The thing about sex scenes these days is that they all look like they were written by an over-enthusiastic, yet thoroughly inexperienced, sex education teacher who is blissfully oblivious as to how cringey she is.
i strongly disagree! bridgerton is famous for its intimacy coordinators and most people give those sex scenes rave reviews! I think the point of a *good* intimacy coordinator is coordinating the communication between the actors in terms of storytelling and boundaries so that both can plan a really good sex scene for their characters and let loose without feelings of fear or inhibition (of one’s own boundaries being violated, or accidentally transgressing against one’s colleague). I don’t know anyone who watches bridgerton who thinks all those scenes are sterile. Actually, porn is more sterile than those thoughtfully-coordinated and then freely-acted scenes.
Alex Lekas
14 days ago
This is how the pendulum swings – we go from one extreme to the other. I guess the happy medium is not so happy, after all.
Joe Donovan
14 days ago
Oh for that great film of yesteryear, “Women in Love.”
Roddy Campbell
14 days ago
The internet, together with dating apps and a cultural acceptance of casual sex and niche sexual practices have resulted in sex losing many of its transgressive elements.
Perhaps we’re discovering that these were actually a very important part of its attraction, and that’s why Gen Zs aren’t hopping into bed with each other as much as one might have predicted.
In the 60s and 70s, an intoxicating aura of the forbidden still hung over sex, much of which is gone. Perversely, perhaps we need to make sex less culturally available in order to put the spice back into it.
From what I gather teenagers are burnt out on all the readily-available p0rn.
laurence scaduto
14 days ago
I finally saw “La Piscine” (1965-ish) just recently. My glasses are still all steamy. Once they clear I’ll think about seeing “Challengers”. This essay told me a lot more about the film, which wasn’t really the subject, than any of the reveiws did.
Thomas K.
14 days ago
Well, in Cavill’s defence, I think his disdain for filming sex scenes may have less to do with any broader cultural shifts and more because of his personal experience working with many a female writer/producer/executive who treated him as little more than a slab of beef to drool over. The horror stories I’ve heard about his time working on Netflix’s adaptation of the Witcher made my blood boil and my nose hair curl, especially considering how much sex is supposed to be integral to the plot of the Witcher.
Victor James
14 days ago
Sex, like food, even very fine and expensive food, becomes repulsive very quickly once satiation has been achieved. What does this say about it, fundamentally?
It’s necessary, but, why hyper stimulate the desire? It only causes harm.
Didn’t notice your comment before posting my own, on the same comparison. Haven’t seen Challengers, but I do hope it contains lots of eating scenes with plenty of food. That is, after all, one of “the powerful drives through which human beings continue to exist on earth”. Or maybe that’s just my desire for titillation.
Dan Croitoru
13 days ago
Based on this article, Gaspar Noe’s Love would definitely melt the snowflakes.
M. Jamieson
13 days ago
I don’t really understand the author’s problem with Cavill, who is completely correct – the vast majority of sex scenes in films are useless to the story and are only there to supply titillation. In many cases they also destroy the flow of the narrative.
That doesn’t mean it’s always the case, but more often than not.
I also think, from the actors POV, they create a lot of pressure that is questionable in a workplace setting. Cavill’s experience on the Tudors might give him a better than average insight into that.
The late Roger Moore in highly amusing chat at Bath Theatre Royal described how erotic it was filming those scenes where Bond is in bed with one or other lovely -( ok I know not porny,safe enough for your maiden aunt and the vicar,but representing…..,and workplace definitely won out.
Agreed. I’ll take it one step further and suggest romance is overused in movies to the point of being cliche. I have to wonder if Kat isn’t indulging in some nostalgia for younger days, which we’re all guilty of from time to time, because that’s how movies used to be. I remember back in the 80’s and 90s when nearly every movie from summer blockbusters to Christmas movies had a hot babe love interest and/or a romance shoehorned into the plot whether that made any sense or not, because there had to be one to appeal to women and reach a broader audience. I mean if there’s no romance women won’t watch and our picture won’t make money. There was a lot of pressure on those Hollywood executives to make bank. Snorting cocaine off the backs of thousand dollar a night ‘escorts’ ain’t cheap.
