The Future is Erotic
Xuanlin Tham, Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene
404 Ink, 112pp, £7.50, ISBN 9781916637085
reviewed by Gabrielle Sicam
Not long ago, I rewatched the vampire horror Ganja & Hess (1974), as its influences stood plain to me while watching Sinners (2025). The film follows Hess, a black anthropologist who becomes a vampire, and the later conversion of his wife, Ganja. After Ganja is made a vampire, Hess invites a male acquaintance over to their house for her to seduce and feed on. The seduction itself reads into the moment of lapse, feels confirming of her change. The man undresses her, their bodies framed by enclosing leaves and candles in an otherwise dark, embryonic room. She caresses his body as they lower themselves; his back glistens; her body largely obscured, her face visible, discerns pleasure. The camera interests itself with writhing legs against a shag carpet, presenting friction under gloss. Then, noticing blood on the man’s back, Ganja places her mouth on him. The film cuts from a scene of Ganja licking the man’s shoulder to a shot of her smelling a red flower, then to a tribal statue with a mouthful of blood. The cuts become shorter, more erratic, before merging together, so that we are watching her scream as she feeds on the man. Horror and pleasure, presented in an ouroboros; violence and ecstasy coming together in the slippage.
The eroticism Xuanlin Tham calls for in Revolutionary Desires is bound up with this kind of ecstatic, bodily ambivalence. They posit that this erotic aspect has been lost in depictions of sex today, due to, among other motives, the isolating work of capitalist influences and the ‘conceptual cudgel’ of shallow representation. Tham’s essay, self-described as an ‘exploration’ of the sex scene, easily has the scope of a sexual manifesto. In our increasingly incremental, internet-driven, incel-adjacent culture, Tham’s simple call is radical: sex is more than ‘just sex’, for it is social and socially ‘spoken’. The sex scene, too, by virtue of this, and by virtue of its place in mass media, is more than a sex scene. It is, or rather it could be, a system of related ideas and tools that can propagate a creative sexual imaginary, that can not only mirror the sexual mores of our time but point the way to an erotic future.
Tham has a careful, considered style, with an tendency to circumscribe and to limit. Their exploration is historically informed — one of the potentialities of the sex scene is as ‘political artefact’ — with examples ranging from the mass pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) to recent summer favourite Challengers (2024). And the exploration is vast: though their background is primarily within film writing, Tham’s reading list for Revolutionary Desires suggests a more interdisciplinary interest. Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado; The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan; Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. To Tham, sex is as necessary to life as food, walks, money, and tied up with questions of power.
‘Exploration’ is an apt way of describing Tham’s approach; the term might otherwise denote discrete categorising, a closed set of conventions, a collection of tropes. But, throughout the book, Tham makes the case for the sex scene as a mode of social mimesis, as a means of mirroring (and possibly deconstructing) an ‘ossified’ life under capitalism; something worth giving our full consideration. The first chapter, ‘The disappearance of the sex scene’, begins with Tham’s recollection of standing before a digital billboard advertisement for ‘The Recliner’, an anthropomorphised, and inexplicably sexually charged, luxury chair option at Vue Cinemas. The anecdote is funny, easing the reader in from real life; could any other position be so redolent of our increasing atomisation?
Later on, Tham mentions RS Benedict’s 'Everyone is Beautiful and No One Is Horny', an essay that outlines a post-9/11 displacement of eroticism in favour of fetishistic warmongering. The perfect Marvel superhero body emerges in a desexualised era of eating disorders and physical competition. ‘No one is horny,’ repeats Benedict, even amid increasing obsessions with surgeries and steroids. In an interview with The Skinny, Tham raises a similar sentiment: ‘I’ve always been very interested in the perverse and the horny in art, so the rising sentiment against sex and eroticism really alarmed me. I see it as not simply an aesthetic disregard, but a political phenomenon.’
Horniness is dependent on mutualities, observance, haptics, presences. Perversion is similarly reliant on subverting, or exploiting the imbalances of, sexual mutualities. But how are these to be realised, even made possible, in art that can only reflect our atomisation? How can eroticism exist without the possibility of friction, without pushing the borders of the paraclausithyron? Tham outlines the potential method of the sex scene to ‘sabotage’ within ‘capitalist mythologies’, as a provisional form of protest seeded within cultural product: through ‘confronting us with the commodification of sex’; ‘utilising “the shock of eros” to make the invisibilised atmosphere of capitalist realism visible’; and by ‘flooding our senses with the erotic energy to break past it and power collective visions of pleasure’, which Tham associates with ‘collective visions of what lies beyond’.
Revolutionary Desires believes in the political force of the narrative image, even if that force is provisional, even if it can only look towards. The sex scene has revolutionary power — as long as it is perceived as a legitimate container of meaning-making. Can this exist in mainstream cinema’s dearth of originality, with its pallid blockbusters, its nostalgia fetish? The films Tham mentions seem mostly auteurist darlings — Crash (1996), The Handmaiden (2016) — with prestige backing. ‘Little-films-that-could.’ For a moment, I wonder whether a sex scene can be subversive if it is in a big-budget film, if it is created, confined, within an industry logic that prioritises mass production.
