Along the way, a conversation has also started about how those sex scenes are brought to life, and the significance of on-set intimacy coordinators… and now, House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke is proving just how important that conversation is.
In a recent interview with iPaper to promote her work on the new Prime Video series The Girlfriend, Cooke offered heaps of praise for the show’s intimacy coordinators. She argued that they help her and other performers through what could otherwise be “really precarious and vulnerable situations” where you feel like “a chunk of yourself as been taken.”
“It’s amazing to me that people had to just fudge their way through those scenes before those people existed,” Cooke argued, before adding that, “[The embarrassment is amplified for] those who are just starting out and don’t have the vocabulary to say what they’re not comfortable with. And for women, who’ll often get labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘a bitch’ for speaking up.”
“[Good intimacy coordinators can] sense hesitation and become your voice,” Cooke continued, adding that, “[while] showing intimacy, passion is an integral part of reflecting the human experience.”
It Matters
For multiple reasons, I found Cooke’s take on the situation (and the fact that her quotes are going viral) to be really refreshing. Her comments are adding a bit more nuance into the larger sex scene debate, which has often gotten boiled down into the most outlandish extremes when hashed out on social media. Regardless of your personal feelings towards those kinds of scenes, it’s undeniable that something has changed in how they’ve come to life across the past few decades of popular culture.
Shifting gender politics both on and off the screen, the rise of the four-quadrant crowd-pleasing blockbuster, and the hiatus of a lot of mid-budget genres like the erotic thriller have led to onscreen sex scenes feeling few and far between, and therefore subject to more attention and scrutiny. (If you want an in-depth look at just how much things have changed, check out Karina Longworth’s excellent work on the “Erotic 80s” and “Erotic 90s” seasons of her film history podcast You Must Remember This.) Even just within the Game of Thrones franchise, which Cooke is now a part of, characters have engaged in sex scenes that have ranged from tender to extremely polarizing to upsetting… and audiences have responded with some form of pearl clutching practically every time.
That is a whole separate conversation in and of itself, but the fact of the matter is: sex scenes in movies and shows will (hopefully) never completely go away. Despite what the Internet might want you to believe, there will always be instances where those moments make sense “for the plot”: to crescendo the relationship between two people, to reveal integral moments of character, and sometimes to just have a bit of fun. And if (with the help of intimacy coordinators) the experience of bringing them to life is handled with nuance and care, just like what Cooke is describing, then that’s the best-case scenario.
Jenna Anderson is the host of the Go Read Some Comics YouTube channel, as well as one of the hosts of the Phase Hero podcast. She has been writing professionally since 2017, but has been loving pop culture (and especially superhero comics) for her entire life. You can usually find her drinking a large iced coffee from Dunkin and talking about comics, female characters, and Taylor Swift at any given opportunity.
If you’re looking to spice up your next Netflix and Chill session this is a great time to remind you that Mea Culpa is streaming now!
Source: Perry Well Films 2 / Netflix
BOSSIP spoke with Kelly Rowland and Trevante Rhodes about the new Tyler Perry erotic thriller, nude scenes, and meeting just a day before shooting together.
“We did it,” Kelly Rowland told BOSSIP when asked how she and her co-star feel about nude scenes.
But the steamy sex scene at the center of the film that has everyone talking could easily have fallen flat had the chemistry been off between the pair.
“Actually we met the day before we started shooting and immediately when Trevante and I embraced, I felt respected, I felt safe, I felt comfortable,” Rowland told BOSSIP. “I texted Tyler right afterwards and I said, ‘This is going to work!’ Because the truth is you never know what’s going to happen. I could have been like, ‘Oh my God, felt nothing’ But… it was amazing.”
In addition to acting, Trevante Rhodes is also a painter so we had to ask him about embodying a role that could bring both worlds together.
“It was amazing, like I said earlier, that scene you were speaking on, Tyler sent us, if you pay attention to the last frame there’s a still shot. So Tyler sent us that still shot. He said, he wanted to get there but he didn’t know how he was going to get there. And you know, we knew how to get there, so you know, I love painting.”
Mea Culpa also marks a new era for Kelly Rowland as a leading lady and producer.
“I wanna continue, it’s so much fun to be able to just have a space and knowing everything that goes on screen,” Rowland told BOSSIP. “It’s just so exciting, from lighting to wardrobe to hair, and the storytelling and the makeup and like certain inflections, in certain places… The characters, the cast, all of that, just shows up on screen and it’s just a another way to continue to tell these colorful stories about us.”
Rhodes also had great things to say about having Rowland both as a producer and scene partner.
“She’s the best,” Rhodes told BOSSIP. “I tell her all the time, she was a great number one for it to be her first time. She was a great #1, so it was a good job.”
She definitely knocked it out of the park — along with the rest of the stellar cast. Make sure to tune in to Mea Culpa and let us know your thoughts!
Henry Cavill can figure out how to play a spy, a superhero, and a monster hunter, but he can’t play a person who enjoys sex scenes. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Cavill and Argylle director Matthew Vaughn explains how they do not “understand” sex scenes. “I am not a fan,” added Cavill, before admitting he feels “awkward” filming them— hey, The Tudors had a lot of ‘em. “I think there are circumstances where a sex scene is actually beneficial to a movie rather than just the audience. I think sometimes they’re overused these days. It’s when you have a sense that you’re going ‘Is this really necessary? Or is it just people with less clothing on?’ and that’s where you start to get more uncomfortable and you’re thinking ‘There’s not a performance here, there’s not a piece which is gonna carry through into the rest of the movie.’” Look, not everyone can appreciate a good sex scene, especially when they’re extremely hot. But, we can think of at least 30 sex scenes that are very essential to cinema.
