In the last year, the atmosphere has evolved in an undeniable direction, which we can no longer ignore. From Saltburn to Challengers, film marketing has veered towards the erotic, even when the films themselves dare not be explicit. And if there was any doubt, there are the songs: from Billie Eilish’s ‘Lunch’ to Doechii’s ‘NISSAN ALTIMA’, where sex – with all its explicit implications – has established itself as a constant leitmotif. The message is clear: the forbidden is back, and this time, it is marketed with an intensity we have never seen before.
Durante la década de mitad de 2010 y principios de la de 2020, el deseo sexual —y en particular el deseo heterosexual— se percibía como un territorio cargado de tensiones y tabúes. El #MeToo vino a destapar las prácticas de explotación en Hollywood, que exponían a los trabajadores, al acoso y abuso por parte de los grandes nombres de la industria. Este despertar también trajo consigo un torrente de nuevas ansiedades sobre la sexualidad que penetraron profundamente en la cultura pop. De pronto, todo pasaba a ser examinado bajo una lente feminista pop que intentaba corregir el balance “arrastrando” el sexismo y evaluando cualquier pieza cultural según cuán profundamente reforzaba la mirada masculina.
During the mid-2010s and early 2020s, sexual desire—and heterosexual desire in particular—was perceived as a territory fraught with tension and taboo. #MeToo brought to light exploitative practices in Hollywood, which exposed workers to harassment and abuse by the industry’s biggest names. This awakening also brought with it a torrent of new anxieties about sexuality that permeated deep into pop culture. Suddenly, everything was being examined through a pop feminist lens that attempted to redress the balance by “dragging out” sexism and evaluating any cultural piece according to how deeply it reinforced the male gaze.
In response, creatives retreated into the safety of neutrality, fearful of the consequences, while audiences found cause for complaint in even the most harmless. The result was clear: the box office was filled with Disney remakes and superhero franchises, obsessed with physical perfection but devoid of any form of real intimacy. Raquel S. Benedict, with her 2021 viral essay titled “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have relationships, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.”
Recently, desire has erupted with overwhelming intensity. Now, everyone seems to be caught up in a maelstrom of attraction without barriers. The need for pleasure has become so omnipresent that opening any social network is to be swept away by a torrent of content that trivializes perversions, from the most risqué praise to the most explicit. After a decade of moralism and an almost sickly prudence, sexuality, which #MeToo tried to contain, has found an overflowing outlet. From movie screens to stages and social media, the pendulum has swung, and what was once taboo has not only returned, but has been diverted into ever more extreme territories.
Films like Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl are now frequently cited in this context. Both explore desire and subjugation from different angles, taking place in a deeply polarised moment: the aftermath of #MeToo still reverberates through the creative industries, while social conservatism continues to set the tone in politics. Both films explore the imbalance of power in provocative ways: Babygirl delves into the relationship between a powerful CEO who is “walked” by a 20-year-old, while Nosferatu amplifies the clash between repression and liberation to almost mythic levels of a struggle between good and evil.
Regardless of the stance taken, the fact that tales of forbidden pleasure are now so prominent and critically celebrated reflects the notable absence of this theme in pop culture over the past decade. Films like Throuple, Birder and The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed align themselves with this same line of provocation. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer follows Craig Lee, an American expatriate living an austere life in Mexico City during the 1950s, who begins a relationship with Eugene Allerton, a young soldier. This bond becomes a tug-of-war, where what could have been a classic conflict of age differences or isolated homosexuality, becomes a much deeper game: male vulnerability, ambiguity of intentions, and the exploration of what happens when desire, as Guadagnino rightly notes, “is out of sync.”
Films like Babygirl, Queer, and others like it have been received as “provocative” and “subversive.” Babygirl in particular resonates with the erotic thriller boom of the late 1980s and 1990s; it’s like an adapted version of The Secretary. However, few contemporary films can be considered transgressive in the same way that, for example, David Cronenberg’s Crash or Brian De Palma’s Body Double were. While in the latter, desire was charged with dangerous sexual tension, Babygirl is limited to a controlled game: the lascivious glances in the office carry no real risk. In fact, critics point out that the film’s “most subversive perversion” lies in the simple fact that a successful woman in her fifties can have an affair in her workplace without facing any personal or professional consequences. It is this same apparent normalization of the forbidden that makes the film not as transgressive as expected.
These are films about desire, but they stop at abjection. They play it safe by introducing deviance as a potentially destructive force and leaving us with the idea that it is positive. If the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s exposed the 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 appease them.
Music seems to be doing a somewhat more subtle and penetrating job of addressing the existential war that consumes our generation. So far in 2025, we have already witnessed two albums that explore sex in its most ambiguous forms, intertwining desires for pleasure and shame, loneliness and power. Ethel Cain’s Perverts, the sequel to her stunning Preacher’s Daughter (2022), unfolds as an expanse of dark atmospheres. The almost minimalist lyrics turn love and sex into sources of existential angst rather than liberation. Everything is steeped in religiosity, caught between the aspiration for purity and the harsh reality of being human, between the desire for visibility and the fear of exposure. The intimacy of her words (“I could make you cum 20 times a day”) becomes a sombre contrast to the more hostile sentiments (“If you love me, keep it to yourself”), while her voice, whispery and disconcerting, seems to brush against our psyche like a distant echo.
On the other hand, FKA twigs’ latest work, Eusexua, follows the same erotic path but with a more expansive and exterior approach, fusing sensuality with the electronic pulses of trip-hop, trance and experimental music. Whereas Perverts is marked by alienation and estrangement, Eusexua shines with a visceral luminosity. Twigs has consistently delved into sex as a life force, both as energy flowing through the body and as an act of liberation. Her iconic Two Weeks (2014), with its unabashed declaration of lust charged with the same subtlety as an explicit Adam Levine text message, was the seed of a multidisciplinary career that sees sex as a dance of emancipation and control, a constant power play that never loses its connection to the human.
Sex has returned to the mainstream, rawer and messier than ever. Yet something is still missing. The real answer to sexual violence cannot lie solely in the courts or in the fight over what is represented in art or entertainment; but neither is it enough to present sex without genuine critical reflection on its implications. Perverts and Eusexua dive headlong into the erotic, finding in conceptual deviance and action a kind of emotional relief, while exploring feelings that are often difficult to assimilate. For some reason, visual storytelling has yet to replicate this radical approach.
While Babygirl touches on sexual power dynamics with a clear pulse of the times, The Secretary has something much deeper to say about female abjection and power structures in the workplace. Nosferatu, a horror classic, is rooted in deviance from its foundations, but its treatment feels as superficially bloody as its own villain. The inclusion of these stories in the box office is a step forward, no doubt, but if a scene like Nicole Kidman enjoying a sweet treat from Harris Dickenson and hitting her head for the pleasure of it is perceived as taboo, we are still far from finding a work that stands the test of time and actually makes you uncomfortable.
“Ugliness in a certain sense is superior to beauty, because it lasts,” Serge Gainsbourg once said. Fundamentally, what we have right now are people with perfect bodies catering to the desires expressed on TikTok. If we are to see a return to the erotic heyday of the 80s and 90s, things will have to be much rawer, uglier and more authentic than that. In the meantime, there is always Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IMDb page.
If you had to choose between sex and food, which would you prefer?
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