Our screens are saturated with explicit sex but it's more strictly shot now, with intimacy coaches a fixture on set — does that mean it's a force for good, asks Jonathan Dean.
Let's talk about sex. On screen, that is — the having of and politics of it. Can one have too much, or do we always want more? The national conversation rages. The rutting in Industry was a bit athletic — do normal people really have that much sex? What was more outrageous about Bridgerton, the colour-blind casting, or the two leads adopting more positions than a politician on the campaign trail?
Sex sells. It always has. And in an age of subscription services vying for attention it is no surprise producers want to use titillation to forge ahead of their rivals. Bridgerton, a bodice-ripping bout of orgasms, is Netflix's most watched show, with 82 million gawping households at last count. And with those numbers, when the show's second series arrives next year, the world's leading streaming service is hardly going to put its clothes back on.
When it comes to sex on TV, the 1970s anti-smut campaigner Mary Whitehouse lost. There is more of it than ever. Partly because there are simply more channels, so there are more hours to fill. But streamers commission what they think people will watch, and, over the past decade, big numbers have been found in big loving. There was Game of Thrones, which began in 2011 and attracted millions with its bonking and dragons. That led to the fantasy follow-ups Outlander and Westworld, neither of which were shy, before we ended up in 2020 with Industry, Normal People and Bridgerton the most buzzed about of the year. All were very nude. One episode of the equally revered I Hate Suzie focused entirely on Billie Piper masturbating.
Think back to the most talked about shows before Game of Thrones and, indeed, Lena Dunham's Girls, which pushed a casual, inclusive sort of nudity on to the small screen. Yes, there was Sex and the City and Californication, whose USP was explicit sex. But while most headlining shows — The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing — weren't strangers to sex scenes, those bits were never what people talked about. Would Normal People have made such a splash if it was about students vanishing into a bedroom behind closed doors? Absolutely not. Indeed, you could argue that the psychology of Sally Rooney's novel was rather lost in an adaptation that essentially became a meme of the actor Paul Mescal's member. But no TV exec would change a thing. It has been streamed 62.7 million times on iPlayer.
Normal People, though, was just the amuse-bouche for Industry, a young professionals drama partly directed by Dunham that had fantastically inventive shags; the fourth base to the first of 1996's This Life. Subscription service shows in the US, Normal People and Industry were broadcast on the BBC in Britain. Is Auntie getting kinky? Perhaps. Or, rather, execs have seen the landscape and know they are not going to attract a young audience brought up on filth like Game of Thrones — and a diet of online pornography — with another chaste adaptation of Evelyn Waugh.
Porn is key to this rise in sexual content. Before it was so readily available, the separation was clear: magazines under the mattress, television in the lounge. But for 20 years now men and women have had access to all their fantasies, and some they weren't expecting, at the click of a button. That's a whole generation with solo sexual fulfilment on tap. Inevitably that will diminish the lure of vaguely intimate TV. When Channel 5 launched in 1997, it was during the lad mags peak, when FHM offered glimpses of flesh to boys. The new channel mimicked that, capitalising on this more overt soft desire. Now, in competition with a more hardcore offering, broadcasters are again copying what the public is used to.
The line between television drama and porn is being wiped out: scenes from Normal People and Bridgerton have ended up on porn sites. "We're hugely disappointed," Ed Guiney, an executive producer on Normal People, told Variety. "It's deeply disrespectful to the actors involved." A Bridgerton insider wailed to The Sun: "It is a prestige drama based on bestselling novels. To peddle scenes as pure smut is beyond the pale."
Well, is it? In theory Bridgerton is an adaptation of a contemporary novel set in Regency England, tackling class. In practice it's a polite orgy — Glamour ran an article on its website titled "Every Bridgerton sex scene, ranked". During episode six alone? Morning-After Sex, Rain Sex — "29 seconds of foreplay . . . Then he takes off his pants . . ." — Sex Montage Extravaganza!, Desk Sex and Conception-Attempt Sex. How fantastic that all was for singles, starved of intimacy during the pandemic after a year of substandard dating app use.
Once again, though, what is on the internet is dictating television's content. Articles such as the one in Glamour, or a piece in Cosmopolitan telling readers where to find smut on Netflix, are pushing viewers towards raunchy shows. And the more people are enticed by sexy shows, the more likely that commissioners will make more of the same. Rumours about the second series of Bridgerton suggest that, with the two lead characters having become parents, they will play second fiddle to other, single ones.
It makes economic sense, but the writers and producers are not the ones getting naked in front of strangers. One young actress, who wishes to remain nameless, remembers that when she was starting out some roles came with a contract that said she basically had to do anything. She felt she had to take the parts because otherwise she would not get cast. This led to an oral sex scene that left her feeling really uncomfortable. Some actors are fine with getting it on for cash. If they aren't, they may find the TV landscape unwelcoming to their perceived prudishness. Imagine where the algorithmic feedback from the success of Bridgerton could lead — a full-on retelling of The Lord of the Rings in which Aragorn and Arwen spend a whole episode giving new meaning to Helm's Deep?
