No one is trying to fuck anymore. And it’s a real shame because people seem to really want to. In the past year, sex has slowly crawled its way back to the movies. Starting with movies like Saltburn and Challengers, and more recently, films such as Babygirl, Queer, and Anora cinema has not become more sexy, rather, they are becoming more sexual. All three of these films focus on sex in their own way. Babygirl is about an inversted pyschosexual relationship between a boss and her much younger (male) employee; Queer is an adaptation of the William Burroughs’ novel centered around queer love and desperation; while Anora is about a stripper’s unlikely rise (and fall) to wealth through a serendipitous meeting with a Russian billionaire's son. None of these are bad films, and the presence of sex in them is not necessarily bad news; rather, it seems like an inevitable respite from the almost decades-long reign of sexless PG-13 films. It is worth noting, however, that despite the inevitable shift back toward sex, it came quite quickly. In a 2021 interview, Paul Verhoeven, ever controversial director of sex-based movies such as Basic Instinct and Showgirls, remarked: “There is already—for twenty years—certainly a movement toward Puritanism. And the question that is asked is Why would you show a sex scene?”

When the puritanical culture that Verhoeven is describing was still at large, that is to say, when sex scenes were disappearing, many of its opponents would make the comparison to pornography. The logic of this argument relied on the belief that pornography was gratuitous, fundamentally shameful, and did not have a place in the mainstream. While pornography is far from a perfect genre, critics of the sex scene did not account for the fact that a nude body, or even a sex scene, does not equate to porn. There are finer lines between what contains sex and what is fundamentally erotic (read: sexy); smut contains sex, poetry is erotic; Snapchat nudes contain sex, charcoal nude drawings are erotic; red LED lights contain sex, candles are erotic. 

The smaller, less insidious, but ever more interesting argument is one that sees pornographic content as a vapid means of sexual self-satisfaction. However, this is really a new development. Historically, sex (and by proxy, pornography) has been a symbol of a movement from boyhood to manhood. Freud was the first prominent figure to posit this, but it does not take Freudian analysis to look at contemporary cultural discussions around sexuality and draw a clear line that what is “appropriate” is inherently unsexual. Thus, to be sexual, whether that is actively having sex or passively watching porn, functions as a symbolic movement towards maturation. There is no better example of this ideology at work than in Playboy magazines. One of Playboy’s big feats was tailoring itself to a very specific and narrow traditional idea of masculinity. They believed (and acted) as the one true bastion of masculinity with the tagline: Entertainment for men. There was never doubt ever that Playboy was a porn magazine but between glossy images of nude women posing in absurd scenarios paired with written testimonies of their aspirations, there were Slavoj Zizek articles about the war in Iraq next to women holding hamburgers in American flag bikinis shortly proceeded by Margaret Atwood short stories. “Men,” as Playboy saw, are not strictly a sexual category, but rather, an assembly of many other parts that constitute proper manhood. 

But, even though this is not what porn is now. While Playboy’s pornography developed an idea of manhood that included porn among many other factors, most contemporary pornography affirms manhood through the separation and degradation of woman from man through a misogynistic matrix of various visual and audio signals. Whereas Playboy had porn of women, independent of men, current pornography focuses on what men are doing to women. Even in pornography where women occupy more dominant sexual positions, the vast majority of viewers are men. This is not to assert Playboy as a fundamentally good organization, but rather to suggest that masculinity has shifted.

What a “gentleman” was used to be a much narrower definition. It wasn’t simply separate from a woman, it was a certain distinction one earned through various “masculine” pursuits: a specific brand of intellectualism, clothes, and speech. This obviously is not to praise these performances as the correct form of masculinity, but rather to point out an obvious shift from the more “refined” sexuality of Playboy to the more crude fucking that Pornhub specializes in. This shift in masculinity seems symptomatic of the grip and control that patriarchy held. As the clearly dominant system, there was no need to make all men “masculine;” it could exclude effeminate men, uneducated men, and poor men. When Playboy describes itself as “entertainment for men,” they have a specific ideal of a man in mind. You can see this in Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, himself; his mansion is decorated to ooze a traditional White American masculinity: wood, leather, books, a pool table, a pool.

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When the sex scene initially started disappearing, it seemed as if they were being subsumed in the name of popular culture. PG-13 franchise films became the norm because it was simply good business. PG-13 serves as a middle ground, able to market to both a kid and adult audience. Studios know that franchise films are the most profitable, and then they design them backward for the broadest possible audience. The shift back to sex in movies, while ultimately placing sex in a more visible place, has done little to change attitudes: sex within Gen-Z is down, the age of virginity has risen, and the number of couples has decreased. This leads to a theory about the permanence of the PG-13 era. Given the relative rarity of sex and nudity in film for the past decade, studios have trained audiences to see those things as inherently pornographic, and in response to this, sex in movies has come back as pure absurdity. The three aforementioned films Babygirl, Queer, and Anora, despite the presence of a sex scene, are all united by the fundamental “unsexiness” of the display. Whether it is the shifted and extreme power dynamics of Babygirl, the pining in Queer, or the skewering of sex work in Anora, sex is never just sex, it is desperation, it is metaphor, it is story, it is moral. The Puritanical culture is still at large, just with a more tolerant system to present imagery. There is no capital-S Sex—there is just guilt around it. We still cannot stomach sex, so we wreck it into something unrecognizable in the name of “art,” or we suppress the impulse entirely. 

