Defending the sex scene: Kink as anti-capitalist provocation
Responding to I Want Your Sex (dir. Gregg Araki, 2026) at the Edinburgh International Film Festival
Despite relentless internet discourse on the necessity of sex scenes, kink is making a comeback in film – and I love to see it. As a queer creative, it excites me that filmmakers are taking risks with increased representations of ‘taboo’ sexuality. In this era of rising conservatism where porn culture and prudishness live side by side, personified by a generation (mine) that is simultaneously undersexed and overstimulated, films with transgressive themes help me contend with ideas about desire as a root of distress, the complicated relationship between taboo and terror, and the role that capitalism plays in these entanglements.
The latest in the kink on film revival is New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. The brain child of Araki and writer Karley Sciortino, I Want Your Sex joins a line of recent psychosexual releases – including Babygirl and Pillion – where toxic power play is satirised, sensationalised and served to audiences starving for an opportunity to process the clusterfuck of contradictions that make up late-stage capitalist society.
The film follows 23-year-old Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman), a sheepish recent graduate who falls into a chaotic BDSM affair with his enigmatic new boss, artist Erika Tracey (Olivia Wilde). Araki, whose previous films include cult classics like Totally Fucked Up and The Doom Generation, brings his trademark provocative style to this absurd plot. Erika is the hot, mean, sexed-up version of the single-minded girlbosses I grew up lusting over in films like The Devil Wears Prada, while Elliot’s character typifies a kind of Zillenial chaos I'm all too familiar with. In his search for just a thimble of novelty in an otherwise algorithmic existence, he dives head-first into a self-destruction that is as hilarious as it is uncomfortable to watch.
As an eager and grateful participant in his own undoing, Elliot is easier for me to scrutinise than he is to feel sorry for. Similarly, my enjoyment of Babygirl and Pillion hinged on an ability to dissociate the plights of the protagonists from my actual experiences with being taken advantage of. It helps that none of the characters in these films would self-identify as victims; the scripts are also irreverent and meta, bringing levity to otherwise heavy (and sometimes horrific) scenes. But crucially, my willingness to consume this fuckery as entertainment is rooted less in these films’ depiction of BDSM and more in their exploration of power and powerlessness as ciphers for class politics. BDSM is central to films like I Want Your Sex, not to normalise the joys of kink, but as a vehicle for capitalist critique: that’s why the dynamics in these narratives are always so dysfunctional.
I Want Your Sex (dir. Gregg Araki, 2026), courtesy of EIFF
As an employee of the lowest authority, Elliot is already primed to submit to Erika before sex even enters the chat. And although she is the ‘dom’ in their arrangement, in her career, Erika herself must submit to the whims of the market. In some ways, her position feels even more fragile than Elliot’s, as she’s forcibly reduced to a spectacle: an apparition conjured by her industry to serve what she cynically describes as the “scam” that is contemporary art.
The exaggerated and often inaccurate portrayals of kink in their dynamic skew towards abuse, like when Erika ties and gags Elliot during a threesome with his friend Apple, ignores his cries of discomfort, violates his consent and insists that “this is what he likes”. She then goes on to use footage of them having sex as part of her exhibition despite previous assurances that the videos would remain private between them. This clearly goes beyond BDSM. Abuse shrouded in irreverence, humour or smut is still abuse, and our ability as audiences to casually consume this speaks to a political and media landscape where we are increasingly desensitised to abuses of the state. Araki draws attention to our desensitisation to highlight these structural abuses, to the extent that kink becomes a sort of dummy for the perversions of capitalism we are frantically trying to distract ourselves from.
In reality, most people who indulge in BDSM will tell you that their enjoyment of it hinges on a sense of safety and liberation. The philosophy of modern sub-dom play is that there’s as much power (and thus pleasure) in surrender as there is in control. What Elliot experiences is not BDSM, but the tortures of capitalism. After Erika breeds a dependency in him that she is repulsed by, Elliot declares his love for her and she immediately pulls away, treating him as expendable in the way the worker is to the capitalist, or the way the civilian is to the authoritarian state.
In the British context, the capitalist class distracts from its own perversions by whipping up a frenzy around identities that sit outside of cis-heteronormativity. This creates a hostile environment where the most marginalised people (visibly queer, non-white, trans people etc.) are charged with ‘corrupting’ and ‘endangering’ others in a way that conflates sexual taboo with genuine terror. Movies like I Want Your Sex, with their explicit representations of the risqué and lack of moralistic posturing, should train us to look taboo in the eye and decide for ourselves what we will tolerate. They should inspire uncomfortable conversations about desire, power, self-determination and personal and collective boundaries. They should invite us to question how we might restructure society so that it is more taboo to be a genocidal technocrat or a wealth-hoarding, paedophilic royal than it is to simply exist outside of sexual norms.
Watching I Want Your Sex, I feel inspired to tell stories that directly challenge my own perspectives and to make art that is radical and honest, even when it is ugly. I am inspired to defy what I've been conditioned to treat as extreme.
This Response was narrated by Memuna Konteh, with sound editing by Sarya Wu.
