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Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001)
If you haven’t been on twitter the past couple of weeks, you have likely missed a very disheartening round of the anti-sex scene discourse. And bless you.
I knew I had to write about this when two separate people within 48 hours of each other turned to me and asked if it’s true that the kids are “canceling sex.”
While yes, this anti-sex-scene ethos can probably be traced back to Gen Z, I don’t think they’re entirely to blame. I have a lot to say about how this strain of Gen Z discourse certainly has its roots in the ambient contrarianism of the Gen Xers who raised them, but I didn’t come here today to dig the trenches in the generation wars any deeper. I came here to defend gratuitous sex scenes.
From what I can tell, this latest round was sparked by an interview with actor Penn Badgely regarding the absence of sex scenes in the latest season of You. You may also know him as Dan Humphries from the OG Gossip Girl. His recent interview with Variety went viral because of its splashy headline: “Penn Badgley Goes Deeper on Swearing Off Racy ‘You’ Sex Scenes: ‘That Aspect of Hollywood Has Been Very Disturbing’.”
The part that really set people off is excerpted below:
Badgley wishes he didn’t have to do any sex scenes. “It’s important to me in my real life to not have them.”
When asked to clarify what he means, Badgley responds: “My fidelity in my relationship. It’s important to me. And actually, it was one of the reasons that I initially wanted to turn the role down. I didn’t tell anybody that. But that is why.”
The part Twitter didn’t pick up on was several paragraphs down. He clarifies that most of his aversion to sex scenes comes from the way they were handled in his early career as a heartthrob on Gossip Girl. Which is understandable! Anyone with a pulse can tell you workplaces were not safe in the early 2000’s, but a TV set full of teenagers must have been a particularly gruesome circle of the Y2K inferno.
But leaving aside this one actor’s consent, and more power to him for being clear about what he will and won’t do now that he has the power to, I want to turn our attention to this attitude that sex scenes are universally bad and wrong. I don’t think this is a hot take you’re going to hear from most normal people in your life, but for the chronically-online, anti-sex scene sentiment is spreading like wildfire. And its implications radiate beyond people on Twitter who think kissing is yucky.
I have a past life working in TV development and production. My (short-lived) Hollywood career spanned the years of 2015 to 2020. #MeToo went viral in 2017, and in February of 2020 I watched the Weinstein trial unfold from my desk in a production office. I didn’t work on prestigious shows, I didn’t travel in fancy circles, but on the many, many phone calls I listened to among high-level people, there was a massive collective eye roll at the cultural conversation around consent. And while these people didn’t have a lot of cache, they had power. The executive I worked for in 2016, for example, once called me into his office to help him decide whether to wear his “day Rolex” or his “night Rolex” on a date. Did I mention I didn’t get a Christmas bonus that year?
As #MeToo gained traction and the industry started to address the problems inherent to shooting sex scenes, the position of the “intimacy coordinator” began taking shape. Intimacy coordinators are specialists in making intimate scenes on set safer, whether that be advocating for a “closed set” so only essential crew members are present when actors are unclothed, or helping actors communicate preferences and consent around the specific choreography of the scene itself. And when this role started to gain traction as a necessity, many of the day/night Rolex guys again rolled their eyes. Much fuss was made about there being no space in production budgets for this “superfluous” position (Again — day AND night Rolexes). Of course, many production companies and networks have adapted since then, but I’m sure many others would welcome the convenience of the cultural attitude that sex scenes are simply too hard to “get right,” so we shouldn’t do them at all.
This resonates deeply for me in my capacity as a kink writer and general sub-about-town. I hear often from people who have realized they’re kinky, but balk at actually putting their desires into practice for fear of never getting it right (for support on this, see the opening episode of season two of my podcast by searching “Ask A Sub” wherever you get your podcasts or going here). But at the end of the day, these individuals are allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And so are the prudes on Twitter.
Exploring sexual themes IRL brings us face to face with our humanity. And, beyond the cost of birth control, does so without a direct interface with capitalism. It is a means of achieving pleasure that costs nothing. And seeing sexual depictions demonized, or forced to justify their existence, feels like capitalism winning the day. Because personally, I don’t want a day/night Rolex guy’s intransigence on adding an intimacy coordinator to a bloated TV or film production budget to rob people of access to sexual self discovery in art. Do you?
As long as there has been art there has been art about sex. Some of this art has had “higher purpose and meaning” as defined in the eye of the beholder, but I’m personally exhausted by the conversation about whether sex scenes must have “merit” to be included in works of art. Are all sexual depictions good? Of course not. There’s a lot of dumb, reductive, stereotype-promoting crap out there. But if we treat every indie film and HBO show like they’re the second coming of the Blurred Lines video, we’ll miss out on those (increasingly rare) sexual depictions that help people feel seen and find their way.
