Music Videos That Had A Strange Effect On My Sexual Development

by Alexandra Molotkow

Busta Rhymes & Janet Jackson, “What’s It Gonna Be?!”
The source of my lifelong thing for twitchy women with rubber-ball cleavage and men made of liquid chrome. That and the idea of making someone’s body do things they didn’t even know it could do, like scream your name. For example, I always made a big thing out of not being into the Backstreet Boys, but around the time this video came out I had a dream that I woke up next to Nick Carter and he turned to me and sang, “What I’m gonna do to you will make your bones relaxed.” I had a secret crush on him for a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbkWvZtFzXo

rusty, “Empty Cell”
A Canadian classic, starring Floria Sigismondi, who is hotter than you even knew! The dude is Danko Jones, also hot, and the director is Bruce LaBruce. So it’s a sexy video, but sexy in a way I didn’t even know to associate with sex as a 10-year-old, which is an uncomfortable thing for a 10-year-old. I don’t think it connects directly to any one kick — I never fantasized about chaining a guy up and crab-shampooing him — but most things that make me uncomfortable turn up in some kind of sex thought, eventually.

Pulp, “Disco 2000”
“Disco 2000” is a heartbreak twofer: the song stings so deep (“you can even bring your baby!”), especially now that its subject, Deborah Bone, has died; and its video offers a repulsively drab picture of adult sexuality, which I might have internalized had it not been for the other videos on this list.

Live, Lakini’s Juice
I don’t know what part of this got me the most: the guy at the ticket counter fondling his blocks of… drugs? soap? cheese?; or Ed Kowalczyk’s wild gesticulations (I think Ed Kowalczyk is genuinely bizarre and sort of hot, but that’s a subject for another post); or the couples dry-humping each other to extremely serious music; or the lyric about washing the chick’s feet with toilet water; or the whole thing where Come On Man What Is Happening Here I’d Seriously Love To Know. I actually think it’s the bunchy underwear.

The Cure, The Love Cats
The first time I ever felt, like, real desire was the first time I laid eyes on Robert Smith. I don’t know what it was — the jerking, or the herking, or his stare, or the way he pets the cat, or the fact that he seems like he’d be into sex stuff that doesn’t even seem sexual until you really think about it and then what a nice surprise. All I know is that I’ve always been into Robert Smith and people who look like Robert Smith, but I’ve never met anyone who looked like Robert Smith who I really liked as a person, so I guess, whatever.

Bonus: anything involving slime and/or goo.