With every generation comes a moral panic about sex. Usually, the fear is that young people are having too much of it, or that the art they’re consuming — movies and TV, music, even video games — is encouraging reckless and immoral behavior. But the arrival of Gen Z, the first generation to grow up fully online, has upended that narrative. Statistically speaking, they are having less sex than young people of the generations before them, and there is no shortage of cultural discourse around their supposed prudishness. (They’ve even earned the nickname “puriteens.”) These modest tastes, along with a #MeToo reckoning that seemingly made Hollywood skittish about sexually explicit material, have been partially blamed for a recent decline in sex on our screens. According to one study, there’s been a 40 percent decrease in sex scenes in films since the millennium.
But the TV shows and movies of the last 12 months or so definitively buck that trend. In simple terms, 2024 has been a very horny year onscreen. From the tennis love-triangle drama Challengers to the deviant bankers of Industry to Nicole Kidman’s transgressive May-December kinkfest Babygirl, much of the work that’s recently captured the zeitgeist has radiated sex appeal — either in the form of explicit sex scenes or pulsating sexual tension. Most notably, it’s not all about sex for its own sake. In all of these works, sex is a vehicle for talking about power: Who has it? And to what end?
Take Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, based on the 1985 William S. Burroughs novella of the same name. It follows protagonist Lee (Daniel Craig), a retired American who is now living in 1950s Mexico City. Aging, dishevelled, and alcohol-dependent, Lee spends his time stumbling from one bar to the next, drunkenly throwing himself at attractive young men.
After an unsatisfying tryst with one such young man (Omar Apollo), Lee becomes obsessed with Allerton (Drew Starkey), a discharged U.S. navy serviceman he meets by chance. Eventually, they start a relationship of sorts — one where, at the beginning, their sex is reciprocal and pleasure-filled. The sex scenes here, including explicit depictions of oral sex, are much more graphic than in Guadagnino’s previous films, particularly Call Me By Your Name, the gay love story that was widely criticized for being “sanitized.”
But that isn’t what makes it so hot. As Lee and Allerton’s relationship progresses, the central tension becomes Lee’s desperation not to lose his young lover as he feels him pulling away. Lee is so obsessed with keeping hold of Allerton that he takes him on an expedition to the South American jungle where, in an extended scene, we see their sweaty and sculpted bodies entwined in a drug-induced hallucination. There is a deep eroticism in how, in their dream-like state, Lee and Allerton’s bodies communicate beyond language.
If Queer is one of the sexiest films of 2024, then it is closely rivaled by another collaboration between Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes: Challengers. For weeks after its April release, the more-than-a-tennis movie starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist was all anyone could talk about — the memes, the fashion, and the sexual tension. In the film, tennis coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) finds herself stuck in the middle between professional players and former childhood besties Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Faist). Zweig plays “show tennis” (a high-risk, entertaining game), whereas Donaldson plays “percentage tennis” (a more dependable, risk-averse game). Both men represent a contrasting side of Tashi’s desires.
According to Kuritzkes, the idea to adapt Queer actually came about on the Challengers set, when Guadagnino handed him a copy of the Burroughs novella and asked if he would read it. He considers the films inextricably linked. “I was writing Queer throughout the whole process of us shooting Challengers, and finished it two weeks after we wrapped,” Kuritzkes says. “I really do think of them as siblings. Queer couldn’t have come into existence without Challengers.”
There is a feeling of forbidden lust that simmers throughout both films. When we first meet Tashi as a promising junior player, Patrick and Art follow her around like horny puppy dogs. High on teenage hormones, they’ll do anything to impress her, from kissing one another on a bed to double-crossing each other. Later, we see Tashi 10 years on — sporting an immaculate bob and Chanel flats — as one half of a tennis “power couple” with her now-husband, Art. Despite appearing like a dom top with a tough exterior, she seems worn down by being the key to both men achieving their potential, and from years of being treated as the prize in their lifelong dick-swinging contest.
Kuritzkes thought that tennis would be an interesting place to explore these dynamics because it’s a sport that is “about containing the chaos of energy” that “puts people in boxes within boxes.” Tennis is fairly rigid, with many rules about where the ball is allowed to land and where the players are allowed to stand and for how long. “With Challengers, everyone talks about the fact that it’s such a sexy movie, but most of the sex scenes are interrupted, or you see people just after they’ve had sex,” he says. “Actually, the deepest intimacy that those characters ever share together is on the tennis court.” He compares the relationship between the players to boxers, who also fight it out in a one-on-one contest — except tennis is about not touching each other, and being highly in control of your body and emotions. “To me,” he says, “that feels like a deep well of repression and eroticism.”
There is a similar theme of repression in Queer, where Lee’s obsession with Allerton is grounded in not knowing whether he’s really queer. It drives their journey deep into the jungle in search of a plant that will supposedly help him see inside his young lover’s mind. Who has the power here? Lee has money, which he uses to tempt his muse on an all-expenses-paid trip (in exchange for sex twice a week). But Allerton has the ultimate trump card: youth, sex appeal, and being tantalizingly out of reach.
