The cultural discourse surrounding Sam Levinson’s HBO powerhouse Euphoria has always been visual, polarizing, and intensely localized around the body. From its premiere, critics and audiences alike split into distinct camps: those who viewed its hyper-stylized, glitter-soaked depiction of Gen-Z teenhood as a cautionary masterpiece, and those who saw it as gratuitous, borderline-exploitative shock value.
At the center of this debate are the show’s unapologetic, unflinching depictions of highly specific sexual acts—acts that mainstream, prestige television has traditionally left behind closed doors, or coded purely through a patriarchal lens. Specifically, the recurring motifs of oral sex, facials, and visible ejaculation (cumshots) have drawn immense fire. For traditionalist or strictly second-wave feminist perspectives, these visuals represent the ultimate capitulation to the “male gaze”—the literal and symbolic reduction of young women to passive vessels for male pleasure.
But if we look closer—if we analyze these scenes through a sex-positive, agency-focused intersectional feminist framework—a radically different narrative emerges. In Euphoria, these acts are stripped of their sterile, algorithmic pornographic context. Instead, they are reframed as raw, messy, and deeply emotional expressions of vulnerability, intimacy, and the radical freedom to love without boundaries. By placing the narrative and bodily agency firmly back into the hands of its female and trans protagonists, Euphoria reclaims the hyper-explicit, turning tools of historical subordination into badges of emotional autonomy.
Reclaiming the Narrative from the Pornographic Gaze
To understand how Euphoria subverts these explicit acts, one must first understand how they function in traditional media. In standard pornography, the facial or the cumshot serves as a punctuation mark—a definitive, visual proof of male dominance and climax. The camera typically objectifies the recipient, rendering her a passive participant whose own pleasure is irrelevant to the structural economy of the scene.
Euphoria fundamentally disrupts this economy. It accomplishes this by prioritizing what feminist film theorists call the female gaze—or more accurately, an interior gaze that emphasizes the emotional, psychological state of the character performing or receiving the act.
When we watch Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney), Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), or Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer) navigate their sexual landscapes, the explicit nature of their encounters is never detached from their ongoing psychological arcs. These are not nameless bodies performing scripted acts for an anonymous viewer; these are highly complex, deeply feeling young women utilizing their bodies to navigate the chaotic waters of love, validation, and self-actualization.
Sydney Sweeney has spoken extensively about her autonomy on set and her collaboration with Levinson to ensure her sexuality felt earned and self-directed. Responding to criticisms regarding her frequent nude and explicit scenes, Sweeney explicitly defended the artistic choices:
“There are hours of discussion about what we’re doing… I’ve never felt like Sam has forced it upon me or is trying to get a nude scene into an HBO show. When I didn’t want to do a scene, he wouldn’t make me do it. It’s a completely safe, collaborative environment.”
By establishing that the actresses themselves possess total veto power and creative input over their bodies, the show’s explicit content ceases to be an act of external exploitation. Instead, it becomes a chosen medium of performance art, allowing characters like Cassie to express an overwhelming, borderline-nihilistic desire for connection.
The Oral Arc: Agency, Control, and Vulnerability
In the economy of teenage relationships depicted in Euphoria, oral sex is rarely just a physical transaction; it is a battleground for intimacy and power.
Consider Maddy Perez. In season one, Maddy’s sexual relationship with Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) is wrapped in layers of performative perfectionism and toxic power struggles. Yet, when Maddy engages in sexual acts, the camera rarely centers Nate’s pleasure. Instead, it focuses on Maddy’s face—her calculating eyes, her intense expressions of control, her deliberate choices. For Maddy, weaponizing her sexuality is a form of survival in an environment that constantly seeks to diminish her. Her willingness to engage in explicit acts is not a sign of submission, but a calculated reclamation of space. It is her stating, implicitly, that she is the author of this encounter.
Conversely, Cassie’s relationship with oral sex shifts from performative validation to a desperate, consuming hunger for love. In season two, as Cassie spirals into her secret, obsessive affair with Nate, her submissive sexual acts are framed not as degradation, but as a devastatingly raw manifestation of absolute devotion. When Cassie performs oral sex or positions herself to receive a facial, the narrative context is steeped in an almost religious fervor of surrender.
