On Sex, Cinema and the Female Gaze

How were you first seduced by cinema?

My relationship with film began long before I could name the mesmeric desire I felt every time I turned myself over to 100 minutes of flickering passion on the screen. It wasn’t until adolescence, when I started to actively seek out any movie on cable with a STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT warning, that my nascent affection for film blossomed into an eternal obsession. And once I was finally left alone to watch what I wanted, I became a cinematic-sex sleuth.

I sought movies such as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Bound, Wild at Heart, The Last Seduction and Crash (David Cronenberg’s version, of course) solely for the sex. I became entranced not only with thrillingly new perspectives on romance, relationships and intimacy but with the complex emotional narratives around them. I became addicted to the nervous fluttering in my belly when the camera pushed in on two faces I loved, their bodies clutched in electrified anticipation before a climactic fuck. I perfected the art of searching TV Guide listings by actor to find the finest filth the Encore Romance channel could offer on a Saturday afternoon. (Remember Damage with Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche?) I spent hours of trigonometry class daydreaming about whichever actor beguiled me at the moment. That complete list is unfit to print in any medium, but I will admit I was hot for Alan Ruck long before Succession.

Even now, nothing thrills me more than a great sex scene. The problem is, the steamiest sex I’ve seen in years, outside of porn, occurred in the sixth episode of HBO’s Euphoria—not in a theater. With its tender, trembling Halloween tryst between the characters played by Barbie Ferreira and Austin Abrams, Euphoria gave me something I’d never seen before, even as a slut for cinematic smut: a fat woman receiving oral pleasure to the point of climax without it being a punch line or a punishment for her or her paramour. While I was thrilled to be consumed by a scene starring someone who looks like me, it reminded me how long it had been since I’d seen a film that made me feel even remotely the same way.

A spectacular sex scene appeals to our lusting lizard brains, but everything that unfolds around the fucking is what invites audience members to invest and empathize with the characters: the tight clasp of Linda Hamilton’s and Michael Biehn’s hands during their pivotal coupling in The Terminator, or the sobering POV shots as Jennifer Jason Leigh bids adieu to her virginity in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Through sex, we’re able to gaze at our most beloved stars during moments of exceptional vulnerability, allowing deeper emotional connections—ones that can validate our own desires.

My love for on-screen erotica made me open to a variety of sexual perspectives long before I could experience them in reality. Even so, it took me three decades to feel represented sexually in film. If the most ubiquitous form of storytelling doesn’t feature people to whom we can relate in their enjoyment of carnal satisfaction, how could we ever feel worthy of such a thing in real life? How could we believe we should ask for it?

I’ve been troubled by the state of sex in movies for the past few years. My fears are confirmed by data from IMDb: Only 1.21 percent of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 contain depictions of sex. That percentage is the lowest since the 1960s. Sex in cinema peaked in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller, with 1.79 percent of all films featuring sex scenes. That half-point decline is massive in relative terms, considering almost four times as many films have been released in the 2010s as in the 1990s.

Studio releases simply aren’t keeping up with the conversations about sex, gender and relationships that have been amplified by Generation Z’s progressive attitudes and a #MeToo-driven cultural reckoning. Mainstream film surely isn’t representative of the kinds of love and sex I experience in my life as a bisexual woman. We’ve only begun to flirt with respectful depictions of queer sex, kink and sex work on-screen, but those stories often live and die in the art houses. Countless nuanced perspectives remain unexplored by studios.

As I investigated the state of sex in cinema, I became frustrated with the attempts to assign blame for the slump. Scapegoats include the rise of streaming tube sites and smartphone dependence. But like the complexities of human attraction, the factors that led to the decline of sex in movies are intertwined with our own media history—both as individual viewers and as a collective audience that isn’t getting laid as often as we did 20 years ago.

