sex scenes, disgust and the aesthetic lie
is it possible to love ourselves, these days?
If you’re keen to hear me in conversation with some very talented people talking about my new novel Carrion Crow—an ‘unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender’—then I’d love to see you at any of the above events. Tickets can be booked at the links here.
If you, like me, love the Inklings series from 404 Ink, and have pre-ordered the most recent series, you’ll have received a book through your letterbox recently: Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene by Edinburgh-based film critic and cultural journalist Xuanlin Tham. This was one of my most anticipated releases from the current Inkling series, alongside forthcoming titles How Does Change Happen? by
and But We Did! by Titilayo Farukuoye—and it really doesn’t disappoint.Tham was driven to write the book by the seemingly endless anti-sex-scene discourse of recent years, something that has been extensively discussed in various groupchats of which I am proud to be a part. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid this, the dominant narrative around the topic is that Gen Z in particular are hugely averse to seeing physical affection on screen, a point that was seemingly cemented in 2023 when a UCLA report concluded that:
47.5% of respondents ages 13–24 feel most TV shows and movie plots don’t need sexual content; 51.5% want to see more focus on friendships and platonic relationships.
As Tham points out, there has since been a lot made of this couplet of statistics, but hardly any reference is made to the fact that almost a quarter of this demographic are legally children, some not yet taking their first tentative steps into the awkward years of puberty. Many of them will not yet have had their first kiss, nor even experienced any feelings of attraction. Why are we drawing conclusions about society as a whole, or even about a particular generation’s attitudes to sex, from a group of mostly teenagers who haven’t yet come to sexual maturity? It’s like asking a breastfeeding baby what it thinks about red meat.
However, social media would seem to suggest that more than a negligible slice of the population (coded: American population) wishes to see less sex on our screens—despite the fact that there is less on it than in previous decades, as much as 40% less than in the year 2000. As Tham points out, the internet is “the single most important realm today where sex is being shaped”—and how things like sex are discussed in these public forums shapes what opinions turn into norms. We may start from a fairly innocuous series of comments from young people about how sex on screen makes them feel uncomfortable (which is not all that surprising, given that when you are a young person your discomfort with your own body and other people’s is often all-consuming), then because of the speed of argument online, and the way the media reports on all this discourse, suddenly we are in a situation where it is broadly seen as morally negative to show sex, even vaguely, on screen. Add in the monopolisation of the TV and film industries, the shift to the ‘traditional’ right occurring in significant parts of the world, and the sweeping modes of censorship coming from several different corners, and what you’re left with is an increasingly sexless movie industry. In a world that, nevertheless, constantly sells the idea of sex.
There is much to be examined about this contradiction, not least what it seems to demand of the people who work in the industry, and how those demands filter down to us, the little people; what (or who) is allowed to be seen. I’ve had a lot of conversation with friends of late about ageing, changing bodies, bodies that stand far outside of increasingly prescriptive and restrictive beauty standards, and this has coincided with with re-emergence of several veteran actresses, whose recent successes are very obviously tied to their highly expensive and successful surgeries and their relentlessly minuscule frames: Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman. These things, of course, are not unrelated.
I am not in the business of judging the choices that women make, especially when their careers rely on them achieving extreme results with their physical bodies. What I am interested in is the way that popular discourse is obsessed with the thinness of these women and their “age-defying” looks, which praises the way they have “miraculously” managed to keep the wrinkles and weight gain of advancing years away while also pretending that this is a normal way to age. If the internet is where we reshape attitudes to sex, as Tham states, then the world of celebrities is where we reshape attitudes to ageing, changing bodies. If you spend even a little time on Instagram, you’ll see Demi Moore, at 62, smooth-faced and white-toothed, fastened into a rib-crushing Schiaparelli dress, commenters thrilled, practically ecstatic, with the efforts she has gone to to meet their ever-shifting standards. A second later you might find yourself in the comments section of an actress of the same age who has not undergone such extensive treatments, watching as hundreds of comments pour in calling her disgusting for having the audacity to look slightly closer to her own natural age—and then you’ll see the same comments on a video of a regular woman, for whom the option to not visibly age was never even an option.
