For decades, cinema taught us what desire should look like and it almost always looked the same. A woman’s body framed in fragments, observed rather than felt. The camera lingered, dissected, consumed. What was meant to be erotic often felt more like surveillance.
The “male gaze” became the default setting of visual storytelling: women as the object, men as the viewer. Even when female characters were written with depth, their physicality was filtered through a lens that didn’t belong to them. Pleasure was something performed, not experienced.
But over the past decade, something has shifted. A new generation of directors from Céline Sciamma and Chloe Zhao to Jane Campion and Emerald Fennell, are reframing sensuality. They’re turning the lens around, creating a cinematic language that feels intimate, emotional and alive. One that’s less about how women look and more about how they feel.
From seeing to feeling
The female gaze isn’t simply the opposite of the male gaze. It isn’t a reversal of power, but a redefinition of what power looks like. Instead of using the camera to possess, it uses it to understand.
In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, desire builds not through exposure, but through attention. The camera lingers not on flesh, but on glances, gestures, the pause of a hand. We see what the characters see, which is the slow recognition of being seen in return. The result is erotic, but also tender. Desire here is empathy: the ability to witness someone fully.
Similarly, Chloe Zhao’s work from The Rider to Nomadland, explores touch as storytelling. Her camera moves with gentleness, often at eye level, capturing the physicality of care rather than conquest. A hand brushing against a horse’s mane. A hug that lasts one second longer than expected. Intimacy becomes texture - something lived, not performed.
The politics of portrayal
For so long, women’s sensuality has been defined by how it appears to others. The female gaze disrupts that by prioritising experience over aesthetics. It asks: what does it feel like to be in this body, to want, to be wanted?
Jane Campion has been exploring that question for years. In The Piano and later in The Power of the Dog, she captures the tension between repression and release, not through nudity, but through silence, breath and resistance. Her work reminds us that eroticism often hides in restraint and in the unspoken.
Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, meanwhile, takes a sharper approach. Her lens exposes the performative nature of desire and the way women have learned to navigate and manipulate the gaze to survive within it. It’s less about romance and more about reclamation: the female body as a site of power, anger and irony.
Each of these filmmakers reminds us that sensuality isn’t a fixed aesthetic but rather it’s a point of view.
Desire as empathy
At the heart of the female gaze is empathy - not sentimentality, but recognition. It allows women to exist in their complexity: tender, flawed, desiring, restrained. It invites intimacy that isn’t dependent on exposure.
What makes these stories so powerful isn’t that they hide sex; it’s that they approach it differently. Pleasure is no longer a punchline or a plot device. It’s emotional context. In Sciamma’s films, a touch can feel more revealing than a sex scene. In Zhao’s, stillness becomes connection. In Campion’s, the body becomes a landscape of feeling.
The female gaze recognises that pleasure can be quiet - that attraction doesn’t always need to be performed to be understood. It values the sensory and the emotional equally, making space for interiority.
Rewriting how we see
We’re entering a moment where desire on screen feels more human. Where sex scenes are being reimagined not for titillation, but for truth. It’s a subtle but significant shift and one that mirrors a broader cultural move toward emotional literacy and self-awareness.
The female gaze doesn’t reject beauty; it redefines it. It asks us to look differently, to feel differently. To consider that eroticism might live not in the spectacle, but in the subtle - in the hand reaching, the breath catching, the eyes meeting and holding just long enough to suggest something deeper.
For so long, cinema taught us that to desire was to look. The female gaze reminds us that to desire can also mean to listen, to understand, to connect.
And perhaps that’s where its real seduction lies - in turning observation into empathy, and touch into story.