The young stars of Industry, though, say they were happy to take part in that ceaselessly naked show. "Sex is a part of life," Myha'la Herrold told this paper. She plays Harper, good at fiddling with numbers and other things. "I also felt I hadn't seen a body like mine — tattoos, small tits, short — doing many sex scenes, so I really embraced that." Marisa Abela, the sexually pioneering Yasmin, thought that the show's explicit scenes, which included her asking a colleague to eat his own semen, were necessary. "Those scenes always told you something new about the character," she said. "They weren't gratuitous."
Part of this carnal contentment on screen comes from intimacy coaches, sexperts on the set who make sure the groping in the script is not a problem in real life. They design stunts to make actors as comfortable and, indeed, distant from each other as possible. Post Me Too, their number shot up. "We'd go through the script and be, like, 'Is it OK if I touch here?'" Herrold says. Abela said she felt overwhelmed about stripping, but it helped that it was so choreographed. "No one actually ever touches what it looks like they're touching," she said. The same was found on Bridgerton. "It felt very practical," the lead actress Phoebe Dynevor said. "If we didn't have an intimacy co-ordinator, it would be our director, who was a male, coming up to me and telling me what to do. No one wants to be told how to perform an orgasm by a man."
Last month Keira Knightley said that any sex scene she agrees to in the future will be directed by a woman. "I don't have an absolute ban," she said. "But I kind of do with men . . . I'd just rather not stand in front of a group of men naked . . . I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze."
For someone who grew up with mainstream cinema at its most leery, when blockbuster directors such as Michael Bay would dress young actresses in very little and lie them across a motorbike, her attitude is understandable. Through gritted teeth, Knightley once explained on The Graham Norton Show how awkward it was to audition her "sex face" for the director David Cronenberg. Dakota Johnson, meanwhile, expressed unease to me about Sam Taylor-Johnson quitting the 50 Shades films after the first one, leaving the actress to be directed by a man in the final two. The stars of the graphic lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour have said making the film for the director Abdellatif Kechiche was "horrible".
Holding out for a female director is not the career speed bump it used to be, though. Men still dominate the industry, but the atmosphere has altered to the extent that previously exploitative directors do not have the space to operate as they once did. The new film-world is best seen in Ammonite — a sapphic drama in which you see a lot more of the A-listers Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan than you ever thought you would. For one lengthy frolic the director Francis Lee gave his two leads a chance to experiment with what they were comfortable doing.
Power, then, has shifted to the stars. But rather than making everyone more coy, a surprise shock wave from Me Too may actually be a rise in explicit sex on our screens. For decades the narrative of intercourse and relationships has been told from a man's point of view, but now, encouraged by safer sets and more women in the writing rooms, stories that have not been told before are getting oxygen.
Take the Oscar-contender Promising Young Woman, coming out later this year, which was written and directed by Emerald Fennell. It stars Carey Mulligan as a woman who feigns inebriation, which leads to men trying to take advantage of her — at which point she reveals she is sober and the men learn a lesson about consent. The smart part? The men who take her home are not cookie-cutter Hollywood rapists. They are, instead, so-called nice guys — men who do not think they are doing something wrong.
It is a film no man would make, mostly because it is about something men do not think they or their friends do. As such, Promising Young Woman is an example of shifting sexual dynamics on and off screen. The representation of sex in entertainment is becoming much more 50/50 than it was. There will be penises. Plenty of sex scenes in this year's bumper crop show women on top — literally and metaphorically. This is significant, since it offers an alternative to a generation of young men derailed by spending their formative years watching aggressive pornography.
Maybe, then, this new, horny TV is a force for good. Isn't it better for society, after all, to watch sex made in safe spaces, pushing more equal narratives, than for people to spend their screen time delving into the fringes of acceptability? Sex is not going anywhere, ever. Indeed, it will only become more available. So let's get it on . . . TV.
21st-century sex scenes
Most star-making
Adam Driver is an A-lister now, but rewind to when we first got to know him, being adventurous as wild man Adam in a bedroom with Lena Dunham's Hannah in Girls. A lot is packed in, from condom consent issues to far too much chat. "Let's play the quiet game," Adam says. Honourable mention here to Patrick Wilson, who in a different episode played naked table tennis with Hannah.
Least family-friendly
There was a lot of sex in the early series of Game of Thrones — so much that it pushed its often nude star Emilia Clarke to tears. It really did start as it meant to go on. Fresh to the characters we would get to know so well, in the very first episode Cersei and Jaime get it on. "Aren't they . . .?" stuttered stunned viewers. Yes, they were siblings.
Most poignant
The full impact of the montages of Olly Alexander's Ritchie and his many boys in Russell T Davies's It's a Sin is only really felt in the final episode. Yes, the endless partner-swapping spread Aids through the UK, but, as he tells his mum, he had so much fun.
Most important
Viola Davis has an Emmy, a Tony and an Oscar. In the first episode of How to Get Away with Murder she sits on a desk and receives oral sex from a man who is not her husband. She is playing a lawyer, and the show is about court cases. Gratuitous? That sort of thing did not happen in Kavanagh QC. But Davis has spoken about its importance; showing a middle-aged black woman as a sexual being is rare on television.
Most ridiculous
For all of TV's sexual evolution, film still has the most memorable scenes. And the silliest. No list of 21st-century screen sex scenes is complete without mentioning the opening of Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. There she is, our returning heroine Sharon Stone, getting it on in a car. Who's that with her? The footballer Stan Collymore. It still makes no sense.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London