In truth, the horniness of 2024 started at the tail end of 2023, with a crop of awards-bait releases that were particularly graphic when it came to sex. There was Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s kinky take on the British class system, in which Barry Keoghan’s character drinks semen-infused bathwater and has a full-frontal nude scene. (In keeping with the theme, Keoghan was frequently under-clothed or unclothed on the film’s press tour, including on the cover of Vanity Fair.) Also in the mix was All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s heartbreaking gay love story in which Paul Mescal sensually licks cum off Andrew Scott’s chest. (It was actually cake batter.) And in March, Emma Stone won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a sex-crazed young woman with an infant’s brain in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.
What is striking about these examples is that they approach sex in a way that is far removed from the contexts of daily life, such as the workplace. In 2017, when the #MeToo movement started, Hollywood began facing its own culpability in the culture of sexual trauma. In the aftermath, there were dramatizations of workplace misconduct, such as Bombshell — the 2019 film starring Margot Robbie and Nicole Kidman that chronicled sexual harassment at Fox News — or The Morning Show, where a Matt Lauer-like anchor is brought down for illicit office affairs. But aside from that, any sex scenes we saw were mostly celebrated for their tenderness, as in Normal People, the Sally Rooney adaptation that launched the careers of Mescal and his co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones in 2020. When these shows were discussed in the media, there was an emphasis on the important role of intimacy coordinators. By contrast, in the latter half of 2024, sex has returned to the workplace, where it has been portrayed more boldly and explicitly.
In HBO finance drama Industry, sex is used to explore the chaotic professional and personal relationships among a group of emotionally damaged financiers at the fictional bank Pierpoint & Co. Earlier this year, Konrad Kay told me that Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) represent two different versions of how women might survive in a male-dominated environment. “Women tended to bifurcate into people who are trying to replicate the men, or trying to become objects of desire for the men,” he says, remembering his time working on the trading floor in his twenties. “Both of those were pathways to success in a rigid male hierarchy.”
In Season Three of Industry, we see Yasmin using sex to reclaim some of the power men have taken from her when they underestimate or objectify her. Suddenly adrift following the disappearance of her sleazy father, Yasmin starts a relationship with Henry Muck — an aristocrat with a urine fetish. When he first invites her to a restaurant to seduce her, she marches him to the bathroom and demeans him in the mirror, telling him he has no chance with her, before tempting him with the trickling sound of her peeing in the cubicle. This moment was reminiscent of the first season, when Yasmin was being sexually harassed at work by a senior colleague, Kenny. At that point, she reasserted herself by sexually dominating her office crush, Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey), making him masturbate in front of her in the office toilets before eating his ejaculate off the mirror. At times, it might seem like Yasmin is in control, but her survival in the elite circles depends on men, which she demonstrated in the Season Three finale when she chose to marry Henry — a man who admitted he might be too selfish to ever truly love her.
Babygirl — the hypersexual (and strangely festive) A24 film starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, which hits cinemas on Christmas Day — explores similar dynamics in the upper echelons of the corporate world. It follows Romy (Kidman), a powerful New York tech CEO who “has it all”: a #girlboss career, a hot husband (Antonio Banderas), and beautiful children whose school bags she still finds time to pack every morning. But behind her immaculate image, Romy is hiding a secret: She is a masochist who craves sex that is unequal, risky, and kinky. Her fetishes are used to dissect one of the most complex questions relating to sexual politics: Why are we so often attracted to people and situations that we know will hurt us? And why might we actually want them to?
In the film’s opening scene, Romy is seen masturbating to BDSM porn and bringing herself to orgasm, just moments after faking one in bed with her husband. Soon, she begins to explore these fantasies with Samuel, a new intern at her job who has just graduated from college. Romy is well-versed in the language of the post-#MeToo era. She knows what she’s doing is wrong, because she is in a “position of power” over Samuel. But their relationship is complicated by the fact that, in the bedroom, she is totally submissive to him — he tells her what to do, where to go, and shows his power over her in some dangerous ways, like showing up her her family home unannounced, leaving suggestive notes on her desk, and, most bizarrely, ordering glasses of milk for her to drink in public.
When Romy worries she might hurt Samuel, he responds: “Hurt me? I think I have power over you. I could make one call and you lose everything.” This only arouses her more, because she later confesses that, for her to be turned on, “there has to be danger, things have to be at stake.” While attempting to conceal the affair, Romy weaponizes both her womanhood and her CEO status. And when it’s inevitably discovered, the people below her on the career ladder try to use those very things against her for their own gain. In that sense, Babygirl is a case study in how power corrupts not only those who have it, but those who crave it.
This all brings to mind a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” Kuritzkes thinks this is true “to some extent,” but that it’s a lot more complicated than one person wielding power over another purely for self interest. He points to numerous moments in Challengers where characters are behaving out of care for each other just as much as their own interests. In Babygirl, Samuel is sadistic but also genuinely cares for Romy. And despite having much less to lose than her, he is the one who is more distraught by the fluctuations in their relationship. In Industry, Yasmin choosing Henry over Rob could be read as selfish or transactional, but we later learn that she engineered a situation where each of them got something — money, status, or security — out of the dissolution of their love triangle.
“It’s seductive to be as cynical as thinking that sex is always about power,” Kuritzkes notes. “It’s a line of reasoning that is clear and simple, but people are not that simple. And even if we wanted to be that cynical, or if that would make our lives easier, I don’t think, at the end of the day, that most of us are.” Perhaps, then, the sexiest films and TV series of the past year have shown the unique power of sex itself — to combine care with control, danger with desire, and all of the feelings in between.