So in defense of the sex scene, below I’d like to share some of my formative sex scenes. Did they “further the plot” of whatever show they were on? WHO CARES!! They furthered the plot of my awakening, allowed me to more closely identify what I wanted, and then run in that direction to the service of my pleasure and happiness. And that’s plot enough.
So now, the sex scenes that created the pervert that stands before you…
I’ve (somewhat embarrassingly) mentioned this on several podcasts now, but in the pilot of The Tudors (2007) there is a brief scene where Henry Cavill’s character and Jonathan Rhys Meyers discuss matters of state while Henry Cavill is casually doing it doggy style with some anonymous woman. And the excitement I felt at the thought of being that anonymous woman could have powered a city’s electrical grid for at least the twenty minutes I spent I Tivo-ing my way back to that single interaction again and again. Not because she was doing it with Henry Cavill, although he is of course a nice-looking man, but because she was being ignored. Can’t tell you exactly what it is about that that really gets me, but it does. Side note, do you think the French Bulldog on TikTok who is Henry Cavill’s biggest fan has seen this scene? Don’t answer that.
And then, for a totally different entry into the “people walking in on people” genre, Atonement (2007). If you were a certain age when that movie came out, the green dress will be forever imprinted in your mind.
Next up, Basic Instinct (1992). Which is a tricky one because LGBT+ activists picketed shooting to express their concerns about the film’s depiction of an evil bisexual. I don’t think this film necessarily did anything positive for bisexual representation in the media, but as for accepting the edgy bisexual representation in my own soul… Sharon Stone deserves a gift basket.
Speaking of messed-up bi representation and a whole host of other issues — Black Swan (2010). Say what you will about the Tumblr-bait film itself, it met me at an important moment and led me to come out to my group of friends as we exited the theater.
And then, because it’s not all dark and problematic representations, there’s Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001). There’s color, there’s laughter, there’s sex in the backseat of a car. What more could you ask for?
As for scenes that don’t strictly “further the plot,” two entries from Girls. These scenes could have been skipped, sure, but their presence adds depth and immediacy of emotion that I think could be found no other way. First up, Girls Season 5 Episode 2 (2016). Jessa and Adam, after a low simmer of sexual tension for several seasons, have finally kissed at Marnie’s wedding, and their feelings are now out in the open.
Adam is ruthlessly pursuing Jessa, who keeps putting him off because he formerly dated her best friend Hannah. In this episode, they spend a cute, romantic day together, and he walks her home. At the door, he asks to come up, and she tells him their relationship would never work. He then asks, “can we be together but not touch each other?” She folds her arms over her chest and replies sharply: “yeah that’s the whole point. We are not going to touch each other.” Cut to — Jessa and Adam upstairs in her apartment masturbating side by side on the couch. Technically — they are not touching each other. There’s nothing I love quite so much as extremely literal sex predicaments — and I think a lot of kinksters are with me on this.
Second, Girls Season 5 Episode 5: Listen, the early Jessa and Adam era was very important for me at the time (and now during my annual rewatch of this entire show). The scene in question opens on Jessa and Adam having sex. She turns to him and says, “Are you gonna come? Ok, after you come, pretend like you meant to pull out, and then you’re going to freak out like you’ve gotten me pregnant.” After confirming she has a contraceptive sponge in, he complies, and my twenty-something brain at the time said “YOU CAN DO THAT?!?”
And finally, a b-side in the sex scene pantheon, but for me the most important, the brief scene from Weeds, Season 4 Episode 7 (2008), that incepted my spanking fetish. Mary Louise Parker’s character, the suburban mom turned drug dealer Nancy Botwin, has developed a bit of a fixation on Esteban Reyes, drug kingpin and the mayor of Tijuana. She follows him to a political event against the advice of the lower level henchmen who are supposed to keep her and Esteban separate, and demands an audience in the back of his limo. She complains to him that she’s being punished by one of his underlings, and is giving him some bratty guff about how if she’s going to be punished, it should be by him. He then flips her over his knee and spanks her, then taps on the window to get his henchman to drag her away. As she’s pulled offscreen by the henchman’s rough hand, she peeks through the limo door, and gives a flustered little laugh, saying “Thank you for your time, Mister Mayor.” Once home, she admires the marks on her ass in the mirror. Later, once they’re dating for real, he takes her out to a nice meal, then makes her watch as he feeds a goat to his pet lion. They then have passionate sex with a lot of scratching and drawn blood. Thank you, Genji Kohan.
Do you have a favorite sex scene to share? Add it to the comments section below! No shame! Just sex scenes!
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Thank you for the lovely article. I think a lot of film and TVs violence is gratuitously portrait and rarely actually moves the plot beyond the violent outcome. Sex scenes that are well shot, consensual and overseen by a intimacy coordinator are way more potent ways to tell us about the characters.
Coming across this article a little after the fact but I just wanted to say when I read "Weeds + spanking" I knew EXACTLY what scene you were talking about even. Nancy Botwin, you will always be famous.