beautiful and horny
I recently reread one of my favorite essays, Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny, and posted a bit about it here. The difference between "beautiful" and "horny" (between "hot" and "sexy," as my bestie @nexility-sims puts it) is kind of difficult to explain in the abstract. So instead of just complaining, I thought it might be useful for me to try to explain how I've tried to depict sex and desire in my story.
Suggestion One: use close-ups to demonstrate desire
First off: I think the key to making something sexy isn't to show someone or something that is visually beautiful. Sexiness isn't about aesthetics, it's about desire. It's very easy to show the audience a beautiful person, harder to make clear that they are desirable. Desire isn't about seeing a beautiful person, it's about looking at them and noticing things about them, specific things. Desire often carries a little bit of objectification with it, and that's okay -- the problem is when someone is wholly objectified, made into a passive thing, a receptacle for desire rather than a person who is themselves desirable.
In this scene, I have two close-ups that emphasize Vivi's backless dress (and Julián's touch). She's wearing that backless dress the whole time, but we don't really notice it until the camera calls specific attention to it by moving in close. The zoom-in on the second shot intensifies what is already present in the first shot, creating a sense of escalation -- it's the same thing, twice in a row, but there is a sense that tension is building. Please also note that Julián is bare-handed, but all the Armoricans are all wearing gloves.
So, to show that someone is desirable, you need to show what the other character is noticing about them. This is happily pretty easy in a visual medium! The entire point of a close-up is to show the audience what they're meant to be noticing: the listening device hidden in the potted plant, the smudged handwriting in a suspect's passport, the curve of the love interest's spine in her backless dress. An effective close-up helps the reader see the character as their love interest does, helps them understand why that character is sexy.
(This doesn't need to be entirely physical! Skill and expertise are desireable traits...a close-up of a chef's hands as they lovingly prepare a meal for their beloved can express desire, as could a shot of an athlete clearing the bar in the high jump.)
Suggestion Two: sex is a thing you do with your mouth and hands
As a wise man once said in an interview about one of my favorite video games, "the thing about desire is that it’s stronger when it’s not totally satisfied."
A wide shot where you can see someone's entire naked body is like 50% sexy. A close-up where you can see part of their naked body is like 75% sexy. A close-up of someone's hands as they tug at the plunging neckline of their evening dress is all the way sexy.
Anything that makes your imagination go into overdrive to fill in the details is automatically going to be sexier than something where you see everything.
(see also: William Ware Theiss, one of the costume designers for Star Trek, who said, "the sexiness of an outfit is directly proportional to the perceived possibility that a vital piece of it might fall off.")
I make use of this a lot.
In this scene, there's a lot of chest on display, but when Vivi makes a pass at Julián, we're looking at their hands and not their bodies. This is another escalation, her touching him instead of the other way around. We're seeing her take the lead, which is sexy!!!
In this scene, we get mouths and hands in a single shot. In a wide shot, this moment of him feeding her ice cream might read as cute, but removed from context and zoomed in to just the mouth and hands, it becomes sensual.
Suggestion Three: Linger in the moment, let us see the reaction
A lot of the idioms related to sex and desire suggest a loss of control. Arousal is "getting hot and bothered," having sex is "giving in" to desire. It's not enough just to show something sexy, we also need to see the effect it's having on our characters. Don't be afraid to show your characters getting flustered, stammering, getting caught up in the moment. I think that people are sometimes a little embarrassed about including sex and want to show only the bare minimum. They want it to be sexy, but they also want it to be over and done with. These two desires are almost always at odds with one another -- if you want something to be sexy, don't be afraid to linger in the moment. Show the action, but more importantly, show the reaction.
In this scene, we don't need to see any naked bodies (or where exactly Emily's put her hands). It's enough to see Freddy getting progressively more worked up as they make out.
It's especially sexy to show a person who is ordinarily very controlled coming undone.
It's not hard to understand why this was my best-performing post of 2023. Leonor and Andre, both very buttoned-up and in-control people, can't keep their hands off of one another. The facade slips for both of them, they need one another more than they need to discuss whatever important thing they were supposed to be discussing.
Suggestion Four: If you aren't fully comfortable showing sex, you don't have to
Not a ton to say here, but I think it's an important point to end on. If you feel weird and awkward writing sex, downloading sexy poses, and taking sexy screenshots, you don't have to include those things in your story!
Sex positivity doesn't mean everyone's fucking all of the time, it means everyone is expressing the amount of sexuality they are comfortable with. I exclusively wrote erotica/smut for nearly a decade, I am very comfortable including sex in my story. But if that's not you, that's okay! You don't need to include anything you don't want to.
A Random Observation That Didn't Fit Anywhere Else
If you have a scene that features naked or nearly-naked characters that aren't meant to be sexy, you can do the opposite of these things to avoid sexualizing them. Show them in wide shots, don't zoom in close to emphasize any one part of their body, focus on things other than physical reaction -- I've got this whole scene with Leonor in a swimsuit but it's not really sexy in the context. We're not leering at her body, she just happens to be wearing a swimsuit because they're at the beach. Even the physical touch and intimacy in that scene isn't particularly sexy, the emphasis there is on the emotions.
