2015 will go down in history as the year when love won. But there were lots of other extraordinary advancements in the world of sex and relationships. Here, my list of 13 highlights, which includes the year’s sexiest movies, the best TED Talk on relationships, and the pop culture icons who are revolutionizing the way we think about sexual identity.
“To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”
Is love something that happens to you, or can you make love happen? Back in January, Mandy Len Catron wrote an essay for The New York Times’s Modern Love column titled “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” Her essay began: “More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied this technique to my own life.” Aron’s study involves two people sitting face-to-face and answering 36 increasingly personal questions, followed by four minutes of silently staring into each other’s eyes. Questions vary from your interest in fame, the last time you cried, and your relationship to your mother. The eye contact part clearly sounds like it would be the most awkward, and prompted my favorite line in the essay: “I know the eyes are the window to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me.” Well, spoiler alert: Mandy Len Catron and her experiment partner fell in love. (And, as of the TED Talk she gave in October, they were still together.) Her article went mega viral, garnering more than 8 million views in just one month. All across the world, people began re-creating this experiment for themselves—some finding success, others not—all wondering the same question: Can love be a choice?
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the best sexual coming-of-age story that I’ve seen in years. The film follows Minnie, a teenager who begins an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe, 20 years her senior. Rather than being a naive, easily manipulated sex object, Minnie is strong and decisive. Through her narrative, we enter her curious and sex-obsessed teenage mind. “I refuse to be a sniveling crybaby. I’m a fucking woman and this is my life,” says the irrepressible heroine. It’s rare to see a film that celebrates the complexity of female desire with such respect—it’s honest, but never exploitative, without ever making it seem “weird” that a teenage girl would be so horny. The film was the feature debut from Marielle Heller, and was a big hit on the festival circuit. Lead actress Bel Powley is captivating, and watching the sex scenes with sex god Alexander Skarsgård isn’t so bad, either.
Esther Perel’s “Rethinking Infidelity” TED Talk
Relationship therapist and cheating expert Esther Perel is one of the most interesting voices on sex and relationships today. Back in March, Perel gave her second TED Talk, “Rethinking Infidelity,” and it’s a must-watch for anyone who’s ever cheated or been cheated on, or who’s simply interested in hearing a new take on a very old dilemma. Perel tackles the question: If even happy people cheat, then what is cheating about? The poignant and funny talk discusses how cheating redefines relationships, how couples can come back from an affair, and even some positive things that can result from infidelity. In a particularly enlightening moment, Perel says, “When we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become . . . It isn’t so much that we’re looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.”
The Pirelli Calendar’s Feminist Makeover
For decades, the Pirelli Calendar has been famous for its soft-porny images of half-naked models posing seductively on exotic beaches, bent over, covered in oil, et cetera. So the calendar got a lot of attention after it took a bold step in a completely new, more feminist direction. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, the 2016 Pirelli Calendar celebrates intelligent, powerful, accomplished women—Patti Smith, Serena Williams, Tavi Gevinson, to name a few—all photographed with their clothes on. (Or, they’re all clothed except Amy Schumer, looking like the bad bitch that she is in just panties and stilettos, confidently displaying her curves.) The message is clear: Sexy is more than just airbrushed supermodels in latex thongs. Sexy is a smart, confident woman.
The “Abortion Drone”
Drones are good for a lot more than just killing bad guys and hanging mistletoe and making unnecessarily futuristic sex tapes. Back in June, the international women’s rights group Women on Waves launched and flew its “abortion drone” from Germany into Poland, where it delivered packets of abortion pills, some of which were swallowed immediately by women on the ground. The stunt drew attention to the reproductive rights (or lack thereof) of women in the primarily Catholic country of Poland. (Poland, Ireland, and Malta are the only European countries where abortion is still illegal.) Access to abortions has been limited in Poland since 1993; women are permitted to have them in the case of rape, incest, or if a mother’s life is threatened by the fetus. These strict abortion laws result in about 50,000 underground abortions each year.