The most obvious example of this is what we might call the Pamela Anderson Oldface Phenomenon: the series of social media responses to bombshell Pamela Anderson’s turn away from make up on the red carpet or during media appearances, which insist to us, human beings with eyes, that a preternatually gorgeous, apparently very happy, sweet-seeming 57-year-old woman who has aged better than most of us could ever hope to is fundamentally disgusting and unattractive because she dares to show her (almost) bare face, with its wrinkles, its age spots, its blemishes, its life. Pamela Anderson, who most people would still lie down in the street for, if only she would deign to walk all over them, is, according to these norms and this messaging, a tired old hag. The refusal to plaster over her natural features with the inch-thick stage makeup that has somehow become standard daywear, nor to continue the Botox injections that, she says, made her look like a different person, render her old, bereft of value, simply unattractive. Our eyes, seeing otherwise, must somehow be wrong.
The reason that the Pamela Andersons of the fame game draw such ire is that they expose the naked insistence, repeated to us over and over again through various means, that looking perfect, and only this, will bring you happiness. That what the wider world thinks of your attractiveness is the most important thing—no matter your job, your circumstances, your environment, your desires. That the peak of attractiveness is being thin and unflawed, and as you age, or become disabled, or as you gain or lose weight, and your mobility changes, the people around you (as well as the wider world) will inherently find you less attractive, and so you will be less attractive, so you will have less sex and your life will be less sensual and this is all normal and inescapable. Attractiveness is for the young, and if you want to remain attractive you have to cling to youth, or the physical approximation of it, for as long as humanly possible. The hysterically positive commentary around the Logans, Moores and Kidmans for their unnaturally unmoving, unmarked faces and their tiny bodies proves that we believe this. And we might think that this is is a phenomenon restricted to women, but it is not: Men within a narrow class—rich, hot, famous, in ‘good shape’—are allowed to age, and are praised for it, but this is an entirely exclusive group, and if even these men do not put in the work and money required to ‘age well’ into the ‘silver fox’ category, or if their health or lifestyles do not permit it, they too will be treated as pathetic figures, worthy not of human attractive but pity, as Brendan Fraser has been in the last few years. The other day I saw a slew of comments decrying how “awful” Elton John looked—a 77-year-old survivor of prostate cancer—stating outright that with all his money, he should have had a lot of surgery.
An incredible example of how this narrative has a chokehold on the media, and on much of culture, is what my friends and I call the Brosnan Fatwife Phenomenon. Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond, has been with his ludicrously gorgeous wife Keely Shaye Smith for over thirty years. They live a life, one would assume, of great wealth and pleasure. He often speaks about how much he adores her. They always look happy. Whenever you see pictures of them, they are all over each other. On their many holidays around the world they are often photographed by the paparazzi, and the resulting photos always have the exact same narrative, one that is so single-note and predictable and offensive that it was summed up thus in one of our groupchats: He doesn't HATE his wife, DESPITE the fact she's SO FAT!
His body, of course, largely escapes critique. Both bodies should, and yet they do not. But the focus is not even on the bodies themselves, but the sheer insistence that a man widely considered one of the most attractive actors of the 90s should have turned away in disgust from a beautiful woman he has loved for three decades, a woman with whom he has had children, a woman with whom he lives a highly privileged and enviable life, because she has had the audacity to physically age, to move on from the years of her life when she was what our abject bodily norms tell us is perfection: young and thin. And because he still loves her, because he still sexualises and appreciates her, because they very obviously have a palpable romantic and sexual connection, the tabloids say: what’s wrong with this guy? She is no longer Keely Shaye Smith, she is Pierce Brosnan’s fatwife, a person defined, in tabloid inches, only by her apparently inexplicable sexual magnetism and her weird husband’s apparently incomprehensible attraction to her. The photos of their normal human affection for each other are smothered in disgust, as if anything other than physical perfection precludes a sexual connection. They are both reduced by this narrative, diminished by the sheer weight of these norms.
