Earlier this year, I left my advance screening of Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s latest big-screen collaboration, thinking two things: Man, that was a lot of sex, and, I hope this movie doesn’t get soft-canceled online before it even comes out. For the record, I adored the film, which tells the story of a young woman’s journey from near-incoherence to agency (sexual and otherwise), and I felt that its frequent sex scenes were entirely earned. But I’ve gotten all too used to the exhausting sex-scene discourse online, which reliably flattens and oversimplifies the question of how, why, and when sex should be used to help tell a story onscreen. (It should be noted that Stone is a producer on Poor Things, so while she might not be able to speak to the film’s intent due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, she almost certainly had some say in its content, and particularly its sex scenes, which deepen in meaning as her character gains life experience.)
The online resistance to sex scenes in movies and TV isn’t coming out of nowhere. Young people are having less sex than ever before, a trend that is often painted as a societal scourge, but might simply reflect the fact that those same young people are feeling less pressured. (As the alumna of a decade’s worth of meh one-night stands, I firmly applaud this.) When it comes to sex onscreen, though, it rankles me to have to advocate for the should-be-commonplace idea that depicting sex is not inherently negative or damaging to the viewer, nor to the actors engaged in the scene. Of course, sometimes those scenes have caused harm—actors Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos have both been open about how exploited they felt making their 2013 film Blue Is the Warmest Color—but that seems more like an argument for having intimacy coordinators on set than for shunning sex scenes altogether.
It’s been 55 years since the end of the Hays Code, which set industry guidelines for the amount and type of sex and violence that could be seen on screen. To be sure, we’re not suffering from a shortage of either today; you can reliably find barely clothed breasts and/or guns on pretty much any television network (not to mention full frontal male nudity—a rarity until only recently). But what we are still lacking is a critical mass of sex scenes that sensitively depict the overwhelming range of what sex is and can be. For one example: Despite the popularity of recent queer films like Red, White, and Royal Blue and Bottoms, straight, cisgender people are still the most likely to be featured in mainstream sex scenes, leading to an underrepresentation of sex that is familiar to LGBTQ+ viewers.
I have clear, vaguely First Amendment–related reasons for supporting a filmmaker’s right to put sex scenes in their movies, but please don’t mistake this line of argument for an absolutist stance. Artists should be able to do what they want with their art, but that doesn t mean that audiences should have to engage with it. I don’t owe Woody Allen’s latest film a single scrap of my attention, and similarly, people who don’t want to see sex scenes have every right to avoid films and TV shows in which they’re featured.
Moreover, any director or person with power on a set should be (at minimum) fired for coercing or otherwise negatively influencing an actor to perform a sex scene they’re not comfortable with. But that is different than saying that no sex scenes should happen at all. It’s in this hyper-vigilance, which can sometimes slide into a stifling of free expression, that I get lost. Sex is a part of life, one that isn’t inherently more problematic or dangerous to portray than any other facet of existence, and we stand to lose something if we try to disincline filmmakers from engaging with it, full stop.
I still remember the first sex scene in a movie that really hit home for me; it was the hookup between Kaitlyn Dever and Diana Silvers in Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart. I loved how disjointed and messy and distinctly un-hot it was. Watching Dever’s character struggle to get her sneakers off made me feel better about all the times that my own sex life lacked seamless choreography, and as a closeted teenage lesbian who didn’t have much to go on in terms of sex scenes between women (that weren’t X-rated, at least), I felt especially affirmed by the idea that queer sex could be awkward, but also worthy and meaningful.
When sex scenes are bad, they’re bad. But as long as they’re filmed by adults who are giving their full, informed consent in a safe workplace, there is a certain power to acknowledging that they don’t have to be good, either. That is to say: Sex can be complicated. Our media should show it.
