Someone who I know and like quite a bit posited the notion of a podcast called Nesexsary that every week discusses whether a sex scene in a piece of media was necessary or not.
Instead of getting into a discussion of why something being necessary actually matters in art, I’d like to suggest the counterpoint podcast that I would title Sextra Layers (working title) which discusses situations where art would actually benefit from including either a greater quantity of, more explicit or more kinky sex or sex with more undertones to it, yet doesn’t feature these things either due to prudishness or a lack of imagination. I think this can be a problem in many places, in particular films about queer people but made by straight creators can often struggle with desexualising queerness in a way that makes us more palatable to a straight audience but also less queer. For most people sex is a pretty fundamental part of existence, and arguably this goes doubly for queer people who have to fight (either with society or with themselves) to get to the point of being able to embrace it without shame.
This message brought to you today by me watching a film yesterday that by all accounts was extremely well made and largely enjoyable, but where I wish the sexual dynamics in play between the central lesbians - sexual dynamics that are key to the plot even! - had been given time to be shown more explicitly; because that would have made the passion between these ladies more palpable and intense, because lesbian sex is (still) transgressive and it would be nice to not have it be hidden away in a film that is otherwise partly about lesbian sex, and because those scenes would provide opportunities to further expand on the power dynamics between these three women, to add more depth to our understanding of how they all relate to each other, and to maybe even offer a point of contrast between how the one who is very much in love fucks versus how the one who is trying to manipulate and win favour fucks (like wow the potential for subtext there is huge, right?).