And yet. Their love and mutual adoration remains, despite what the narrative around them is in the media, and in what purports to be the popular consciousness, going by the worst pondscum comments on social media. Their attraction, like that of many many others, proves that sitting outside of the bounds of perfection does not, actually, make you unloveable, valueless. And the inverse of this point—that being physically perfect and thin unflawed and unageing makes you inherently sexual, desirable, valuable, worthy and happy—is not true either, as the sad personal lives of many a celebrity prove.
Once upon a time we might have dismissed this as an issue only for the famous, who have bought into this industry for the money and fame it buys them; they knew the rules, and they chose to play by them. But this doesn’t ring true any more, because the separation between our norms and their norms no longer exists. The line between how celebrities ‘should’ look and how normal people ‘should’ look is the thinnest it’s ever been, because we now all project ourselves into the public sphere via social media; we constantly turn the cameras on ourselves, hoping to build an audience. But we are buying into this world at the expense of the real one. We are changing our physical bodies towards a set of norms that thinks nothing of the real life consequences. As RS Benedict points out (and as Tham quotes), in the much-quoted and brilliant essay Everyone is Beautiful and No-one is Horny:
When a body receives fewer calories, it must prioritise essential life support systems over any function not strictly necessary for the body’s immediate survival. Sexual desire falls into the latter category, as does high-level abstract thought. A body that restricts food and increases exercise believes it is undergoing a famine, which is not an ideal time to reproduce.
Is there anything more cruelly Puritanical than enshrining a sexual ideal that leaves a person unable to enjoy sex?
In fact, there is perhaps a more apt example of this: the revelation that receiving Botox injections in the face may actually hinder women from reaching orgasm—because, as it turns out, the facial expressions that we pull as we reach climax are not just a result of orgasms but are an intrinsic part of them: As Natalie Gil for Refinery29 put it, summarising this 2018 study:
Researchers followed a small sample of 24 women who'd had Botox (and were tested before and after treatment), and compared them with 12 women who'd had non-muscle restricting facial procedures, such as skin peels. The women were asked to complete various questionnaires relating to their sexual function, mood and ability to read others' emotions.
The findings are enough to leave anyone furrowing their brow. The 13 women who'd had Botox on their frown lines reported reduced sexual satisfaction – orgasms were harder to achieve and less satisfying. There was also a "near significant" decline among women who'd been treated for crow's feet and frown lines.
The things that we are told to do, increasingly, to keep ourselves desirable might be actually working against the possibility of real sexual pleasure. We are making ourselves fuckable, according to beauty norms, but incapable of truly enjoying it—whether that’s because we are too tired and undernourished to experience desire or too frozen to properly orgasm.
I think, at this juncture, of Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, so taut and primed and thin that she looked absolutely sexless even when completely naked, unable to show desire on her perfect unmoving face, unable even to form some words properly due to the immobilisation of her top lip. I think about how completely unmoved I was by that film, how despite being about a powerplay, about attraction, how totally devoid of chemistry it was. I felt utterly unconvinced that the characters had any connection whatsoever. Is this sex allowed on screen during this period of sexlessness because it is inherently nonsexual? I think of the things I find attractive about people in my life, and how many of them are the expressions that they pull, the way their unique bodies move through the world, the inherent imperfectness.
I think too about Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan’s much-lauded, highly-expensive facelifts, their extremely thin and frail bodies, held up to the rest of us as examples of what you should, as a human woman, look like, in your 40s or your 60s or at any age at all, no mention of the fact that these actors have been pressured into erasing any emotive ability out of their faces, despite the conveying of emotion quite literally being their job. I think of the many great old male actors with deep lines and wrinkles on their intensely expressive faces, and I think of how this is a vanishing reality for female actors, singers, performers; how instead, we are supposed to praise the absence of visible change. I think about Frances McDormand pointing to a wrinkle on her face, saying it was formed from her grinning at her son Pedro, and how sad it would be for her to erase that history, that love, because of the pressures of Hollywood, the pressures to pretend that no time has passed, that no physical, emotional or ‘attitudinal’ change has occurred. As if unflawed youth has to be preserved in amber, and failure to catch it is a moral transgression, worthy of nothing but pure disdain.