But seriously, that was just how things were done back then. It usually wasn’t full on sex but it was usually gratuitous and rarely necessary. This was the age where the summer blockbuster had just been invented and movie budgets were skyrocketing thanks to the film studios all trying to one up one another, or just Spielberg trying to one up himself. The idea was that romance pulled in the ladies and helped the film make up its ridiculous budget. This is the same era that produced the entire rom-com industry, which is the same principle but reversed. Put the cheap romantic filler in as the whole movie and pull in a decent take from women moviegoers on a shoestring budget. It was so ubiquitous that even I noticed it as a teenager. I think what finally tipped me off was when they somehow managed to wedge a contrived romantic subplot into the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. It was, for multiple reasons, the cringiest, most awkward and inappropriate thing I’ve ever seen in a movie, let alone a kids movie, or at least it was until the Mike Myers version of Cat in the Hat rolled around. Poor Theodore Geisel probably turned a couple somersaults in his grave over those embarrassments.
Personally I think Cavill and Gen Z have the right idea. Depending on one’s position on the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism, cinema is either storytelling or entertainment. Watching other people’s physical intimacy is almost never critical to the story and not the most entertaining thing there is. If I’m spending the ridiculous price for a movie ticket these days, I want to be engaged in a well told story that makes me think, or I want to be mesmerized by the skill of the filmmakers in making something fantastic, spectacular, and impossible to see in real life through the use of movie magic, effects, etc. If all I want is to watch an animal humping something or someone, my dog does that for free. And, if I do want to engage in the erotic, there’s plenty of porn created explicitly for that purpose and quite a bit cheaper. If I’m going to a fancy restaurant, pay through the nose, and wait hours for a table, I want the experience to be worth it, so I’m going to eat something that I can’t get just anywhere, something unique and worth the expense. I’m not going to order a hamburger. If on the other, hand, I’m just hungry and I want a hamburger, I’ll go to McDonald’s.
Andrew Vanbarner
13 days ago
Zendaya’s characters – an aggressive tennis coach, a nearly feral desert warrior – strike one as moreso intimidating than appealing.
Flirting or even meeting the gaze of such a woman would probably be hazardous, not intriguing – would I have a drink thrown in my face, or worse? Do I need to lasso a predatory worm the size of an office tower? – and one would probably double fault at the line, or fail to return a volley.
Sex may be back in cinema with “Challengers.” But need it be so challenging?
JB87
13 days ago
The return of eroticism is long overdue. Once pornography became mainstream it lost any last shred of titillation it may have ever had. The unavailable, unapproachable and slightly forbidden will always fascinate more than that which is rubbed in one’s face.
Benedict Waterson
13 days ago
Slightly confused puff piece. If Challengers doesn’t in fact have any sex scenes, then why spend half the piece criticizing widespread boredom with gratuitous sex scenes demonstrated by Gen Z, and people like Henry Cavill?
Richard Ross
13 days ago
Haven’t seen Challengers, but I do hope it contains lots of eating scenes with plenty of food. That is, after all, one of “the powerful drives through which human beings continue to exist on earth”. Or maybe that’s just my desire for titillation.
Christopher Barclay
13 days ago
Perhaps the problem with sex scenes today is that young actors today don’t know how to express desire because in real life they don’t.
William Shaw
13 days ago
I have to agree with Cavill and Gen Z.
Sex scenes are mostly irrelevant to a good film.
No interest in seeing them.
Referencing the propagation of the species is a total red herring.
andy young
13 days ago
Watched Far From The Madding Crowd for the first time in donkey’s the other day. Troy seducing Bathsheba with his dazzling sword play: now that’s what I call a proper sex scene.
Grumpy Hedgehog
12 days ago
So, you want sex to feel titillating and naughty instead of as banal as eating a sandwich?
Society has spent decades working very hard to demystify and normalise sex. Young people are practically ordered to masturbate for their health. Any and all types of sex are to be accepted, celebrated, and consequently trivialised. Sex has been taken entirely out of any context of relationships or (heaven forbid) reproduction, and turned into a self-care practice. And this is Gen Z’s fault?
Gate, horse, bolted.
Emily DeRosa
12 days ago
This article really makes me want to see Challengers! 😀 It sounds sexy and totally refreshing.
I agree with Rosenfield’s take.
For some, every sex scene that pops up in a movie is like the traumatizing imagery we were violated with via unexpected pop up ads, links, and memes, while exploring the internet unchaperoned as kids as we hunted for pirated TV shows and other innocent adventures. How many times do you have to see men’s power-fantasy images of women getting sexually degraded until you’re allowed to be a little bit grossed out and scared of sex?