From a radical sex-positive feminist perspective, the freedom to choose submission—to willingly offer oneself to a partner as an act of consuming passion—is just as valid an expression of bodily autonomy as demanding dominant pleasure. Cassie is choosing to love to the absolute point of erasure, and the explicit visualization of that desire honors the gravity of her emotional state. It refuses to sanitize her passion, presenting it in all its sticky, unvarnished reality.
Jules Vaughn and the Trans-Feminist Reclamation of Intimacy
The subversion of explicit sexual motifs becomes even more politically potent when examining the arc of Jules Vaughn, played by Hunter Schafer. As a transgender young woman, Jules’s relationship with her own body, femininity, and the desires of cisgender men is central to her character’s philosophical journey.
In her groundbreaking special episode, “Fck Anyone Who Who计 (Part 2: Jules)”, co-written by Schafer herself, Jules explicitly deconstructs how her sexuality has been shaped by the male gaze, and how she desires to dismantle it. She notes that her entire concept of femininity had been built around what men wanted.
Yet, throughout the series, when Jules engages in explicit sexual acts—including scenes that touch upon the mechanics of queer and trans intimacy—the show honors her bodily reality without fetishizing her. When visible male climax or explicit acts occur within her orbit, they are framed through her need for authentic validation and her deep-seated desire to be seen as a whole human being.
Hunter Schafer has noted how deeply involved she was in crafting Jules’s sexual narrative, ensuring it moved away from standard pornographic tropes that frequently dehumanize trans women:
“We talked about everything. Sam [Levinson] and I would sit down for hours and just talk about our lives, transness, femininity, and what it means to love. Bringing that into the sexual scenes meant they came from a place of real, lived truth, not just a fantasy.”
When Jules engages in explicit acts with Rue (Zendaya) or even her complicated encounters with Elliot (Dominic Fike), the acts are saturated with a sense of exploratory freedom. For a trans woman, the unapologetic depiction of participating in raw, explicit intimacy—free from the violent, closeted shame of the men around her—is a profound feminist victory. It asserts her right to give and receive love in whatever physical configuration she chooses, transforming potentially objectifying motifs into expressions of divine, unfettered romance.
The Radical Honesty of the “Cumshot” and the Facial
Why must these acts be shown so explicitly? Why can television not simply rely on the time-honored tradition of cutting to a panning shot of the bedroom window or a discarded piece of clothing on the floor?
The answer lies in Euphoria’s commitment to radical honesty. For Gen-Z, a generation raised in an era of ubiquitous digital pornography, smartphones, and instant access to explicit imagery, sexuality is not abstract. It is highly literal. By incorporating the visual language of the internet age—the facial, the visible ejaculation—and transplanting it into a prestige television drama, Euphoria bridges the gap between the hyper-sanitized media teens are supposed to watch and the hyper-explicit world they actually navigate.
When Euphoria shows these fluids and these climaxes, it strips them of their clinical, exploitative isolation. It bathes them in cinematic lighting, scores them with ethereal music by Labrinth, and surrounds them with the crushing weight of adolescent heartbreak and euphoria. The show argues that these bodily fluids are not inherently dirty, shameful, or degrading. They are the physical byproducts of human connection. To view a facial or a cumshot as inherently anti-feminist is to accept the patriarchal definition of those acts—to agree that they are inherently damaging to women.
Euphoria challenges the viewer to look past the initial shock value and ask: Why do we find the physical manifestation of male pleasure so uniquely threatening to female autonomy when the female characters themselves are consenting, active participants in the narrative?
Conclusion: The Freedom to Bleed, Sweat, and Love
Ultimately, Euphoria operates on the frontier of a third- and fourth-wave feminist philosophy that refuses to police women’s sexual choices. It understands that true liberation does not look like a neat, respectable, perfectly egalitarian sexual encounter where everyone sits up straight and speaks in clinical terms of consent. True liberation is messy. It is sweaty. It is occasionally self-destructive, profoundly intense, and wildly explicit.
By allowing its actresses to collaborate on these scenes, and by centering the emotional interiority of Cassie, Maddy, and Jules, Euphoria effectively reclaims the explicit. It argues that the freedom to love means the freedom to engage in the full spectrum of human sexuality without being branded as a victim of exploitation. The facials, the oral sex, and the visible climaxes are not stains on the show’s feminist credentials; they are the ultimate proof of its radical commitment to bodily autonomy. They remind us that in the pursuit of love and ecstasy, young women have the absolute right to map their own boundaries, make their own mistakes, and find their own version of freedom in the splash zone of human intimacy.
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