Kink Is Back In Cinema – How Transgressive Is It?
Words: Valeria Berghinz
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Babygirl (2024), Pillion (2025) and now I Want Your Sex (2026); take it from director Gregg Araki – “Sex is fucking back!”
So Araki declared on a No Notes interview earlier this summer, part of a press tour for I Want Your Sex, a singular film in Araki’s oeuvre for coming after a 12 year hiatus, partly starring an older protagonist, and being a sometimes silly and ultimately uplifting sex comedy.
In it, sexually insecure 23-year-old Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is hired as an assistant at an avant-garde art studio. He is soon called into the office of Erika (Olivia Wilde), the artist, a leather-clad sexually voracious dominatrix who initiates a sub-dom relationship between the two, a whirlwind sexcapade of high highs and low lows. The connection between Araki’s film and the earlier Babygirl and Pillion, as made by the No Notes podcast, is immediately evident. “There’s this clear urge in culture for some taboo smashing,” they say.
Taboos smashed by Babygirl come in the variety of an older woman (Nicole Kidman), a married and powerful CEO, letting go of all convention through her relationship to a dominating young intern (Harris Dickinson). Milk-drinking, floor-crawling and deep guttural orgasms ensue. Pillion also observes the dominant-submissive dynamic, this time from the perspective of a shy gay man (Harry Melling) entering into a BDSM relationship with a beautiful biker (Alexander Skarsgard), who has him sleep on the ground and do housework, to name the tamer kinks. “I have an aptitude for devotion,” explains Colin.
But why stop there? For a little sexual diversity, we could point to another of Olivia Wilde’s starring roles as flustered housewife Angela in The Invite (2026), which Wilde also directed. Here, Angela and husband Joe (Seth Rogen) invite their upstairs neighbours for dinner – Angela intending to make friends and Joe looking to complain about their impossibly loud sex. Tables are turned when they’re invited to their neighbour’s sex parties. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“kink is a fantasy land and our protagonists are an everyman, the audience’s stand-in – an audience lulled into sexless complacency from non-erotic media and online discourse about whether sex scenes should only appear if they forward the plot. “
So yes, kink is decidedly trending. Araki’s take on it is a direct response to Gen Z’s dwindling engagement with sex, which in an interview with Grindr’s Blog he chops up to COVID, social media and the risk of being filmed at all times – “so many things factor into people feeling uncomfortable and people being afraid to take a chance.” He also explains that a big turning point for the script came when he read an article on the statistics of Gen Z’s decreased sex rates, the same article Erika references in the film. “Your generation’s all about Fomo and you’re missing out on the sexual part,” she rants at Elliot. I Want Your Sex is an encouragement towards the opposite, an invitation for young people into the world of pleasure.
That idea of an invitation is also what connects these films. All are from the perspective of the uninitiated, the would-be virgin, an uncertain and blushing ingénue crossing the line into corruption. It’s ultimately a necessity of narrative structure that this recurs across the films – our blushing protagonists are essentially embarking on a kinky hero’s journey. Meeting their partners and being propositioned is the call to adventure, initial hesitance is their refusal, and soon enough they’ll cross the threshold into this new world of sex.
If initiation is so baked into this newly popular genre, what does that tell us about how audiences view sex? Araki makes it clear that his hopes for a less repressed youth are distilled into his film, that the young protagonist is us and the experienced teacher is, to some extent, him. In the hero’s journey metaphor, kink is a fantasy land and our protagonists are an everyman, the audience’s stand-in – an audience lulled into sexless complacency from non-erotic media and online discourse about whether sex scenes should only appear if they forward the plot.
But at the end of the hero’s journey is the return home, often known as ‘the return with the elixir’, a reward for a battle well fought and a peace restored. More than one film hits this note: Babygirl’s CEO quits her intern and returns to her husband, their unsatisfying sex life saved and their marriage all the better for it; The Invite’s ending is up to interpretation, but with the quasi-magical disappearance of the sexed up couple, Angela and Joe are finally able to decide whether they will divorce or stay married, this time healthily; I Want Your Sex end with a flash forward to a future where all characters are confident, contributing members of society. Pillion is slightly different, both in that the kink it explores is more extreme and in that its protagonist ends the film still looking for a BDSM relationship, if this time with a stronger self-knowledge and desire for boundaries.
The thing about narratively linking kink to the threshold crossed by protagonists is that sex becomes akin to a magical land one can travel to, a place to be explored without it necessarily defining who you are as a person. So on the one hand, these films can be great for the enthusiastic messaging of exploration – when sexual experiences don’t define you, the weight of identity politics is lifted. On the other hand, the return from this magical land of kink as shown in these films is a regulatory one. Now that our characters have dipped their toe and learned about themselves in the process, they may return to their husbands and jobs with an increased sense of self-worth. It’s an easier pill to swallow for hesitant audiences embarking on the erotic journey that is watching these films. But where does that leave sex?
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) hits many of the same notes with a timid protagonist and an older sexual mentor letting her into the world of slasher film eroticism. It’s also an incredibly self-conscious film about a director looking to make the latest installation in a slasher franchise, thus producing a cerebral narrative of film theory mixed with love of film. Kink here is less an act than it is a philosophy on the much researched and debated eroticism of horror films. What makes it stand out is that the film’s conclusion embraces desire – director Jane Schronenberg’s protagonists stay in their fantastical world and are happier for it.
That the only film that fully accepts the world of sex is one so concerned with the trappings of cinema and genre suggests maybe we should overthink this topic. Have taboos been smashed? Maybe we’re not there yet, but audiences are clearly curious and willing; perhaps this string of films can itself be an invitation for a more transgressive future in cinema.
