(Disclaimer: Although the title refers to 'cinema' only, I am talking about 'on screen' more generally, meaning both cinema and TV.)
Urgh, what a tired old question. It’s one that’s come up on the podcast a couple of times now. This week Tris and I discussed The Idol, which featured numerous intense, verging on violent scenes of sex, and we agreed that this felt gratuitous and uncomfortable. I made the point that in most cases a sex scene will add nothing to a story, hence is not necessary and should be omitted. Having thought more deeply about it now, I want to try to (briefly) give my full opinion on sex scenes, and maybe offer an answer to this question as old as cinema itself.
Firstly, I am not against sex in cinema. Art imitates life (or vice versa) and sex is part of life, therefore there is a place for it in cinema. Simple. Since cinema’s conception, sex on the screen has been a controversial issue, and has been targeted with criticism from religious groups and traditionalists. Cinema’s first kiss was produced by Thomas Edison (yep, same one) in 1896, and was met with shock from a Victorian audience. From then on, writers have been pushing the boundaries, trying to get society to loosen up and accept whatever new explicit images their story includes. No doubt, we’ve come a long way. It’s taken us over two hundred years to get from the first on screen kiss to… well, whatever The Idol was supposed to be. To criticise sex in cinema now is to risk aligning oneself with the perspectives of the same religious ideologies that fought against this progression back in the day. It is to risk being called conservative, prudish, or label oneself as unenlightened and anti-progressive.
However, progressive is the last word I would use to describe The Idol. It propagates dangerous messages about mental illness and pain and torture being the best source of artistic self-expression. I’m sure Tesfaye, Depp and Levinson would say that this is simply an accurate depiction of the industry, and that may be so, but The Idol does nothing to challenge these ideas. The convoluted ending in fact seem to glorify them.
Back in 2021, Witney Seibold, writing for SlashFilm, penned a strong defence for sex scenes in modern cinema. She lists the reasons that intimate scenes can be important to both the story and the audience, and argues that the omission of sex scenes is a form of censorship:
It [] feeds into a widespread fear of sex and sexuality that has been deeply infecting an increasingly conservative discourse at large. Removing sex from movies is, in a vital way, removing it from everyday conversation.
She also goes on to talk about how this very censorship is potentially damaging to LGBTQ people, and that people calling to remove sex scenes from movies may actually be speaking from a position of disguised homophobia.
“With all sexless figures, everyone can be imagined as straight, and there's suddenly no queer representation whatsoever. Hiding sex from movies is an aggressive act that forces queer people back into the celluloid closet.”
-Witney Seibold, /Film.
There is certainly a lot of truth in what Seibold is pointing out. Representation is important, essential even, in today’s political volatile twitter world, and I agree with the notion that cinema and TV is the one of the best platforms with which to represent, and to encourage healthy conversations and attitudes around sex.
But my concern is that the TV shows and movies that include sexually explicit scenes for the purposes of healthy conversation and representation are, by a long way, in the minority. Are many sex scenes making a progressive point anymore? As Tristan says, we still see far more female than male nudity on screen, which indicates a straight male gaze that still dominates cinema. Like The Idol, most ‘intimate’ scenes in modern movies pander to a male audience, are overly indulgent and contain no message at all. It seems to me that sex scenes don’t contribute to a more liberal and healthier societal view of sex, but instead just make the movie in question another one you can’t watch with your nan. You see, you can have representation, you can do sexual tension and release, and you can do talking about sex in a positive way, all without putting the act on screen. Sometimes the implication is enough.
This leads me to the ‘unnecessary argument’, one that Seibold calls ‘well-worn’. Well, Seibold, it may be well-worn but that’s because it continues to be relevant. I believe that the primary purpose of drama (and you can extend this to fiction if you like) is to entertain. Social commentary, cautionary messages, reflection, representation, empowerment, and self-expression are all incredibly important, but there is not much power in a story if it fails to entertain. I’m not going to start talking about cave men sitting around fires here, you get my point. When you’re telling a story, like a good joke, everything should be geared towards the punchline. You throw out what’s unnecessary. A trimmed down, sharp story is one that is consistently entertaining, and I can’t think of many stories that an explicit sex scene is essential to- and if it’s not completely essential, what’s it there for? I imagine that Seibold might argue that the scene itself is there to entertain, but doing so would in a way admit that it’s not relevant to the story. If the scene is there because people find sex entertaining, well, that separates the scene from its context, and here Seibold would be contradicting her own slamming of the recontextualization of sex scenes as porn.
If the explicit showcasing of sex on screen isn’t relevant to the context of the story it’s taking place in, then it could have been achieved through insinuation alone. That way, the difficulty of filming the scene is avoided, and the male gaze isn’t fed more over sensationalism.
All this said, I want to reiterate that I am not against sex on the screen. I just think it should be relevant to fully make it’s point. Sex Education does it perfectly. There are loads of sex scenes in Sex Education- how could there not be? Yet every single one is entirely relevant to the story and speaks to an overall narrative about a group of young people (and adults) navigating the complicated world of sex and relationships. The explicit scenes in Sex Education are relevant to the story: it’s a show about sex, but more than that, it’s a show about learning, and in that way can be the perfect tool for promoting positive conversations, sexual health and understanding.
Sex scenes in cinema are necessary, if the motivation is positive reflection and the scene is relevant to the story it’s being used to tell. Ultimately, there’s a line. I don’t know where it is, (I only said I’d try) but I know The Idol crossed it. That shit was weird.
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