Also…Gen Z and young Millennials are also traumatized about sex by our parents. When your parents are the victims of the “free love” movement aka the “get sexually assaulted at wild parties and never speak about it ever again bc if it happened to you it was probably your fault and also stop harshing our buzz” movement…yeah, some of them tended to over-correct a bit and teach us that wild 60’s-70’s style sexy parties are horror zones of trauma…which they were, for a lot of women. 🙁
Everyone likes to trash Gen-Z and Millennials…but no one ever likes to blame the traumatized latchkey-kids who raised us while dealing with the fallout of decades of unspoken sexual trauma or life-destroying teen pregnancies, etc?
God bless Bridgerton, though! That show for me was like a female-gaze oasis in a parched desert of male-gaze brutality, as someone who grew up right at the start of the sexual horror men’s internet porn generation. Literally counting down the days till season 3 premiers!
Matt Sylvestre
12 days ago
Never understood people who do not at least aspire to romantic love and sincere lust. Even though it may not be obtainable at all times in life or even not at all unfortunately. Still who would not prefer it…
jane baker
15 days ago
Oh,B-O-R-I-N-G. Is this some chick journalist whose grown up listening to her Grandma’s stories of how Free and Hot life was in 1970,how Granny,in her Hot Pants +.cheesecloth top could date a different guy every night of the week,have sex with them all,and not only come away(,no pun intended) with no.sexual diseases,but keep her good nice girl of this neighbourhood reputation intact,pining to bring those days back,just like the JSO ones who regret they were born way too late to be at Grosvenor.Square,like their Grandma was,albeit she lives in a mellow ivy covered ancient manor house in rural Dorset now.
What? How do you make a tenuous jump like that from an article about the general disappearance of sex scenes in films?
Also if somebody’s Nan did behave like that in the 70’s good on them, sounds like they spent their youth enjoying themselves which is exactly the point.
Find the old family photo albums,the undigitised ones.
tony morrin
11 days ago
There were at least a couple of decades when you couldn’t watch a blockbuster movie without a “hot” sex scene which was borderline irrelevant and then irrelevantly repeated and likely again repeated. Bridgerton et al sex seems to be for an older audience but it was all for the audience not the art. You can’t impress the young now with a sex scene because they’ve seen it all before and far more at age 8 on their phones so it’s no good for big movies anymore.
Also, “I was the sole audience member at an otherwise-empty afternoon showing” is a painful opener to have to read.
The thing about sex scenes these days is that they all look like they were written by an over-enthusiastic, yet thoroughly inexperienced, sex education teacher who is blissfully oblivious as to how cringey she is.
Quite possibly due to all such scenes now having an “intimacy co-ordinator” which takes any ounce of real passion out of it.
…in our,shake it all about.,.
i strongly disagree! bridgerton is famous for its intimacy coordinators and most people give those sex scenes rave reviews! I think the point of a *good* intimacy coordinator is coordinating the communication between the actors in terms of storytelling and boundaries so that both can plan a really good sex scene for their characters and let loose without feelings of fear or inhibition (of one’s own boundaries being violated, or accidentally transgressing against one’s colleague). I don’t know anyone who watches bridgerton who thinks all those scenes are sterile. Actually, porn is more sterile than those thoughtfully-coordinated and then freely-acted scenes.
This is how the pendulum swings – we go from one extreme to the other. I guess the happy medium is not so happy, after all.
Oh for that great film of yesteryear, “Women in Love.”
The internet, together with dating apps and a cultural acceptance of casual sex and niche sexual practices have resulted in sex losing many of its transgressive elements.
Perhaps we’re discovering that these were actually a very important part of its attraction, and that’s why Gen Zs aren’t hopping into bed with each other as much as one might have predicted.
In the 60s and 70s, an intoxicating aura of the forbidden still hung over sex, much of which is gone. Perversely, perhaps we need to make sex less culturally available in order to put the spice back into it.
From what I gather teenagers are burnt out on all the readily-available p0rn.
I finally saw “La Piscine” (1965-ish) just recently. My glasses are still all steamy. Once they clear I’ll think about seeing “Challengers”. This essay told me a lot more about the film, which wasn’t really the subject, than any of the reveiws did.
Well, in Cavill’s defence, I think his disdain for filming sex scenes may have less to do with any broader cultural shifts and more because of his personal experience working with many a female writer/producer/executive who treated him as little more than a slab of beef to drool over. The horror stories I’ve heard about his time working on Netflix’s adaptation of the Witcher made my blood boil and my nose hair curl, especially considering how much sex is supposed to be integral to the plot of the Witcher.
