Valentine’s Day is the least erotic holiday that could exist. Gaudy pink and red marketing schemes take over the internet. Those with significant others buy generic heart-shaped Russell Stover chocolate boxes and nervously wonder if their partner will underperform. Those without significant others lick their wounds with a Galentine’s Day dinner or a bottle of cheap wine. When stripped of the anticipative buildup that is characteristic of desire, Valentine’s Day reveals just how complacent humans can become with concocted notions of love and intimacy.
This sex column was born from my desire to write and consume media about desire, from the “Modern Love” column to “Sex and the City” (1998). However, marketing firms’ decisions to deem certain presentations of intimacy more profitable than others compel users to enjoy consuming these narrower depictions of desire. Short-form TikTok videos combine the captivation of visual editing and catchy song fragments to create trends for couples while the porn industry has desensitized millions to the consideration and awkwardness essential to even the most casual sex.
I like to think about desire like this: As with energy in physics, the majority of desire exists in a dormant state — untapped.
Take a Reddit post asking: “In what ways has capitalism ‘seeped into the unconscious?’” for example. User @hirnwichserei replies, “We have largely lost the ability to imagine a better world, and the entire task of doing so appears patently absurd.” The media’s depiction of relationships under capitalism — Carrie Bradshaw palavering over the decline of available men left in New York, for instance — operates through inherent competition; in a college environment like Emory University specifically, students gasp when a boy finally posts the girl he has been hooking up with on social media and roll their eyes at the couple who has been together since the first week of freshman year. Over winter break, I found myself on a mission to find visual media outside of the mold of prescribed notions of connection, showing how realized desire persists through a rejection of the generic. In interrogating your perceptions of desire, I implore you to watch these films to connect with an inner sense of eros.
Director Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” (2024) represents a resurgence of the erotic thriller, a genre critical to evoking widespread discourse of sexual empowerment for American women in the ’80s and ’90s. While the media industry understands the profit-generating impact of sex, few mainstream films use sex as a receptacle for more uncomfortable conversations surrounding less mainstream desire. “Babygirl” is a universal testament to women reckoning with the guilt of desire, telling the story of Romy (Nicole Kidman), a high-powered CEO, who begins a charged affair with her 20-something intern (Harris Dickinson). The film represents the notion that our deepest desires often remain buried because, when clawed to the surface, they can often uproot entire lives. Romy’s affair occurs at middle age, a stage of life in which she is seemingly content, with a doting husband and two daughters. Her story shows how so many tenets of a successful life are built around uninterrogated wants. Just as Generation X women have been reacting to the film by processing their own buried fantasies, I believe that a majority of Emory students require an impetus to think outside of prescribed binaries — a high-powered, lucrative job in New York is recited as too universal a goal for it to be representative of a deep-seated desire, and I would like to believe that our most fervent dreams do not revolve around labor. The film preaches that discomfort is the vessel necessary for understanding our visceral gravitations and makes viewers question just how easily a facade of self can break under the right conditions.
If you want to double the eroticism, watch this in movie theaters while you still can. Sex scenes that show the awkward transition from nervous fumbling to orgasm feel an hour long when you are sitting between a shell-shocked middle-aged couple and a giggling old man. “Babygirl” represents a burgeoning cultural shift to prioritizing discomfort, pointing to the larger sentiment of consciously choosing the media we consume as an act of desire.
“Carol” (2015), directed by Todd Haynes, shares the same dynamic of an age-gap relationship and extramarital affair as “Babygirl,” but little else. Set in the ’50s, young Therese (Rooney Mara), is immediately enamored at first sight by Carol, (Cate Blanchett), a sumptuous older woman whose every move reverberates in mystique and glamour. Queer love, in history and this movie, is a testament to desire as a driving force for connection outside of the binary and the right to experience said connection. To me, this slow burn brings about the timeless question so many women I know ask: “Do I want to be her or be with her?” Carol becomes a vessel for Therese’s self-discovery, showing how so many of us are programmed to move through life waiting for something profound to happen instead of seeking experiences that challenge who we are and what we want. The film, following a lesbian relationship in a time period when this desire was socially prohibited, shows the capacity for the erotic to manifest as a lingering touch or a glanced goodbye — the foreplay of lust that a generation used to the idea of sex as the embodiment of desire has lost.
Quite differently, the horror film “Shivers” (1975), directed by David Cronenberg, revolves around a parasite that gradually infects people in an apartment complex, turning tenants into erotic-obsessed hosts who infect others through violent sex. Cronenberg used the grotesque and the inhuman as vessels for showing the fear associated with confronting one’s most buried desires. In a review, film critic Becca Rothfeld praises the parallelism of parasitic metamorphosis to how humans can transform through love and sex. The ability to change each other through a state of desire, whether through a long-term relationship or a single kiss, relies on surrender. This genre-melding film symbolizes the mind-bending moments characteristic of the erotic. In a media society deeply desensitized to the mainstream showcase of intimacy as mechanical, heterosexual sex, “Shivers” shows that desire can be ravenous. In experiencing the fine line between Cronenberg’s inclination towards the grotesque and the intimate, viewers can’t help but ask themselves if they have ever had an experience so undefinable.
Audre Lorde, the muse behind this column, advocated for desire as a physical state of being. Like a muscle that needs to be worked, the places, people and rituals that bring us to this state require a commitment to experimentation. Questioning presentations of mainstream intimacy means questioning which romantic and sexual inclinations are imbibed and which are self-realized. This Valentine’s season, I advocate for interrogating your desire for a facade of the erotic.
Contact Saanvi Nayar at saanvi.nayar@emory.edu.