Coming back to the auteurist question, I am prompted to think about Tham’s stated interest in ‘the perverse’. Cinema has always welcomed a contained perversion, always incorporated the act of voyeurism, and often depicted the figure of the voyeur. However, it seems to be channelled as more of an individual force. In her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which is also discussed in Revolutionary Desires, Laura Mulvey describes the primacy and manipulation of voyeuristic pleasure in Western cinema. The desires and fantastic whims of the ‘alienated subject’, Mulvey argues, are central to the reuniting motives of the Hollywood narrative. Mulvey’s cinema ‘unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy’. She highlights a crucial aspect of the cinematic aesthetic — that it seems built around the observing subject, privy to and even exploitative towards their ‘alienation’.
Tham is trying to offer a counter, something new; they are writing towards a cinema that is not palliative, singular or comfortable. One film they praise is particularly disregarded by the cinema-going public, having won ‘a Guardian poll for the worst sex scene of all time’: The Matrix Reloaded. Is new sex possible in the blockbuster sequel? Tham makes a case for it, highlighting a scene wherein Neo and Trinity have sex, intercut with slo-mo shots of ‘grinding bodies’ in a rave. There is an abundance of beautiful people moving with each other; the camera luxuriates in this feeling of bodily ecstasy. What seems particular to the erotics in this scene, however, is that it moves within a kind of erotic time and gaze. It is impossible to fixate one’s eyes upon each and every moving body. The camera trains the observing subject to take in the affect of an ecstatic mass, so that even when we do see the individualised act between Neo and Trinity, it is inflected with the joy of the collective.
Tham’s conclusion returns to an acknowledgement of the political fallibility of film form, and perhaps fiction more generally: ‘Sex is not going to be the revolution, and neither is cinema. But I do believe they are some of the many portals in our everyday lives to feelings of revolutionary impulse, no matter how nascent.’ I return, for a moment, to my initial consideration of their voice as considered, careful, tacit; conversely, they describe their interest in the sex scene as ‘prurient’, denoting a knowing perversion, and inherent disobedience. They articulate, beautifully, the possibilities of translating a more engaged relationship with media into a more engaged relationship with the world around us. Tham’s discussion of the limits of their subject, and even, to some regard, the form they are writing within, might be more usefully viewed as an attempt to move their theory of erotics closer to real-world practice. The fictive worlds that we imagine, that we write about, that we receive for our enjoyment, are worth proper material consideration.
I went to my local cinema, Peckhamplex, to see Sinners during its opening weekend. Finding a seat proved difficult. Our crowd was entirely engaged, en masse, in Coogler’s feat of horror and horniness: shouting during moments of tension, booing people that walked out. The experience reminded me of my parents’ anecdotes about going on ‘standing cinema’ dates as teenagers in the Philippines, where moviehouses would play a marathon of films for cheap — as long as you were okay to stand, to brush against strangers’ bodies, to engage, for a few hours, in a shared conspiracy of pleasure.
The eroticism Xuanlin Tham calls for in Revolutionary Desires is bound up with this kind of ecstatic, bodily ambivalence. They posit that this erotic aspect has been lost in depictions of sex today, due to, among other motives, the isolating work of capitalist influences and the ‘conceptual cudgel’ of shallow representation. Tham’s essay, self-described as an ‘exploration’ of the sex scene, easily has the scope of a sexual manifesto. In our increasingly incremental, internet-driven, incel-adjacent culture, Tham’s simple call is radical: sex is more than ‘just sex’, for it is social and socially ‘spoken’. The sex scene, too, by virtue of this, and by virtue of its place in mass media, is more than a sex scene. It is, or rather it could be, a system of related ideas and tools that can propagate a creative sexual imaginary, that can not only mirror the sexual mores of our time but point the way to an erotic future.
Tham has a careful, considered style, with an tendency to circumscribe and to limit. Their exploration is historically informed — one of the potentialities of the sex scene is as ‘political artefact’ — with examples ranging from the mass pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) to recent summer favourite Challengers (2024). And the exploration is vast: though their background is primarily within film writing, Tham’s reading list for Revolutionary Desires suggests a more interdisciplinary interest. Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado; The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan; Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. To Tham, sex is as necessary to life as food, walks, money, and tied up with questions of power.
‘Exploration’ is an apt way of describing Tham’s approach; the term might otherwise denote discrete categorising, a closed set of conventions, a collection of tropes. But, throughout the book, Tham makes the case for the sex scene as a mode of social mimesis, as a means of mirroring (and possibly deconstructing) an ‘ossified’ life under capitalism; something worth giving our full consideration. The first chapter, ‘The disappearance of the sex scene’, begins with Tham’s recollection of standing before a digital billboard advertisement for ‘The Recliner’, an anthropomorphised, and inexplicably sexually charged, luxury chair option at Vue Cinemas. The anecdote is funny, easing the reader in from real life; could any other position be so redolent of our increasing atomisation?