Sex, like food, even very fine and expensive food, becomes repulsive very quickly once satiation has been achieved. What does this say about it, fundamentally?
It’s necessary, but, why hyper stimulate the desire? It only causes harm.
Didn’t notice your comment before posting my own, on the same comparison. Haven’t seen Challengers, but I do hope it contains lots of eating scenes with plenty of food. That is, after all, one of “the powerful drives through which human beings continue to exist on earth”. Or maybe that’s just my desire for titillation.
Based on this article, Gaspar Noe’s Love would definitely melt the snowflakes.
I don’t really understand the author’s problem with Cavill, who is completely correct – the vast majority of sex scenes in films are useless to the story and are only there to supply titillation. In many cases they also destroy the flow of the narrative.
That doesn’t mean it’s always the case, but more often than not.
I also think, from the actors POV, they create a lot of pressure that is questionable in a workplace setting. Cavill’s experience on the Tudors might give him a better than average insight into that.
if you’re going to call a movie set a workplace setting, you’re in no danger of making anything that even hints at the erotic.
The late Roger Moore in highly amusing chat at Bath Theatre Royal described how erotic it was filming those scenes where Bond is in bed with one or other lovely -( ok I know not porny,safe enough for your maiden aunt and the vicar,but representing…..,and workplace definitely won out.
Agreed. I’ll take it one step further and suggest romance is overused in movies to the point of being cliche. I have to wonder if Kat isn’t indulging in some nostalgia for younger days, which we’re all guilty of from time to time, because that’s how movies used to be. I remember back in the 80’s and 90s when nearly every movie from summer blockbusters to Christmas movies had a hot babe love interest and/or a romance shoehorned into the plot whether that made any sense or not, because there had to be one to appeal to women and reach a broader audience. I mean if there’s no romance women won’t watch and our picture won’t make money. There was a lot of pressure on those Hollywood executives to make bank. Snorting cocaine off the backs of thousand dollar a night ‘escorts’ ain’t cheap.
But seriously, that was just how things were done back then. It usually wasn’t full on sex but it was usually gratuitous and rarely necessary. This was the age where the summer blockbuster had just been invented and movie budgets were skyrocketing thanks to the film studios all trying to one up one another, or just Spielberg trying to one up himself. The idea was that romance pulled in the ladies and helped the film make up its ridiculous budget. This is the same era that produced the entire rom-com industry, which is the same principle but reversed. Put the cheap romantic filler in as the whole movie and pull in a decent take from women moviegoers on a shoestring budget. It was so ubiquitous that even I noticed it as a teenager. I think what finally tipped me off was when they somehow managed to wedge a contrived romantic subplot into the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. It was, for multiple reasons, the cringiest, most awkward and inappropriate thing I’ve ever seen in a movie, let alone a kids movie, or at least it was until the Mike Myers version of Cat in the Hat rolled around. Poor Theodore Geisel probably turned a couple somersaults in his grave over those embarrassments.
Personally I think Cavill and Gen Z have the right idea. Depending on one’s position on the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism, cinema is either storytelling or entertainment. Watching other people’s physical intimacy is almost never critical to the story and not the most entertaining thing there is. If I’m spending the ridiculous price for a movie ticket these days, I want to be engaged in a well told story that makes me think, or I want to be mesmerized by the skill of the filmmakers in making something fantastic, spectacular, and impossible to see in real life through the use of movie magic, effects, etc. If all I want is to watch an animal humping something or someone, my dog does that for free. And, if I do want to engage in the erotic, there’s plenty of porn created explicitly for that purpose and quite a bit cheaper. If I’m going to a fancy restaurant, pay through the nose, and wait hours for a table, I want the experience to be worth it, so I’m going to eat something that I can’t get just anywhere, something unique and worth the expense. I’m not going to order a hamburger. If on the other, hand, I’m just hungry and I want a hamburger, I’ll go to McDonald’s.
Zendaya’s characters – an aggressive tennis coach, a nearly feral desert warrior – strike one as moreso intimidating than appealing.
Flirting or even meeting the gaze of such a woman would probably be hazardous, not intriguing – would I have a drink thrown in my face, or worse? Do I need to lasso a predatory worm the size of an office tower? – and one would probably double fault at the line, or fail to return a volley.
Sex may be back in cinema with “Challengers.” But need it be so challenging?
The return of eroticism is long overdue. Once pornography became mainstream it lost any last shred of titillation it may have ever had. The unavailable, unapproachable and slightly forbidden will always fascinate more than that which is rubbed in one’s face.
