Do we need TV sex scenes?
Photo Courtesy: Hulu
Sex scenes are ‘rude and horrible’, actress Joanna Lumley radically declared in an interview with The Guardian. For her, the only purpose of sex scenes in cinema is to satisfy a voyeuristic curiosity into the most private areas of individuals: ‘the audience just looks at what your genitals are like’. There are legitimate issues with sex scenes in TV and film, primarily with the objectification of the female body and the lack of regard for actors’ off-screen needs whilst filming these intimate scenes. However, Lumley’s belief that sex scenes are ‘rude’ is perhaps just too simplistic.
The introduction of intimacy coordinators into the TV and film industry has allowed actors to claim control over their bodies. Intimacy coordinators ensure that boundaries set by actors remain enforced, and this has had a profound positive impact on TV shows such as BBC’s Normal People. Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Marianne in Normal People, praised the production team and the intimacy coordinator on set, Ida O’Brien, for their handling of the intimate scenes on the show, stating that she was proud of the ‘equality in nudity’ between her and her costar Paul Mescal, as it showed ‘the truth about a relationship’. Sex scenes cannot just be eradicated from TV and film, as sex is a natural part of life.
Censoring sex, or showing a disparity in nudity between men and women in TV and film, jeopardises the realism of relationships on screen. Sex is integral to the story of Normal People, and more specifically Marianne’s characterisation, as her state of mind often parallels her experiences with sex, and so sex becomes intrinsically linked with other aspects of her life. Her experimentation with violent sex mirrors her low self esteem and her belief that she deserved to be degraded.
Laura Mulvey, film theorist, articulated the problems with the depiction of women on screen in her ground-breaking work ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, stating that ‘the male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly’. Here she laid out the theory of the ‘male gaze’, describing cinema’s tendency to objectify and sexualise the female body. Take the MCU, which dresses Scarlet Johannson in an impractical, skin-tight leather bodysuit. This costume puts an objectifying emphasis on her body, reducing her to, as character Tony Stark calls her, a ‘piece of meat’.
A TV show that continually resists the male gaze is Netflix’s Sex Education. The show does not sexualise the female characters, and neither does it reinforce unrealistic body standards. Rather than showing sex as a performative act with a focus on male pleasure, the show depicts sex as something that is sometimes awkward, clumsy, and ‘unsexy’. It deconstructs inaccurate preconceptions surrounding sex that are learnt from pornography, and shows sex in all different forms, exploring different intimate issues such as vaginismus, sexuality and gender identity, orgasm, and masturbation. No topic, no matter how stigmatised, is off limits.
The ‘male gaze’ that has haunted visual media for decades has created a multitude of problems, especially with the presentation of women. It has led to power and nudity imbalances in sex scenes, as well as the over-sexualisation of women on screen. However, shows such as Normal People and Sex Education which have hired intimacy coordinators on set show that it is not sex on screen which is ‘rude and horrible’, but rather the objectifying male gaze.
What we need in film and TV is not an erasure of sex, but a change in perspective away from the ‘male gaze’ where sex is depicted on screen as an act of mutual pleasure and mutual respect. Well-made sex scenes have the potential to positively impact the culture surrounding sex, and denying this inevitable part of life is repressive and creates unnecessary stigma where sex is deemed shameful and taboo.