You could see this, then, as the sex scene eclipsing pornography’s long-held grip on sexual aesthetics. Porn is formed entirely on the basis of spectacle. Replacing the real (the body) with a vacant sign (image of the body), in an attempt to recreate sexual pleasure (orgasm). Porn’s aesthetics have always been superficial at best, even the most devout addict implicitly understands that porn is a surrealist interpretation of the sex; the lack of eroticism is made up for in increasingly hardcore situations and exaggerated visual and audio stimuli. The contemporary sex scene, on the contrary, is stripped down in nature. They are often quiet and bizarre: Barry Keoghan eating cum out of a drain, Nicole Kidman licking milk out of a dish, and Zendaya and her two boyfriends’ dorm room discussions of tennis. This is no longer porn—moving beyond its spectacle, this is something more removed. The contemporary sex scene isn’t really even sex anymore. It’s not even the empty bodies that porn produces, rather they are the visuals of what is supposed to be sex without any desire behind them. They are sex for the sake of risque, but even in this portrayal, sex cannot supersede the aesthetic desire with anything more meaningful. 

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None of this is an endorsement, necessarily, of porn. If anything the increasingly removed nature of sex from film just pushes people back toward porn and its host of problematic values and practices. From the more symbolic objectification objections lauded by the Radical Feminist Andrea Dworkin to the contemporary asphyxiation concerns of Peggy Orenstien; porn has never exactly been seen as a net positive for women. Even the men’s rights activists of 4chan-yore see porn as demeaning, at the very least, for the male viewer of it, pushing unrealistic body standards for men and promoting singular, hegemonic ideals of masculinity. Again, none of this is new, but when considering the frequent (and varied) critiques of pornography in the past half century, the question arises: if sex for pleasure's sake only exists when it also demeans women for the sake of masculinity, how is anyone supposed to care about sex? 

This question, of course, presupposes a given vision of what sex should be. The issue has never been about the presence of boobs or the lack of penetration on screen, but rather the tone, context, or framing of a given scene. Whether in porn or in cinema, presentations of sex carry a certain ideology with them. Thus, in separating the pornographic from the cinematic, distinctions must be made. One of the more notable theories on these distinctions in made by Nobel Prize-winning poet, Octavio Paz, in his 1993 book The Double Flame: Love & Eroticism. In it, Paz posits that sex, love, and eroticism are three separate concepts that sit together on the same axis. He defines the three in two quotes: “Eroticism can be religious...but love is always human” and “Sexuality is animal; eroticism is human.” Thus, we can define the three properties on a spectrum: love sits on one end (human) and sexuality sits on the other (animal), with eroticism falling somewhere in between. It does not contain the utilitarian animality of sex, nor does it contain the pure humanity of love. “An erotic encounter begins with the sight of the desired body. Whether clothes or naked, the body is a presence: a form that for an instant is every form in the world,” Paz would later write. The erotic is rooted in the human but fundamentally interconnected to the world.

Feminist writer and thinker Audre Lorde would offer up a slightly different definition of eroticism in her essay “Uses of the Erotic” in which she wrote, “[t]he erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” She then furthers this definition, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” Lorde’s definitions are obviously more gendered than Paz’s, but even still, the enduring quality of the erotic is something rooted in the body.

Paz and Lorde’s respective theories of the erotic still see the body as more than its simple flesh and blood. Both Playboy and its contemporary pornographic counterparts contain images of the body, and still, both Paz and Lorde would pause about describing it as erotic. Pornography’s use of the body is a discursive one. All bodies in pornography, both male and female, perform sex as an overdramatized version of the act itself. The primary purpose of porn is to assist masturbation, thus there is no reason that porn should enable or perfom more than the sexuality it aids. Both Paz and Lorde acknowledge the body's potential, its interconnectedness to the world, its energy. To be erotic is to present the body as a thing that can do more than just fuck.

There is a fine line to ride here. Erotics are still expresssions of sexality, just ones that acknowledge a body a site that contains the potential to do more than fuck. This is where Verhoeven succeeded in showing sex (in creating a body, that is), but having it exist within a world and within a system. His bodies were not symbolism, they were plot. His characters have motivations, and it is precisely these motivations that make them choose sex.

This returns us to sex in contemporary cinema: there are no bodies. There are symbols of bodies, there are aesthetics of sexuality, but there is no fucking—there is nothing erotic. There is no shortage of romantic subplots, no shortage of theoretical fucking, no shortage of the stench of horniness that has ran-through the box office in the past two years, but there has been a shortage pure, unadulterated eroticism. Characters do not choose sex; the plot does. It isolates the sex in these films, relegating it to nothing more than a piece of shock value to generate The Cut-style think pieces, but fundamentally it is still out of touch with the basic erotics that make sex desirable. Read this as a formal complaint: there needs to be fucking, real fucking, with real bodies, and real erotics—symbolism will no longer suffice. 

I fear that we are currently watching the death of sex, and while it is, perhaps, crude and taboo to phrase it like that, it is the only term that couples love and pure, unadulterated pleasure together. My greatest fear, however, is not that sex is already dead, but rather, that we are too incapacitated to do anything but watch it die.