Late 90s/Early 00s Movies That Shaped Me Sexually

Gillian Anderson giving whale tail at the Oscars in the early 00s.

I came of age in the time of the h0rny profile, ripe with music videos of young women shaking ass and Cosmo tips on how to please your man studied long before I had a man. It was a time of AOL chatrooms and cybering with strangers who could’ve been men in their 50s or could’ve also been perverted little 10 year olds like myself! It was the best of times, when I was gifted my very first thong at age 12 and subsequently made every effort to let the world know—it was the worst of times, the first season of the whale tail (see above). It was also a time in which I watched A LOT of movies. Probably in part because what else was I gonna do? but the late 90s was a kind of renaissance of the teen flick—both horror (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer) and rom-com (10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That) Jennifer Love Hewitt was a goddess. Women’s body parts were plot devices. Everyone had their belly button pierced and everyone was technically still a virgin. Do they still make movies for the kids these days?

Below, five movies that shaped me sexually—most of these aren’t exactly billed as erotic films, but they certainly imprinted erotically on my young mind.

NICOLE 4 EVA IYKYK

The earliest film on my list is also probably the most fucked up and impactful. Fear, directed by James Foley and written by Christopher Crowe, came out in 1996 and I don’t know if it was a made-for-tv movie but I definitely didn’t see it in theaters. I was 11 and it is rated R. The movie stars a young, ripped Mark Wahlberg, Reese Witherspoon, and Alyssa Milano (!) Marky Mark is the older bad boy young Reese falls for (her character’s name is Nicole) and they share a fingerbang scene on a rollercoaster that has lived rent free in my mind for decades since. The movie takes a scary turn and gives us the second (but not last) incredibly iconic moment, in which an obsessed Mark Wahlberg etches “Nicole 4 EVA” into his chest. I wanted someone to want me like that! Dangerously. Possessed.

It helped that Mark Wahlberg was incredibly hot back then—I had his Calvin Klein ad in which he pouts and grabs his junk hanging in my room.

Mark Wahlberg did Calvin Klein undies long before Jeremy Allen White

Kathryn Merteuil is my hero.

As an avid Buffy fan and the black sheep daughter of a Catholic, I was primed to love Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions, which came out in 1999. This movie was so SEXUAL and dark. It taught me that sex was a tool in relationships and society (sad but true) and showed one of the first and only representations in media at the time of women owning their sexuality and not being completely ruined by it (spoiler alert but I don’t consider Kathryn’s coke habit being revealed to her high school to be particularly ruinous, that and losing the Jag—replaceable!) Am I missing the point? Maybe, but Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character in this film will always be my hero. That and her corset situation was just so. fucking. good.

Iconic and influential.

Another fucked up film that I found sexually inspirational: Jawbreakers, written and directed by Darren Stein, a queer filmmaker who’s said of the film, “The boys, the men, in the movie are peripheral. They don’t have the agency that the girls have. The girls play boy roles, like in that one scene when Courtney [played by Rose McGowan] uses the boy to get pleasure in the bedroom, dominating him..” This pivotal scene involves a popsicle dubbed the “big stick” and Rose McGowan’s character first sweetly then forcefully making Ethan Erickson suck the popsicle like a cock. The Jawbreakers popsicle moment walked so James Franco could perform fellatio on a gun 14 years later in Springbreakers.

She is horizontal for most of the movie.

By 2003 I had grown up a little, and started watching foreign films (the height of sophistication) like Swimming Pool, directed by François Ozon, and starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier and her breasts. The French willingness to let nudity spill out on screen felt like p0rn to me—I loved every second of the tense vibes, the French villa, and pulsing Hockney pool in nearly every shot, and felt not unlike Rampling’s character who is quite the voyeur. The ending doesn’t matter!

She is beauty, she is grace.

The Dreamers, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, gave me an impossible lifestyle to envy, one that involved taking inappropriate baths with your conjoined twin brother and new friend, parents who go out of town for a month at a time and leave you to your own devices in a sweet Parisian flat, running through the Louvre, and sheets that can be styled into a Venus de Milo-esque moment, which is, of course, tattooed on my brain for all of eternity. My ideas of what was sexy were clearly maturing by this point, and the crossover of my interest in art and history in this erotic image is truly unrivaled. I’ve tried to recreate it in photos multiple times. Maybe I’ll show you someday.

What movie did you see when you were young that shaped you sexually?