The Aesthetics of Sexual Repression
By Reese Carmen Villella
If I have to pretend to be impressed by another matcha-labubu-Dubai-chocolate performative male, I’m going to scream.
Performative males are so in. You know him, you’ve met him, and if you’re not sure what he looks like, go into any coffee shop in the East Village and he will be there in the corner reading Sally Rooney. He’s so over hookup culture and looking for something real. Every Hinge voice prompt sounds like a late-night NPR segment, with his slow, deliberate, low-register voice like it’s nonconsensual pillow talk. He has Clairo on vinyl and a first edition copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex.” He collects zines. The Watermelon Woman is a mainstay in his Letterboxd top four because he “is deeply moved by queer cinema.”
Image Sourced through Pinterest
Dating is a bureaucratic chaos these days. Everyone wants closeness to be optimized. We seek meaningful connection through apps and DMs and “wyd.” We want to construct the ideal relationship carefully, but we don’t have the emotional maturity to handle authenticity. We’re addicted to algorithms, explore pages perfectly curated for our interests, Instagram reels that feel like they were made for you—so when something unexpected happens, we have no clue how to yes, and… our way through it.
The performative male is an example of this curated connection. They know all the right things to say and the right ways to say them. Modern relationship talk is feigned emotional intelligence with the most emotionally immature person you know. The performative male is constantly bending language to avoid saying the truth. Because he doesn’t wanna hurt anyone’s feelings. And in protecting your feelings (and his brand), he ends up protecting nothing at all in his attempt to maintain the empathetic charade. If you don’t communicate what you want, you will end up unfulfilled, and the person you are seeing will feel discarded. If you can’t communicate clearly, you can’t be in a relationship. You can’t build intimacy out of euphemism. Are you saying you’re “not ready for this” because you’re managing emotions or optics?
Turning romance into transactions and curating the performance of emotions has made dating a largely immature experience for Gen Z. It’s nearly impossible to build a genuine connection for those who are seeking it. But, to be honest, how many Gen Z men are seeking genuine connection?
Which brings us to the part no one wants to say out loud. Men only want one thing, right? It’s a cliché and it’s not universal, but it’s not rare either. When did dating start to mean immediate intimacy? Is there a quota we’re supposed to meet: three dates and you’re overdue for a hand job? Frankly, this expectation somewhat makes sense, given the age of those who have it. A fleeting, physical connection often aligns with immaturity. Men in their twenties are often just beginning to navigate power, money, ego, and sex in for the first time, so yes, relationships become transactional. Transaction isn’t inherently evil; it’s structure, it’s clarity, it’s the invisible contract of modern adulthood.
The issue isn’t the exchange itself, but the masquerade around it. The performance of reverence, vulnerability, feminism. They listen to Mitski and Fiona Apple in the name of plausible deniability. Because admitting (wanting sex, surface-level desires) is too shameful. Doing the feminist literature and posting the infographics will only get you so far. You can’t read your way into decency. You have to walk the walk if you’re going to talk the talk. Otherwise, you’re just using feminism as foreplay.
Image Sourced through Pinterest
Not wanting a relationship and seeking a purely physical connection is fine. Pretending to be the enlightened exception to the rule when you’re just a slightly more self-aware participant in it is not. Putting on the “male feminist” mask to get the girl isn’t progressive; it’s manipulative. If you don’t want to be in a relationship, don’t pretend like you do. Just text her “DTF?” like an adult and get on with it. There’s more integrity in bluntness than in false tenderness.
And yet, the same script continues after the “exclusive” talk, just with a new set of expectations. You might be surprised to learn that sex also has nuances within the context of a relationship! Dating someone and entering a relationship are not guarantees of sex. Men love to claim they seek “connection,” that sex is about intimacy, about souls intertwining. But are they seeking connection or compliance? Is connection just a euphemism for libido? Real connection is holistic; it lives in the conversations, in laughter, and in the ability to see another person as a full, autonomous being.
Sometimes, people just don’t want sex. Maybe they prefer to wait a bit longer, maybe they have a history of abuse, maybe it's a misalignment in libido, or maybe it’s just the fact that desire isn’t a constant state. Unequal sex drives with a partner often lead to the male counterpart complaining that he seeks connection, but the reality is that he doesn’t seek connection—he aims to get his rocks off with a compliant partner, someone who will go with the flow. Agency is not sexy. They don’t like all that. Then, the narrative is that he feels rejected and unwanted. He misses being “close to you,” but he’s not yearning for emotional intimacy; he’s mourning the loss of an easy yes.
May (2002)
Agency, suddenly, is not sexy. It’s an obstruction. The fantasy collapses when a woman’s desire or lack thereof becomes visible, named, and self-determined. Because many men are not aroused by mutuality, they’re aroused by validation. Did those “Consent is Sexy” infographics you reposted mean nothing to you? Making women feel unempowered to say no reinforces the fantasy. No isn’t sexy; women with agency are inconvenient, because they’re not “useful” when they say no.
And so, women are often conditioned to be accommodating. We’re taught to say yes, to go with the flow, to smooth over tension instead of confronting it. Our instinct is to protect the mood, to keep things pleasant, even when it costs us our honesty. We equate being agreeable with being desirable. Saying no isn’t sexy because it interrupts the fantasy. So we stay quiet, convinced that passivity is easier than confrontation.
We’re conditioned to think that saying no means losing someone. It means you weren’t open-minded enough, you weren’t trying hard enough, you were being closed off, withholding, and weird. We need to reframe this: if you say no and someone leaves you, then good. You don’t want a partner that seeks obedience; you want one who wants the same things as you, even if that means you’re not always gonna be an easy lay.
Image Sourced through Pinterest
We’ve created a media paradox in which the more women post hashtags and retweets about sexual liberation, the more the liberation feels like performance rather than autonomy. And so, we lean into other forms of liberation: aestheticizing sexual repression. Retweeting photos of Isabelle Hubert with the caption “she’s so me” and saying May (2002) is precisely what it feels like to be a girl. Reading a copy of Sexual Anorexia on the beach, Elf Bar in hand, and #DealingWithIt. Singing along to Alanis Morissette's “Is she perverted like me?” with a little too much enthusiasm.
The refusal of desire becomes its own aesthetic, a kind of rebellion against being reduced. In The Piano Teacher (2001) or May (2002), we see clinical depictions of women who are both repulsed by and obsessed with their own desire. And now, on social media, we’ve seen a resurgence in these films with young femme audiences. They’re framed as perverted, broken, unstable in a “she’s so me” way. But maybe we relate to them not because we are perverse, but because sex doesn’t symbolize intimacy anymore; it symbolizes consumption.
The Piano Teacher (2001)
When everything about female sexuality is commodified, abstention starts to look like resistance. You’re not withholding because you hate sex; you’re withholding because the implication that to be touched is to be used. So we retreat into an aesthetic of repression. The more our bodies are consumed by culture, the more we long to disappear them. It feels like you’re only taken seriously when you make yourself small, restrained, asexual. It’s like you have to be Barbie down there to be a whole person.
Sexual repression, in this sense, isn’t about purity, but control. We aestheticize the repression: minimalist cool-girl celibacy, weird girl, sexually anorexic girl, Pearl from Pearl girl, Isabelle Adjani in Possession girl…
Extremes are so boring. You don’t have to be hypersexual. You don’t have to retreat into repression, either. Nuance is where humanity actually resides, so live within that in-between. We shouldn’t have to navigate the world in a way that others’ desires dictate our actions or what we allow them to do to us.
