Twitter may be slowly decaying, but it still finds a way to generate a minor sex panic. The latest micro-iteration blazing through one corner of the pop culture sphere: Penn Badgley, best known for playing Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl and as the star of Netflix’s You, said that he no longer wished to act in sex scenes, citing fidelity to his wife. According to his podcast, Badgley asked You showrunner Sera Gamble for a reduction in intimate scenes in the show’s fourth season, which premiered last week; his character, the disarmingly bookish serial killer/love addict Joe Goldberg, still has sex in the new season but less so than in prior ones, and fully clothed.
Specific contractual clauses regarding intimacy on camera are not new – Julia Roberts is one of many actors who’ve said they’ll never do on-screen nudity, for example. And Badgley is certainly entitled to his own boundaries. (A new Variety story connects his reluctance to film intimate scenes to his feelings of discomfort as a child actor.) But a segment of the Twittersphere’s extension of his personal logic into an argument against sex on-screen in general, and the conflation the professional performance of intimacy with individual fidelity, feels disturbingly puritanical. Some have expressed distaste at any on-screen nudity, or asserted that most sex scenes are gratuitous, unnecessary and rife with issues of consent.
(Badgley, to be clear, only suggests an anti-sex scene argument beyond his own work: “That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me – and that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary – has always been something that I actually don’t want to play with at all,” he told Variety. But his claim to fidelity doesn’t feel too far removed spiritually from Christian actor Kirk Cameron insisting that he’ll only ever kiss his wife.)
This line of thinking is, to be clear, absurd, and admittedly much of the dreaded “sex scene discourse” is classic Twitter behavior, ie morality circle-jerking or over-dunking on easily dunkable takes. But it is concerning insomuch as it reaffirms Hollywood’s pivot away from sex on-screen and the sexlessness of culture in general – the gamified, optimization-driven, personal brand-laden, uncanny valley landscape of life online. The final CGI-constructed kiss at the end of the new Netflix romcom You People, Lindsay Lohan’s body double for the kiss in her comeback vehicle Falling for Christmas, the scolding attitude to eroticism on Twitter – it all feels apiece with the depressing decline of the Hollywood sex scene (and, as some have argued, the decline of young Americans having actual sex).
It feels a bit odd to defend the utility of the sex scene, because its importance to cinema (and my personal interest in movies and TV) seems so obvious – think the box office dominance of Fatal Attraction, the groundbreaking tent scene in Brokeback Mountain, even the car tryst in Titanic. But Hollywood has managed to get by with fewer and fewer of them: according to a 2019 report in Playboy by the Black List’s Kate Hagen using IMDb data, sex in cinema in the 2010s was at its lowest point (1.21%) since the 1960s, half a point (1.79% ) lower than in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller (and adult mid-budget films). (This is significant in relative terms, as four times as many movies were released in the 2010s as the 1990s.) That’s despite demonstrated interest for sex and pleasure on the big screen – see: the surprise success of the Magic Mike franchise, one of the very few to cater specifically to female desire, from 2012 through to this month’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance, or the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey series.
There are economic as well as cultural reasons for this. With the rise of streaming services, studios have gravitated toward films with maximum audience potential, including children and international markets – the Middle East, China – with strict morality codes, especially around depictions of gay sex. (Hence completely desexed Marvel movies.) The death of the sex scene owes in large part to the decline of the adult mid-budget drama; it’s not just the absence of sex on the big screen, but “the absence of the general environment in which the sex scene would be warranted”, as New Yorker writer Doreen St Felix put it in a 2022 critical roundtable on the state of the sex scene. The widespread access to porn online, according the magazine’s Vinson Cunningham, raised the bar for a sex scene from titillation to plot. It wasn’t enough to make people horny; a sex scene had to move the story forward or serve a stylistic purpose.
Narrative momentum can in itself be a turn-on. As a teenager growing up online, I was significantly less interested in porn, which felt obviously fake, than in Youtube compilations and cuts of various sex scenes, which had the trappings of real characters, and thus real life. The scenes felt fascinating, shocking, spellbinding, adult. Maybe not actually realistic, but vibrant and vital, validation of my own capacity for eroticism. Sex is an essential part of humanity, sex scenes an essential reflection of the human experience.
The anti-sex scene scolds seem to have forgotten that, and instead conflated many legitimate concerns about filming intimacy with the act itself – the idea that the possibility of violated consent invalidates the entire enterprise. Of course sex scenes can be exploitative and violating, such as director Bernardo Bertolucci’s refusal to prepare Maria Schneider for the “butter rape” scene while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1972. Just last month, the stars of 1968’s Romeo and Juliet sued Paramount for sexual exploitation, alleging they were manipulated into nude shots as teenagers. Several Euphoria cast members have discussed working with writer and creator Sam Levinson to lessen their nudity on-screen, which can be screengrabbed and memed across the internet without context and out of one’s control.
It’s interesting to see a backlash to sex scenes just as Hollywood has reckoned with how to do them better and more ethically with the rise of intimacy coordinators along the #MeToo movement. An intimacy specialist worked on the Hulu show Normal People, for instance, to specifically make the sex, including a nine-minute scene which seamlessly simulates the entire act from start to finish, feel naturalistic, entrancing, good. Television generally has been better territory for the sex scene, more accurately and vibrantly reflecting desire and eroticism than most big-budget films. Sex in shows such as Euphoria, Bridgerton, Pose, Industry, Normal People, Conversations with Friends, Hulu’s erotic thriller-adjacent Tell Me Lies and, in a watershed way, Girls, is used for fun, for character development, for shock, for representation, for expressions of gender dynamics and power.
There are of course still films that play with sex and narrative in provocative ways – for self-actualization and revelation (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), to skewer the power dynamics in a relationship (recent Sundance breakout Fair Play), or to impart the horror of an actually exploitative relationship (the upcoming Palm Trees and Power Lines). But most of these films exist within the arthouse or are dumped on streaming services, not at the multiplex. Even Magic Mike’s Last Dance, while still a desire-forward romp, is relatively tame compared to prior installments.
Perhaps the most frustrating element of this particular anti-sex scene argument is its fixation on a justification for sex on-screen, as if people wanting to have sex or wanting to be turned on is not character-driven or important enough. To deny the power of sex on-screen is to deny one of the core reasons to watch anything in the first place: desire, a basic human impulse and a gift. Long live the sex scene.
