or many of us, movies – along with whisperings
on the school bus, maybe – are one of the first
places we learn about sex. It could be the swimsuit
strip-off in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or the window-
steaming love scene in Titanic. Or renting something like
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers from the video shop
without your parents having the foggiest notion what it
was (guilty). Or maybe, if you’re a little younger than me,
seeing the nerve-prickling sensuality of something like
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. Even if the film
you saw had the slightest hint of libidinal energy, it was
probably enough in that formative moment to have sent
you down a whole new corridor of desire and lust.
I say desire here rather than sex because, so often,
cinema is better at the erotics of yearning than it is at
the actual sex act. When I think of the sexiest scenes in
movies, I think of Marlon Brando’s hulking charisma in
A Streetcar Named Desire, or the loaded stare between
Denzel Washington and Sanaa Lathan in Carl Franklin’s
2003 thriller, Out of Time, or Richard Gere’s lithe frame as
the eponymous American Gigolo. Sometimes, if you’re
LGBT+ or a person of colour, it can be difficult to see
your desires reflected on cinema screens, because of the
severe lack of widespread representation in the movies.
But you can often find the tidbit of something to carry
around, the spark of some implication or moment. It’s not
an ideal or equal representation, by any stretch, dominated
as movies are by white and hetero sex. But nearly all of
us, regardless of our backgrounds or sexual preferences,
can likely highlight one earth-shatteringly sexy moment
committed to celluloid that we will never forget. I think it’s
something to do with the way that cinema is full of coded
suggestions and reverberating ambiguities each exerting
a deep effect on our psyches. Women have become so
used to seeing our bodies on display. Any sign of sexual
willingness is often a way to condemn female characters.
Women’s desire, whether depicted on screen or felt as
the member of an audience, revels in real, honest-to-
goodness thirstiness, and it still feels bold. Thirst is the
newest catchphrase for an old impulse, repackaged as
something joyous, and turned from an admonishing
statement about sexual desperation to one that has been
cheerfully reclaimed by young people online.
I have felt this truth from my own early days of
moviegoing, held it at arm’s length as something separate
from ‘serious’ cinema culture for so long, and finally let
myself be ravishingly brought back to that thing from
which cinema is totally inextricable: desire. The belief
that women’s desire, in relation to the screen, was sorely
under-discussed, is what led me to editing my first
anthology of writers on the subject with Red Press. ‘She
Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and
Cinema’ features 21 culture writers looking at the subject
from every angle. From Claire Denis movies to female-
driven crime flicks such as Set it Off, these essays run the
gamut of predeliction and taste, often touching on the
reconciliation of feminist politics with forbidden urges. To
me, they are just the beginning of a wider conversation,
since the topic is endlessly complex and subjective. Along
with the publication of ’She Found it at the Movies‘, my
programme at BFI Southbank in London – entitled ’THIRST:
Female Desire Onscreen‘ – will run throughout April 2020.
The concept behind the season is to highlight both
actively thirsty women characters and films which stimulate
the thirst of the viewer. Marielle Heller’s Diary of a Teenage
Girl, which so aptly and empathetically touches on the
raging hormones and sexual missteps of an independently-
minded young woman, is among the selections. So too is a
riotously enjoyable 2018 documentary, This One’s for the
Ladies, a sort of real-life Magic Mike story about a group
of strippers catering to female audiences. Then there’s
Dirty Dancing, a sex-positive and beloved romance thatF
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