This week I had a conversation with someone very close to me, someone ludicrously attractive and funny and kind and talented and smart and a wonderful mother and friend, about how we are supposed to exist in bodies that are considered lesser or that are negatively narrativised by society. Specifically, her question was: Confidence is sexy, but if your confidence gets eroded by society's approach to fat people, how can you be a sexy fat person?
This question, in its various forms, is something that has come up a lot in the last few years amongst my friends. How do we live happily, confidently in opposition to these beauty norms (and the resulting social biases), when they fundamentally affect how we are seen in this world? It is, I think, unanswerable, because you either place the onus on something beyond most of us individually—changing society’s approach to fat people (or to aging bodies, or disabled bodies, or trans bodies, or racialised bodies, or whatever type of body we have that is routinely diminished by society’s norms (and, often, attacked by laws and failures of the social welfare and healthcare systems))—or on the individual entirely, asking them to overcome something (society’s reaction to their physicality) that is overwhelmingly present and real, sometimes extending into such things as medical malpractice and/or legal discrimination. People who live in bodies that are fat, disabled, racialised, gendered, trans, ageing and in any way ‘othered’ can tell you the myriad ways in which social norms and discrimination very seriously affect their lives and their ability to connect with others on an equal playing field. We can and must fight these structures. But they also affect our relationships with ourselves, and while it is unfair to ask people to alter the way that this socialisation has affected them, to right a wrong that is not their own, there is no other way out of it. We have to deal with the way it has affected us in our own minds.
The question, I suppose, is this: can we decouple our relationships with our own bodies from how they are politicised, denigrated, othered? Is that even possible any more?
I very often think of Lindy West, and how, in her 2016 book Shrill, she described the process by which she deprogrammed her brain, teaching it to see her own body and those like it not as morally inferior or in some way deficient for not meeting the standards of thinness and beauty that are rammed into us by media and popular discourse, but first neutrally, and then positively:
I discovered a photo blog called ‘Hey, Fat Chick’ (now, crushingly, defunct) run by an effervescent Australian angel names Frances Lockie, and pored over it nightly like a jeweler or a surgeon or a codebreaker. It was pure, unburdened joy, and so simple: Just fat women — some bigger than me, some smaller — wearing outfits and doing things and smiling. Having lives. That’s it. They were like medicine. One by one they loosened my knots.
First, I stopped reacting with knee-jerk embarrassment at the brazenness of their bodies, the way I’d been trained. I stopped feeling obscene, exposed, like someone had ripped the veil off my worst secrets.
Next, they became ordinary. Mundane. Neutral. Their thick thighs and sagging bellies were just bodies, like any other. Their lives were just lives, like any other. Like mine.
Then, one day, they were beautiful. I wanted to look and be like them — I wanted to spill out of a crop top; plant a flag in a mountain of lingerie; alienate small, bitter men who dared to presume that women exist for their consumption; lay bare the cowardice in recoiling at something as literally fundamental as a woman’s real body. I wasn’t unnatural after all; the cultural attitude that taught me so was the real abomination.
The process West describes is so simple that it’s borderline genius. What if I just choose to believe something other than the messaging that’s given to me every day? What if I choose to reclaim myself from that? When I am feeling at my lowest (at a predictable point in my menstrual cycle, thanks hormones), if I see a photo or video of myself or catch my face in a mirror and hate it, I try to practice the same: what if I decide I’m beautiful instead? What if I just decide to think differently? A variation on this: what would I feel about this person if it wasn’t me? Would I ever be so harsh, or think so unkindly about her if she was a friend or even a stranger? I would not. So why am I so awful to myself? Of course, this mental recalibration is not easy to do, and must be even more difficult if you exist in a body that is othered in multiple ways. Neither does it erase the very real issues that othered bodies face in society, nor stop unkind comments from other people, nor judgment from medical practitioners, nor anything else. But as a practice to reclaim your own mind from the ceaseless self-criticism that has been wired into us since birth, I think it is a pretty good place to start.
