Why does pervert winter feel so cold?
Justice for the girl pervert!
are girls born freaky, or do they have freakiness thrust upon them?1
I want to make friends with the girls and gays on the Ethel Cain subreddit who talk about fucking their boyfriends to her new record Perverts. Tortured, eerie soundscapes with muffled incantations of religious guilt and sexual shame are not typical fodder for a sex playlist. Yet freaky times call for freakier sex music. And lately, most things feel profoundly unsexy.
Competitive OnlyFans challenges are turning porn into an algorithmic race to the bottom. Films promising an erotic exploration of kink repeatedly miss the mark. Dating apps fail to capture the weird quirks that make a person attractive. The sex that comes from them can feel transactional and cold. The answer posed to us is celibacy – the viral ‘boy sober’ trend. Everything is content, so it makes sense that sex is content too. I wonder if the next person I sleep with will inspire a moving Substack essay. To paraphrase André Leon Talley, it’s a famine of eroticism, honey!
Like any good cinephile worth their Mubi subscription, I was at the cinema when I found out that David Lynch had died. I got the text five minutes before going in to watch Babygirl. The film itself left me cold. What was billed as a daring exploration of sexual submission and female desire depicted a surface-level soft kink dynamic that hinges on blackmail. There is no discussion of a safe word until well over halfway through the film and protagonist Romy’s kinks are clunkily pathologised — because a woman can’t simply exist in her sexuality. It always has to have some tenuous link to her past.
To me, the erotic thriller felt neither erotic nor thrilling. “You can just tell the director isn’t a real freak,” I noted mournfully as we stepped back out onto the pavement.
Watching Babygirl compounded my grief for Lynch – a real freak. After all, he once said that “Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.” That’s what the sex scenes in Babygirl felt like; flat, distant, cold. But that’s no surprise when current conversations around sex often feel this way too.
Cultural trends keep juddering along and brat summer has given way to pervert winter, thanks to Ethel Cain’s Perverts and Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu — both works that plunge straight to the gnarly, tortured heart of sexual shame. In her brilliant essay on Nosferatu and Babygirl, Lina Dune writes, “The core tension between these films is the question of whether a real-world depiction of kink can ever hold a candle to a metaphorical, Rorschach test of a monster-fucking horror story.” Good films about sex are, on the surface, often about something else, which makes sense because good sex is rarely about just sex either.
I want more art from capital F Freaks. The outcasts, creeps, creatures, masturbators, addicts, losers, obsessives. To pervert something means to lead it away from what is considered conventional, natural, moral or acceptable. It doesn’t have to have sexual roots, but it usually does.
In a 2023 article for i-D magazine, writer Veronica Phillips coined the term ‘Girl Pervert’ to describe the rare female archetype who is unrepentant in her weird perversions. “Girl Perverts do not function under the neat self-flagellation of the Fleabag Era,” she writes. “Instead, they are often intentionally, deeply, and oftentimes desperately into the erotic, nasty and strange – and oftentimes only view it from a distance.” For instance, this Reddit poster who had “freaky nasty sex with a stranger that i feel somewhat ashamed about” in preparation for a first listen to Ethel Cain’s new album.
Phillips argues that the Girl Pervert is the antithesis to the Millennial Sad Girl who typically only engages in kinky or subversive sex to show that she is so sad and obviously lacking in self-esteem. God forbid she simply enjoys weird sex.
So, what’s an IRL Girl Pervert to do? Download Feeld??
The transactional bluntness of dating apps is hardly going to restore your faith in the erotic. Neither will a film like Babygirl, though Nosferatu does a pretty good job. Then there’s the uncanny valley of the likes of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips – women who posit themselves as sexually liberated perverts but who appear more interested in viral, algorithmic success than genuine sexual pleasure. Among all the discourse about what their sex challenges say about contemporary sexual politics, my overriding feeling is that it is all so deeply unsexy.
Celibacy is one solution. To swear off sex entirely because the options are so lacking. And it seems popular, if you believe what you read online. Julia Fox is doing it, so it must be cool.