Slightly confused puff piece. If Challengers doesn’t in fact have any sex scenes, then why spend half the piece criticizing widespread boredom with gratuitous sex scenes demonstrated by Gen Z, and people like Henry Cavill?
Haven’t seen Challengers, but I do hope it contains lots of eating scenes with plenty of food. That is, after all, one of “the powerful drives through which human beings continue to exist on earth”. Or maybe that’s just my desire for titillation.
Perhaps the problem with sex scenes today is that young actors today don’t know how to express desire because in real life they don’t.
I have to agree with Cavill and Gen Z.
Sex scenes are mostly irrelevant to a good film.
No interest in seeing them.
Referencing the propagation of the species is a total red herring.
Watched Far From The Madding Crowd for the first time in donkey’s the other day. Troy seducing Bathsheba with his dazzling sword play: now that’s what I call a proper sex scene.
So, you want sex to feel titillating and naughty instead of as banal as eating a sandwich?
Society has spent decades working very hard to demystify and normalise sex. Young people are practically ordered to masturbate for their health. Any and all types of sex are to be accepted, celebrated, and consequently trivialised. Sex has been taken entirely out of any context of relationships or (heaven forbid) reproduction, and turned into a self-care practice. And this is Gen Z’s fault?
Gate, horse, bolted.
This article really makes me want to see Challengers! 😀 It sounds sexy and totally refreshing.
I agree with Rosenfield’s take.
For some, every sex scene that pops up in a movie is like the traumatizing imagery we were violated with via unexpected pop up ads, links, and memes, while exploring the internet unchaperoned as kids as we hunted for pirated TV shows and other innocent adventures. How many times do you have to see men’s power-fantasy images of women getting sexually degraded until you’re allowed to be a little bit grossed out and scared of sex?
Also…Gen Z and young Millennials are also traumatized about sex by our parents. When your parents are the victims of the “free love” movement aka the “get sexually assaulted at wild parties and never speak about it ever again bc if it happened to you it was probably your fault and also stop harshing our buzz” movement…yeah, some of them tended to over-correct a bit and teach us that wild 60’s-70’s style sexy parties are horror zones of trauma…which they were, for a lot of women. 🙁
Everyone likes to trash Gen-Z and Millennials…but no one ever likes to blame the traumatized latchkey-kids who raised us while dealing with the fallout of decades of unspoken sexual trauma or life-destroying teen pregnancies, etc?
God bless Bridgerton, though! That show for me was like a female-gaze oasis in a parched desert of male-gaze brutality, as someone who grew up right at the start of the sexual horror men’s internet porn generation. Literally counting down the days till season 3 premiers!
Never understood people who do not at least aspire to romantic love and sincere lust. Even though it may not be obtainable at all times in life or even not at all unfortunately. Still who would not prefer it…
Oh,B-O-R-I-N-G. Is this some chick journalist whose grown up listening to her Grandma’s stories of how Free and Hot life was in 1970,how Granny,in her Hot Pants +.cheesecloth top could date a different guy every night of the week,have sex with them all,and not only come away(,no pun intended) with no.sexual diseases,but keep her good nice girl of this neighbourhood reputation intact,pining to bring those days back,just like the JSO ones who regret they were born way too late to be at Grosvenor.Square,like their Grandma was,albeit she lives in a mellow ivy covered ancient manor house in rural Dorset now.
What? How do you make a tenuous jump like that from an article about the general disappearance of sex scenes in films?
Also if somebody’s Nan did behave like that in the 70’s good on them, sounds like they spent their youth enjoying themselves which is exactly the point.
Exactly!
You had to be there,unless you were there but that 1960s rule still applied.
Everybody’s Nan behaved like that in 1970. I’m not a Nan because I flunked the social acceptability.
You wouldn’t want to see my granny in hotpants Not even in the 70s.
After a few beers I’m game for most things
A libertarian Billy?
When you look as rough as I do you can’t afford to be picky
Find the old family photo albums,the undigitised ones.
There were at least a couple of decades when you couldn’t watch a blockbuster movie without a “hot” sex scene which was borderline irrelevant and then irrelevantly repeated and likely again repeated. Bridgerton et al sex seems to be for an older audience but it was all for the audience not the art. You can’t impress the young now with a sex scene because they’ve seen it all before and far more at age 8 on their phones so it’s no good for big movies anymore.
Also, “I was the sole audience member at an otherwise-empty afternoon showing” is a painful opener to have to read.