If you were to time-travel back to the ’90s and tell marketing executives that sex no longer sells, you would be laughed out of the building. But in the year 2023? It’s common knowledge that sex is not as profitable as it used to be. If you’re wondering why you might be seeing a lot less sex scenes in film and TV in the coming years, you might have Gen Z to thank for that. But will a shortage of sex in cinema liberate us from the shackles of exploitation? Or will it simply send us back to the dark ages of conservative censorship and religious repression—a development that would ultimately cheapen the depiction of sex and turn it into something forbidden?
According to the 2023 Teens and Screens report, which was conducted by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, around 51.5% of adolescents would prefer to see less sex and see more content depicting platonic friendships and relationships. Despite this damning news, it barely scratches the surface of a largely sex-negative culture that has rapidly developed online amongst our youth. This wave has even led to the coining of the term “puriteen”.
A puriteen is a teenager or young adult who finds an emphasis on sexuality to be intrusive, wails against age gaps in relationships, and finds the presence of kink at Pride a tad excessive. Statistics suggest that Gen Z is also less sexually active than previous generations in general, and I blame that on our relationships primarily taking place on screens and a general fear for the future. But the most prevalent form of puriteenism is a general repulsion toward and distaste for the presence of sex scenes in movies and TV. This has been seen through Gen Z’s criticism of racy shows such as Euphoria, The Idol, and even that one sex scene Christopher Nolan’s latest filmOppenheimer.
An 18 year old just told me the sex scene in Oppenheimer made them uncomfortable so they had to stop watching it, and proceeded to tell me it was a bad movie because of the sex scene?
What does a world without sex scenes actually look like? You don’t need to go back too far in time in order to find out. From 1934 to 1968, major motion picture studios in the United States abided by a set of rules and guidelines known as the Hays Code. This code dictated what was considered acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures made for a public audience. Film curator Chelsea O’Brien tells the ACMI that the code “prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic, or realistic violence, sexual persuasions and rape. It had rules around the use of crime, costume, dance, religion, national sentiment, and morality.”
CBS
If you’re a puriteen, you might find yourself nodding in agreement. Who wants to see gratuitous rape scenes or an excessive use of nudity that has nothing to do with the plot? However, the Hays Code manifested in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It forced motion pictures to present couples as sleeping in separate beds, as seen in the hit show I Love Lucy. It restricted the depiction of pregnancy and childbirth in cinema. Mocking or criticizing the Christian faith was strictly prohibited. The word “virgin” was also banned from scripts. In short—the Hays Code led to a snowball effect of unbidden restrictions on artistic expression. It was also implemented after the spicy and provocative landscape of 1920s cinema, which often depicted women in positions of power, autonomy, and domination. For the next 30 years, the Hays Code put a stop to that, bringing women right back into the kitchen and stripping them of the freedom to authentically express their womanhood.
Rolling Stone
While Gen Z is certainly not advocating for an outward ban on sex in cinema, it’s important to remember how fast one thing leads to another and how far filmmakers had to come to even be able to depict sexual themes at all. In the years that followed the downfall of the Hays Code, cinema experienced a sexual reawakening. If you think racy sex scenes quickly became excessive—as seen in shows like Sex and the City, Game of Thrones, or True Blood—it probably has to do with the fact that we, as artists and consumers, had been deprived of sex for so long. Maybe filmmakers had to go buck wild in the ’90s and 2000s just to bring us back to a healthier and more balanced barometer.
New Line Cinema
However, Gen Z did not grow up during a period of sexual repression in cinema; they grew up during an era that was trying to make up for lost time. They may not have experienced this “sexual revolution” firsthand, because for previous generations, seeing Allie and Noah finally hook up in The Notebook (2004) or Jack and Rose have sex in a steamy parked car in The Titanic (1997) reminded many of us that sex could be passionate, wild, amorous, and downright spiritual. Seeing cowboys Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger bang in a tent and fall in love in Brokeback Mountain (2005) showed the heteronormative world that gay sex was real, romantic, and that it mattered.
Paramount Pictures
These too-hot-to-handle sex scenes arrived at a time when porn was becoming widely available on the internet, making it easier than ever for adults—and even minors—to access violent, graphic, and sometimes even grotesque depictions of sex with the click of a button. And while I’m not one to kink shame, it’s usually women and queer folks who suffer from these depictions the most in their personal sex lives. It’s thanks to the more artistic expressions of sex that appear in film and TV that many of us even understand that sex can actually be sweet, respectful, emotional, funny, relatable, and romantic. Without these cinematic sex scenes, many of us would only get our sexual education from pornography. And that would mean most of us might think a normal session of sex involves ejaculating on a woman’s face when really it doesn’t have to.
Paramount Pictures
Point blank: Sex is an integral part of our stories and identities and it will never not be—so why shouldn’t we be able to express ourselves about it? Sex can influence your self-esteem, bringing rise to feelings of power, passion, ambition, and the most exalting form of contentment when done right. It can also be associated with pain, embarrassment, and trauma, making it all the more important to be able to talk about it and heal through honest expression.
If sex was exclusively reserved for porn and shunned in other forms of media, would cinema be able to accurately capture the way sex elevates our consciousness and impacts our overall lives? Or would it take the magic away from sex and turn it into something rote and purely exploitative? Let’s not forget the very real possibility that we backslide into the same outdated and horrific perceptions of sex expression and femininity that used to run rampant when the Hays Code was still in effect.
During a time when it’s never been easier to hire an intimacy coordinator to facilitate the production of sex scenes with ease, consent, and respect—and the fall of Roe v. Wade is rapidly harming our hard-fought understanding of sex and bodily autonomy—I personally don’t want to see the sex scene go. I want to see the sex scene become something better than it has ever been; something more creative, liberating, and authentic than we’ve ever known.
