Challengers made me wanna fuck my husband
On sensuality, the female gaze, and Audre Lorde's eroticism in film
For all of the hand-wringing about sex in media — whether there’s too much or too little of it, depending on who you ask — it’s plain as day that media in general is unsexy. Regardless of quantity, the sex we are served is cold and lacking passion; the default male gaze demands that sex be something primal, hard, fast, rough. The p-in-v penetration is the real show, because for the cis men that make film and TV, that’s the only way they allow themselves to fully surrender their pleasure. It’s why they are so pitifully bad at foreplay.
Where is the seduction? Where is the sensuality, the warm, unrelenting desire that precedes any penetration? Challengers, starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, dared to not only ask this question, but answer it in full.
I made my way to the theater this past Monday1 to see the sexy sports film, one I’d been anticipating long before the SAG/WGA strikes of 2023 delayed its premiere. As I watched, I took note of the various moments throughout where sexual tension bubbled beneath the surface of the main characters’ dispositions. It could be felt in the obvious moments, like when two characters were in bed together, but it also crept in during pauses in dialogue, imposing stances, and lingering stares. Director Luca Guadagnino mastered the subversive female gaze by focusing less on bodies and more on the emotions driving the sensuality in physical moments. Particularly, Art (Faist) and Patrick (O’Connor) displayed a soft, feminine intimacy with one another that inspired a central conflict of the film.
While there are numerous references to the men having sex with Tashi (Zendaya) in the film, the sex is never shown. Instead, it is alluded to. An impassioned conversation or a lengthy, flirtatious exchange will lead to deep kisses, grabbing, straddling — and then we will cut away. Even the scenes that don’t lead to sex tease the audience with tension: a kiss on the leg that lasts a second too long, a cheeky shot of someone’s backside.
The sensuality of the film is philosophically linked to Audre Lorde’s description of the erotic2. Each rendezvous is intentional to telling the story of the trio’s desperation for one another, and as such is portrayed not for the sake of superficial titillation but rather to reveal something about Tashi, Art, or Patrick. Real eroticism, as Lorde describes, tells a complex story about our interiority.
“It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
Challengers is dripping with feeling. The erotic is surrendering ourselves fully, it is “not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”
The love language of the film, as described early on by a young Tashi, is tennis. It is the magnetic force that kept the three of them connected (and fucking). Tashi expresses her desire to see her two white boys play “some good fucking tennis,” describing the sport as itself a relationship between the two opposing sides. Going back to Lorde, she described the erotic as something not purely sexual, but a quality that can be felt in any activity where our enthusiasm runneth over:
“[…] so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”
By the climax of the film — the very end, perhaps controversially — Art and Patrick have finally given themselves to the erotic, both of them bursting with the verve Tashi spent much of the movie pleading them to play with. She erupts from the stands, probably thinking “finally, some good fucking tennis!”
Not only did Art and Patrick play the game with intensity, but in doing so, they rekindled their relationship without words and ended their decade-long rivalry. The final ten-ish minutes of this film was the culmination of two hours of foreplay, and to watch it felt intense, sensual, and thrilling all at once. Even if the outcome of the threesome’s relationship was left ambiguous, the ending of the film felt earned. It was the enthusiastic “Yes!” said to oneself at the end of a session of lovemaking.
The female gaze achieved in Challengers is the thoughtful foreplay that women pine for. It is the responsive desire to the male gaze’s spontaneous desire. We as women want to be stimulated, caressed, teased before we get to the business; we can’t just rev up on demand like penis-owners can. The tension built in every scene spoke directly to the way women generally prefer to engage in sensuality: slowly building to a volcanic eruption of feeling.
This is why I left the theater feeling invigorated. The eroticism I witnessed for two hours made me want to find it within myself (and my husband). This, to me, is how you know a film’s sensuality was effective. It should lead its audience to interrogate the quality of the erotic within themselves. You should finish the movie and be inspired to fuck. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting the rapid gratification of a smutty sex scene; sometimes we just want to get off, and fast! If that is all we consume, however, we may be dooming ourselves to the shallowest of nutting for the rest of our lives. We should be curious about the depth of feeling we are capable of, not just in bed, but in life. What may happen if we slow down and appreciate the journey.
We may find, as Tashi, Art, and Patrick did, the greatness we can achieve when we let the fires of our passions burn unencumbered.
Mother’s Day gift :)
As described in her most famous speech/essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”