According to a November 2017 article in Archives of Sexual Behavior, American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s than adults in the late 1990s. A 2016 LinkedIn study determined that entertainment is the top industry for young workers, which suggests we may be seeing less sex at the movies because Hollywood is full of undersexed millennials. (And why not blame another cultural catastrophe on millennials?) But that theory falls apart when you consider that the six major studios are run by baby boomers and Gen-Xers—who reportedly have more sex than the younger cohort. If industry gatekeepers are so sexually active, shouldn’t there be more sex on release slates?

Consider the most successful erotic thriller ever made: Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, which grossed more than $155 million domestically and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture, in 1987. With its chaotic sex, Oscar-nominated performance from Glenn Close (“I won’t be ignored, Dan” still haunts me) and controversial climax, Fatal Attraction gained the kind of cultural ubiquity now reserved for franchises and IP-driven tentpoles, not middle-budget adult dramas.

To further contextualize Fatal Attraction’s success, its adjusted domestic box office is nearly $360 million. If released in 2019, it would be the year’s sixth-highest-grossing domestic release, behind four Disney films and one Sony/Marvel/Disney crossover. There’s simply no way a movie like Fatal Attraction, with its languorous erotic intrigue and troubling morality, could compete with a Marvel giant in our current landscape, nor gain the same awards heat.

Beyond stories with explicit eroticism, five of the 100 all-time highest domestic grossers—Avatar, Titanic, Deadpool, Forrest Gump, Skyfall and Twilight: Breaking Dawn–Part 2—feature depictions of sex. At five percent, this list over-indexes when compared with the percentage of sex scenes in all movies, but with alien sex, superhero sex and vampire sex, these movies are not representative of anyone’s sexual experiences (I imagine). What’s more, not a single female director is responsible for these titles.

The exceptions to the major studios’ sex strike are the adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James’s problematic fantasy about the luxury of heteronormative submission. The first Fifty Shades film—and the only one lensed by a woman, Sam Taylor-Johnson—grossed more than 10 times its $40 million budget. In total, all three films in the franchise made more than $1.3 billion worldwide, without showing a single penis.

Given the paucity of narratives about sexual fantasies centered on female desire, I can appreciate how the series pushed the envelope. But can the chemistry between Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan begin to compare with the incendiary attraction between Close and Michael Douglas? Pushing even further, the last notable theatrical release to receive an NC-17 rating was 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Color. Scenes of graphic un-simulated sex, such as those in Anatomy of Hell and Nymphomaniac, remain the territory of auteurs and international filmmakers who can leverage critical clout to get into festivals. Such releases sometimes make it to streaming platforms (for example, Gaspar Noé’s Love, now on Netflix), but they aren’t the cinephilic fodder they were just a decade ago.

As streaming platforms continue to dominate, new possibilities for adult content are emerging. Amazon’s Jennifer Salke has partnered with Nicole Kidman to create a new house brand of “sexy date night” movies for Prime members. We have to consider that one of most plausible explanations for the cinematic-sex decline is the increase in sex on television. Should you ask your friends about their favorite recent depictions of sex, I imagine most will reference the small screen. Sex has made shows such as Vida, Outlander, Euphoria and Pose must-see television. The discourse around TV’s steamiest moments—from bold thirst tweets to erotic GIFs—feels more pervasive than any cultural conversation about sex in film.

If we’re living in the era of peak TV, shouldn’t that suggest peak TV sex? Despite the earlier examples, not quite. Since 2000, sex scenes on television have tripled—to 0.06 percent. From 2010 to 2019, the percentage of movies with sex scenes was 20 times that of TV shows, at a time when television production outpaced film production by a ratio of about 13 to one. If we look back to the 1990s, the so-called peak decade for movie sex, data show that sex in film outpaced sex on TV by a staggering rate of about 60 to one.

