idea of how women, especially, should sound during sex: pithily transcribed in Saou Ichikawa’s novel Hunchback as “Aah ♡!” Certain tropes, found in everything from baroque sculpture to internet pornography, narrow our visual and auditory palettes to a rather polite, acceptable expression of sexual pleasure. Of course, sex is often incredibly tender, gentle, soft; of course it can be aesthetically beautiful, with the wonders of filmmaking tools at our disposal. But many great sex scenes also push at the seams of what we deem beautiful or acceptable. Pleasure can contort our bodies, make our veins protrude, drag hoarse and guttural sounds from our abdomens. Seeing and hearing Nicole Kidman’s character in Babygirl orgasm for the first time in her life on the big screen, over big cinema speakers, is unforgettable: she is being fingered face down in the carpet of a seedy hotel room; the frame is mostly taken up by the hair falling in her reddening face; she panics that she will urinate. She does not sound gentle, blissful or feminine. She comes hard and loud, like perhaps more of us would if we did not feel bound to limiting notions of how we are allowed to behave while experiencing pleasure. The erotic is not always pretty.

Sex scenes demand invention

To think about the sex scene is also to think about its history – alongside cinema as a whole – as a site of objectification, commodification and reproduction of oppression. Yet the long history of the movies has also shown us that the sex scene can be enlisted in unmaking these troubling dynamics. The cinematic sex scene exhibits breathtaking creativity in how and what it pushes us to feel, from Love Lies Bleeding’s muscle-twanging vision of sex as a queer, embodied stretchiness, to the philosophical affirmation of a trans woman’s subjectivity in Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca. Cinema demands, above all, that we feel something. The sex scene is one of the most evocative ways it can make this happen; it should be taken seriously as a frontier of cinematic invention.

Sex is sometimes just sex

When we’re all done arguing, stoking moral panics, surveying Gen Z or calculating plot-to-not-plot ratios, maybe we can remember that sex has always been part of the movies, and that it has always been part of many of our lives. Coming-of-age stories, blockbusters, action movies and comedies used to portray sex as unremarkable, neither charged with the force of unspeakable transgression nor so exceptional that it took on the sheen of the sacred. In today’s puritanical climate, it can be hard to resist the temptation to valorise ‘kinkier’, freakier sex on screen in response, but we should not fall into the trap of reifying certain types of sex as more or less morally, or politically, righteous than others. Sex can sometimes just be sex. As Park Ji-min’s character Freddie says irreverently in Return to Seoul, waking up in bed with a stranger, sometimes it can be as simple as just: “You. Me. Sex, again.”

Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene by Xuanlin Tham is published by 404 Ink, and is out now.