The year female desire went mainstream

While women’s desire is nothing new and certainly not a trend, 2024 has seen the female sex drive take the wheel in popular culture.

It feels apt that the year will close — culturally speaking, at least — with the release of “Babygirl.” The movie, which came out on Christmas Day in the US (January 10 in the UK), stars Nicole Kidman as a high-powered businesswoman who becomes sexually submissive to one of her interns.

“It’s told by a woman, through her gaze,” said Kidman at a press conference during the Venice Film Festival screening in August. “That’s, to me, what made it so unique … and freeing.”

“Babygirl” is directed by the Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, who at the same press conference said that she hoped the movie would address “the huge orgasm gap” that exists between men and women.

While there have been plenty of expressions of female sexuality throughout history — from the banned books of late Irish novelist Edna O’Brien to Jane Birkin’s orgasmic vocals in 1967’s “Je t’aime moi non plus” and rapper Cardi B’s spit take-inducing lyrics on “WAP” — these have often been the exception, rather than the rule.

But the past 12 months have seen explicit examples of female desire rush in simultaneously from the margins to the mainstream. From film to TV, music and literature, the female gaze has been promoted wholesale without shame, secrecy or euphemism.

Here are some highlights from 2024.

One singer whose popularity has soared this year is Chappell Roan. In January her monthly listeners on Spotify hovered around 1 million — now it’s a little over 43 million. A key part of Roan’s success has been her authentic representation of queer relationships, peppering her lyrics with sexual references such as “I heard you like magic/ I’ve got a Wand and a Rabbit” — a nod to two popular vibrator styles.

Pop princess Sabrina Carpenter also wasn’t mincing her words. When Carpenter launched her album “Short n’ Sweet” on Instagram in August, it was accompanied by the caption “four days of ovulation” — a sentiment which fit the record’s hypersexual lyrics of “come ride on me/ I mean camaraderie” and the straightforward “I’m so f**king horny.” The album went straight to number 1 in the Billboard 200 chart.

Summer 2024 was soundtracked by Tinashe’s “Nasty” in which the singer repeatedly asks for someone to “match her freak.” Meanwhile, in September FKA Twigs released “Eusexua,” a single from her forthcoming album of the same name. Earlier in the year, during an interview with British Vogue, the musician explained that she coined the word as a way of describing the “sensation of being so euphoric” that one could “transcend human form.”

Women whispering (and shouting) sweet nothings weren’t limited to music, either. Subscription-based audio erotica app Quinn launched five years ago and says its revenue grew by 440% over the past two years after a string of celebrities including actors Andrew Scott and Victoria Pedretti voiced its stories.

“Talent started to want to talk to us about narrating,” said Quinn’s founder and CEO, Caroline Spiegel, in a phone call to CNN. “That was a big shift… I don’t think it would have happened earlier. Female desire has existed in little pockets throughout history but now it’s everywhere and not hidden anymore. It is definitely more explicit now.”

This is exactly as Spiegel thinks it should be — and is very much in line with Quinn’s values: “We believe sex is a healthy, happy part of life not something that should be relegated to a dark, scary corner of the internet,” she said.

“Sex content doesn’t have to be overly graphic and jarring and instead can be just another piece of your media diet.”

Which perhaps explains why the top audiobook of 2024 (both in the US and globally) according to Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” feature, was a “romantasy” book about sexy fairies called “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas. In fact, four of the top 10 audiobooks in the US for this year were romantasy novels — three by Maas — earning the writer the accolade of being the streaming service’s global top author.

On television, a wealth of shows also put female pleasure first, including an adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling book “Three Women” on Starz, which unraveled the complicated reality of three characters’ very different sex lives.

On Disney+ an adaptation of British romance novelist Jilly Cooper’s book “Rivals” — set in 1980s England — gave female pleasure top billing. Cooper has long centered women’s desire in her writing, but her raunchy vision was given new life this year with shoulder pads, non-ironic mustaches and braying chauvinism on the small screen.

Elsewhere, “Bridgerton” came back for a third season that made global headlines thanks to a groundbreaking sex scene between the newly engaged Penelope Featherington (played by Nicola Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). The scene depicted Penelope’s first time — and championed consent and respect while not compromising on spiciness; it lasted just shy of six TV minutes and according to the actors the chaise longue broke during filming.

While society has led us to believe that sexual appetite is traditionally the domain of the young and supple — for those with dewy skin and cropped tops — 2024 challenged that notion.

Miranda July’s novel “All Fours” is a requiem to perimenopausal desire. It follows the protagonist — a married, successful mother — on an ultimately abortive road trip during which she falls for a younger man who works at a car hire company. Despite their chemistry, the young married man Davey, won’t sleep with her, leaving the unnamed protagonist to masturbate furiously to no satisfaction.

“I would never get what I wanted anymore, man-wise,” she laments at one point.

The novel was an instant New York Times bestseller, perhaps because it gave voice and insight into a time of life that is underrepresented and rarely discussed.

Elsewhere, actor Gillian Anderson edited “Want,” a portal into the minds of what women really crave but do not always feel able to say. The 174 anonymous sexual fantasy entries are just a tiny sample of the 800 submissions Anderson received from all over the world and ranging from the more popular reveries (threesomes) to the surreal (robots) and the quietly heart-breaking (craving admiration from a cold husband). Anderson wrote in the introduction that she hoped the book will “start a new conversation about sexual power.”

That conversation — and a greater emphasis on female sexual pleasure — was well underway in 2024, said Dr. Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University.

According to Lehmiller and recent studies into female masturbation, the topic of women’s sexual experience and self-pleasure is less taboo than ever before.

Lehmiller pointed to the growing market of sex toys and products aimed at enhancing women’s fulfilment. “This shows just how mainstream women’s pleasure has gone,” he added in a phone interview with CNN

While Lehmiller points to women’s liberation — citing the birth control pill as well as women’s economic and educational gains — as major game changers when it comes to female sexual freedom, it’s not the full picture. Today, psychology and sex therapy are now fields predominantly occupied by women which has dramatically changed how female pleasure is perceived, he said.

“In the past these fields were dominated by men who had very different ideas about what it is that brought women pleasure: they had a lot of fundamental misunderstandings,” Lehmiller explained. “A century ago, Freud was the biggest voice — he had a lot to say about female orgasm and how women should be experiencing pleasure. But as women have come to the forefront of the field, they have changed the conversation.”

And they’re no longer talking quietly, among themselves.

This article was updated with the release dates for “Babygirl.”