It is, of course, a lot to ask: just rid your vulnerable and susceptible brain of some of the most relentless messaging of all time, from the phone you spend most of your days staring at! Pretend that the world is not as you have been convinced it is! If some of the most beautiful, rich, privileged, able-bodied white women in the world are subjected to these narratives, commented on relentlessly as disgusting freaks by regular human men and women who couldn’t possibly live up to the very beauty standards they take it on themselves to police, what would be made of anyone who stands outside of that incredibly narrow group—anyone racialised, disabled, poor, or living outside of the strict confines of gender? There is surely no hope for the vast majority of us. And yet, here’s the truth: they—we—are all loved, all desired, and longed for, all living sensual, sexual lives. The othered, the ‘gross’, the queer, the strange, the odd, the ugly—all of us (if we so choose) are engaged in love, in romance, in sex. Not every single person is, but throughout the world, people who consider themselves unlovable and valueless due to their supposed physical failures have others prove to themselves that they are far from unlovable, undesirable, without value as human beings. No matter how strongly the beauty norms are policed, the fact of the matter, globally, is that most of us live outside of them, and yet sex and desire and love remain constants for the vast majority of people living. This narrative, this media-driven insistence on physical, ageless perfection is really just a particular type of messaging to a particular type of person, one that finds form in the comments section of videos online or in the priapic responses to the Tates and other incel psychopaths on social media, and while it infects the way we see ourselves and the way we seek and find others, it is not a true reflection of how most people experience desire or sexual attraction. The messages we get most often from the media, from the world of celebrity, are contradicted by the feelings of those around us. And yet, it is those messages we most often listen to.
What to do, then, with the knowledge of this? Still it is difficult to not fall victim to the pressures of it, no matter the facts of our physical bodies, no matter the level of privilege we have. Sometimes I see photos of myself, or I engage in the intensely brutal self criticism that I feel is accurate, and for a moment I wish I could just surrender myself to a surgeon’s knife or an injector’s needle and have them decide what I should look like, bringing me up to what, at times, can feel like the standards by which every person in the world has decided we all must live. Sometimes, I can better see this landscape: a series of rapidly changing norms, capitalism-entwined, used to both line the pockets of the megarich, used to judge those who refuse them or fail to adhere to them and, often, to denigrate those who do try to live by them, but don’t have the money to achieve either the results or the invisibility of the process that the norms require; those who have had cheap or bad work done, who have had ‘too much’ (too obvious) work done, those whose genetics are simply not in line with the look they are trying to achieve. Other times—increasingly, as I get older and give fewer shits—my partner wraps me up in attracted energy, and tells me I am beautiful, and my friends grin at my face and laugh at something I have said and enjoy the food I have made for them, and praise the things I have done with my brain, and I consider the hours I have left in my life, and the beauty processes I could go through, the money I could spend getting things pulled up and padded out and altered and I think: why would I waste my life that way? I could simply be doing something better: thinking, fucking, eating, loving, living.
I think, then, about sex scenes, the good ones, which don’t insist on perfect youth, perfect bodies; ones that are dripping in a sensuality draped in grief, awkwardness, terror, a love of food. I think about Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, about Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia, about Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer, about Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in The Taste of Things—Hollywood stars, yes, still, but ones who are playing at normal people, with all their flaws, their aging, changing bodies, their shame and trauma and desire and need. I think about the joy to be had from knowing and seeing that normal, flawed, beautiful people are sensually entwined, engaged in the sensory pleasures of life, that it actually does not matter if your body and face are not marblesque, unlined, unmarked surfaces—that, actually, the messy physicality of your body is key to the whole thing. The more you strive for physical perfection, the further you get away from a real embodied experience of love and desire. And I try to remind myself that that, really, is the truth of it. No matter what I might be told.
how i wish everyone would read this !! it's so comforting and down-to-earth, i love it. i think i'll come back to it often
What an incredible read, thank you for this 🤌