Monica Bellucci Becomes the Oldest Bond Girl
Monica Bellucci is so hot it’s almost confusing. I’ve always been in awe of her seemingly effortless, European sensuality. She’s so elegant and womanly—the type you’re far more likely to see lounging around with a glass of wine than being a maniac at 6:00 a.m. Pilates. This year, at 51, she became the oldest Bond girl ever, eclipsing Honor Blackman, who played Pussy Galore in Goldfinger at age 39.
The Supreme Court’s Legalization of Gay Marriage
2015 will always be remembered as the year the Supreme Court approved the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Now people all across the United States can experience the joys of a gay wedding. In Obama’s very sweet speech right after the ruling, he said, “There’s so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American. But today we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.”
Amy Schumer Becomes a Raunchy Feminist Hero
2015 has definitely been Amy Schumer’s year. What makes Schumer so special is that she’s changed the way we talk about “women’s issues.” Her comedy tackles issues like campus rape, sexual assault in the military, the sexual double standard, and gender inequality, but she does so in a way that’s so hysterically funny and accessible that she’s miraculously managed to make “women’s issues” something that guys want to tune in for. Not to mention that Schumer proudly and explicitly talks about female sexuality and desire. As a result, she’s become the face of a modern brand of sex-positive feminism. Schumer is to millennials what Madonna was to women in the ’80s—proof that you can be smart, political, funny, and aggressively sexual, all at the same time.
Clancy Martin’s Novel Bad Sex
As with all of Clancy Martin’s fiction, this book is sexy, scandalous, and depressing in the most comical way possible. His previous novel, How to Sell, was a Times Literary Supplement pick for Best Book of 2009. Based heavily on his own life, it follows two scheming brothers as they pull off jewelry scams, take a ton of cocaine, sleep with hookers, and generally make questionable life decisions. Bad Sex is a fast and fun novel about an alcoholic woman who enters an affair with her husband’s banker—“bad” as in immoral, not second-rate, a description one might ascribe to the author himself. After reading How to Sell a few years back, I became sort of unhealthily obsessed with Martin, and have since sent him quite a few inappropriately erotic Facebook messages. He has yet to reply.
The Introduction of Caitlyn Jenner
An astonishing 17 million people tuned in to watch former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner triumphantly claim her true identity and come out as transgender in an interview with Diane Sawyer that informed millions around the world about the reality and the hardships of being transgender. Soon after, she graced the cover of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz. Visibility is power, because we cannot be what we cannot see. In just the past year, the increase in transgender visibility has been incredible, allowing a space for society to look at gender, as a whole, in a more nuanced way.
Tangerine
Tangerine is a raucously funny indie comedy about two black trans sex workers, both dealing with various dramas on the streets of Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. The movie, shot entirely on an iPhone 5, begins when Sin-Dee discovers that her boyfriend-slash-pimp has been seeing a white cisgender woman during her recent stint in jail, setting in motion a series of crises. The film’s characters are raw and complicated, and their hysterical odyssey ends up being less about trans identity and more about the power of female friendship. Not long ago, it would have been hard to imagine black trans characters at the center of a film, let alone as anything more than secondary, two-dimentional embellishments.
John Oliver Blasts America’s Subpar Sex Education
Or, more accurately, the lack of sex education in America. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO highlights often-underreported social issues in very thoroughly researched, 15-minute segments, delivered with Oliver’s particular brand of absurdist humor. In this episode from August, we learn what schools in the Bible Belt consider sex-ed—for instance, likening people (mainly women) who have sex to trampled roses, chewed gum, and dirty shoes. The episode enlists the help of celebs like Laverne Cox and Aisha Tyler and is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.
Miley Cyrus Becomes an Unlikely Beacon of Sex Positivity
Back in June, Miley Cyrus graced the cover of Paper magazine, but it wasn’t the accompanying nude photo spread that got everyone’s attention. Instead, it was her hyper-candid interview, in which she discussed her open-mindedness about sexuality and gender. Cyrus said, “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age . . . I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.” Sure, Miley Cyrus can be irritating sometimes, but it’s difficult to deny the significance of these words coming from such a huge celebrity, in a world where bi and trans visibility were basically nonexistent in mainstream culture only a handful of years ago.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
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