After all, a pervert is a pervert no matter how much or how little sex they are having. Like the reclamation of the word slut, perversion encapsulates a general joie de vivre. Being a pervert is about possessing a lust for life; for obsession, for food, for pleasure, for art, for beauty, for sex. Most of all, it’s earnest. Being a freak means being a lover.
In her recent article for Elle, Sophie Wilkinson argues that the rise of ‘sex extremism’ — extreme hypersexualisation vs. total celibacy — isn’t doing women or men any good. I wonder, what is sex extremism doing to art?
Sex is an unsettling presence in Lynch’s films. It’s grotesque, violent, horny, haunting and debased. It’s uncomfortable and not easily explained. A few years ago, I watched four of his films back to back at an all-night movie marathon and the sex scenes were the ones where the room felt most tense. The online crusade against sex scenes springs from this feeling. If something is uncomfortable, we don’t want to feel it.
Yet sex isn’t always easy, happy and shame-free. It’s nuanced, messy, degrading, desperate, ugly. As long as it’s consensual, that’s part of what makes it pleasurable and interesting. Desire can make or break you. Oftentimes both. Lynch’s work is never solely about sex, but there is something deeply erotic about it. After all, dreams themselves are erotic. Nearly all of us experience sex dreams — women are actually slightly more likely to have them than men. If we tell ourselves that’s Lynchian then it’s interesting rather than banal.
After watching Babygirl, Shannon and I recalled the night we spent at a Gaspar Noé movie marathon where Noé himself – a certified Freak – dropped in to introduce each film. He sat in the back row while we watched Love in 3D which famously features multiple unsimulated sex scenes as well as a cameo of Noé’s own hard dick. The 3D cumshot scene would probably give the people handwringing over pornographic themes in Babygirl an aneurysm.
‘Pornographic’ has become synonymous with ‘bad’. As if all films depicting graphic sex are inherently problematic and misogynistic. As if those scenes are put there just to appease the desires of men — the only group whose horniness is sanctioned. This view is reductive and ultimately limiting. If we can’t portray graphic sex in art at all, then how can we talk about how to make sex better and more equal? We’re left with increasingly soulless representations in actual porn. Sex in films can be a device to symbolise violence and misogyny, but depicting something doesn’t mean condoning it. It’s the perverts, not the prudes who will improve sex and conversations around it for the better.
So, how do we make pervert winter feel warmer, more human, more alive? What do we want when we’re not being watched? In Babygirl, Romy’s husband says that “female masochism is a male fantasy.” Does it even matter? What films about sex get wrong is their tendency to try and overexplain something that doesn’t have an easy explanation. It’s that Millennial Sad Girl trope again. Men get to exist in their sexuality while women have to justify theirs.
Pervert winter offers a potential alternative to this. It’s about making more weird art. Having weird fantasies, weird sex. Then, like Lynch, refusing to explain any of it to anyone. Perversion is passion. Perversion is rebellion. Perversion is love. Let desire become a living, breathing, crawling lifeform with flesh and blood and bones. Make and engage with art that makes pervert winter feel warm again.
Some things I’ve been enjoying this week:
I’ve been rinsing the Twin Peaks score, for obvious reasons </3
The audiobook of Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld examines how digital algorithms have flattened culture. It’s been making my long runs more enjoyable which is always the sign of a good audiobook. I might write about it on here when I’ve finished it.
Lina Dune’s review of Babygirl and Nosferatu which I quoted in this piece nailed my views on both films to a tee. I had been waiting for her take and it didn’t disappoint.
From Hari Nef’s Nosferatu review on Letterboxd
“More art from capital F freaks” love that!
I'm an old-school pervert meself. I like to spank and humiliate naughty girls. Strangely, many of them have been prima and proper, and often feminist. When I started writing, I practised by writing erotic stories. Mostly spanking and humiliation. I had untold fans, and most were women. My stories are still the most highly rated on certain sites after more than a decade. I reckon women write erotic better than men. But I can get into the mind of women and do it like them. I think I'm turned on more like a woman, despite being a manly, dominant fella. I need cerebral inspiration, and I like sex to be a whole scene. A drama. And I certainly agree with old Lynch, sex is Mystic.