Later on, Tham mentions RS Benedict’s 'Everyone is Beautiful and No One Is Horny', an essay that outlines a post-9/11 displacement of eroticism in favour of fetishistic warmongering. The perfect Marvel superhero body emerges in a desexualised era of eating disorders and physical competition. ‘No one is horny,’ repeats Benedict, even amid increasing obsessions with surgeries and steroids. In an interview with The Skinny, Tham raises a similar sentiment: ‘I’ve always been very interested in the perverse and the horny in art, so the rising sentiment against sex and eroticism really alarmed me. I see it as not simply an aesthetic disregard, but a political phenomenon.’
Horniness is dependent on mutualities, observance, haptics, presences. Perversion is similarly reliant on subverting, or exploiting the imbalances of, sexual mutualities. But how are these to be realised, even made possible, in art that can only reflect our atomisation? How can eroticism exist without the possibility of friction, without pushing the borders of the paraclausithyron? Tham outlines the potential method of the sex scene to ‘sabotage’ within ‘capitalist mythologies’, as a provisional form of protest seeded within cultural product: through ‘confronting us with the commodification of sex’; ‘utilising “the shock of eros” to make the invisibilised atmosphere of capitalist realism visible’; and by ‘flooding our senses with the erotic energy to break past it and power collective visions of pleasure’, which Tham associates with ‘collective visions of what lies beyond’.
Revolutionary Desires believes in the political force of the narrative image, even if that force is provisional, even if it can only look towards. The sex scene has revolutionary power — as long as it is perceived as a legitimate container of meaning-making. Can this exist in mainstream cinema’s dearth of originality, with its pallid blockbusters, its nostalgia fetish? The films Tham mentions seem mostly auteurist darlings — Crash (1996), The Handmaiden (2016) — with prestige backing. ‘Little-films-that-could.’ For a moment, I wonder whether a sex scene can be subversive if it is in a big-budget film, if it is created, confined, within an industry logic that prioritises mass production.
Coming back to the auteurist question, I am prompted to think about Tham’s stated interest in ‘the perverse’. Cinema has always welcomed a contained perversion, always incorporated the act of voyeurism, and often depicted the figure of the voyeur. However, it seems to be channelled as more of an individual force. In her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which is also discussed in Revolutionary Desires, Laura Mulvey describes the primacy and manipulation of voyeuristic pleasure in Western cinema. The desires and fantastic whims of the ‘alienated subject’, Mulvey argues, are central to the reuniting motives of the Hollywood narrative. Mulvey’s cinema ‘unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy’. She highlights a crucial aspect of the cinematic aesthetic — that it seems built around the observing subject, privy to and even exploitative towards their ‘alienation’.
Tham is trying to offer a counter, something new; they are writing towards a cinema that is not palliative, singular or comfortable. One film they praise is particularly disregarded by the cinema-going public, having won ‘a Guardian poll for the worst sex scene of all time’: The Matrix Reloaded. Is new sex possible in the blockbuster sequel? Tham makes a case for it, highlighting a scene wherein Neo and Trinity have sex, intercut with slo-mo shots of ‘grinding bodies’ in a rave. There is an abundance of beautiful people moving with each other; the camera luxuriates in this feeling of bodily ecstasy. What seems particular to the erotics in this scene, however, is that it moves within a kind of erotic time and gaze. It is impossible to fixate one’s eyes upon each and every moving body. The camera trains the observing subject to take in the affect of an ecstatic mass, so that even when we do see the individualised act between Neo and Trinity, it is inflected with the joy of the collective.
Tham’s conclusion returns to an acknowledgement of the political fallibility of film form, and perhaps fiction more generally: ‘Sex is not going to be the revolution, and neither is cinema. But I do believe they are some of the many portals in our everyday lives to feelings of revolutionary impulse, no matter how nascent.’ I return, for a moment, to my initial consideration of their voice as considered, careful, tacit; conversely, they describe their interest in the sex scene as ‘prurient’, denoting a knowing perversion, and inherent disobedience. They articulate, beautifully, the possibilities of translating a more engaged relationship with media into a more engaged relationship with the world around us. Tham’s discussion of the limits of their subject, and even, to some regard, the form they are writing within, might be more usefully viewed as an attempt to move their theory of erotics closer to real-world practice. The fictive worlds that we imagine, that we write about, that we receive for our enjoyment, are worth proper material consideration.
I went to my local cinema, Peckhamplex, to see Sinners during its opening weekend. Finding a seat proved difficult. Our crowd was entirely engaged, en masse, in Coogler’s feat of horror and horniness: shouting during moments of tension, booing people that walked out. The experience reminded me of my parents’ anecdotes about going on ‘standing cinema’ dates as teenagers in the Philippines, where moviehouses would play a marathon of films for cheap — as long as you were okay to stand, to brush against strangers’ bodies, to engage, for a few hours, in a shared conspiracy of pleasure.