While there may be more sex on TV today compared with 2000, the halcyon days of XXX late-night programming have come to an end. In 2018, HBO pulled Cathouse, Real Sex and other adult programming from its broadcast and streaming services. This summer, the world lost erotic pioneer Patricia Louisianna Knop, who, along with her life and business partner, Zalman King, produced a carousel of pay-cable carnality throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Together they created the lushest sexual-fantasy films to hit the mainstream, including 9 Weeks, Two Moon Junction and Wild Orchid, plus Red Shoe Diaries, which premiered on Showtime in 1992.

Red Shoe Diaries focused on the complexities of desire in a patriarchal, post-AIDS world. Bounty hunters, architects and doctors narrated their own stories of “love, passion, and betrayal” in letters sent to Red Shoes (played by David Duchovny), a wounded lothario who gets his kicks from their lurid tales. To kids of the 1990s, Red Shoe Diaries evokes sexy, synthwave role-play scenarios sponsored by Spencer’s Gifts. But I would argue it had more progressive, thoughtful explorations of passion in its first season than in any premium-cable series since. It wasn’t surprising, then, when I learned the show was produced in part by women, as was Real Sex. In the quarter-century since Knop and King’s series debuted, we haven’t come far in our depictions of non-heterosexual, non-vanilla sex in popular entertainment—or, more specifically, popular entertainment that isn’t pornography.

I will admit cinematic sex satisfied my voyeurism only until I discovered the work of adult maven Joanna Angel, a former sex-advice columnist for Spin. Angel’s brand of alt-porn features goth babes of all sizes along with approachable hunks such as Tommy Pistol. Through her Burning Angel banner, I realized that porn could be much more than vapid nymphets and hung studs, especially with a woman in the director’s chair. Porn has always occupied a different part of my imagination than movie sex; the adult industry has its own celebrities, awards circuit and cinematic language that is both reflective of and totally unlike Hollywood. Equating the two industries undermines the talented performers in both worlds.

Hollywood’s influence, and its current failure to present diverse perspectives on pleasure, is apparent on Adult Time, a paid subscription streaming service that bills itself as the Netflix of porn. Featuring more than 100 curated channels and 50,000 videos, Adult Time is the brainchild of Bree Mills, a queer female pornographer whose work includes everything from a lesbian-themed Miami Vice homage to a trans reimagining of Thelma & Louise to a kinky parody of the musical Annie.

Signing up for a trial of Adult Time this spring was the most revelatory experience I’ve had with porn since discovering Burning Angel. There, I watched real bodies—bodies with acne, cellulite and stretch marks; bodies historically valued as less than desirable in mainstream storytelling of all kinds; bodies denied on-screen pleasure in Hollywood as well as adult films—experiencing real bliss. Scouring Adult Time’s library, which includes thousands of scenes from porn’s golden age, it’s apparent there are more inclusive, feminine gazes in adult content than ever before. You just have to be willing to look beyond Pornhub.

More than half the nominees for best director at the 2019 XBIZ Awards were women, which represents far more gender diversity than any directing category during major awards season. Since the 1990s peak of cinematic sex, porn made for, by and about women (and trans, nonbinary and other gender-nonconforming folks) has unquestionably improved and diversified. This was long overdue, and I wouldn’t trade porn’s progress for better Hollywood-produced erotica, but mainstream filmmakers could learn how to frame, block and light cinematic sex scenes from Adult Time.

Depending on whom you ask, valuations of the global adult industry range from $5 billion to $97 billion. Pornhub reported 33.5 billion global visits in 2018; if we compare this to 2018’s global box office returns of $41.7 billion (assuming the average movie ticket costs $10), we can estimate that about 4 billion movie tickets were sold in the same time frame. Adult industry aggregator MindGeek (which owns Pornhub, Redtube and YouPorn, among other sites) is currently mining millions of data points from users to craft new content by algorithm, just as Netflix did with Maniac and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Whether this optimized adult content resonates with viewers is yet to be seen, but for me, returning to the Wild West of free pornography after my Adult Time trial felt like eating Vienna sausage after two weeks of bingeing Wagyu beef.

Innovations in the adult industry have also created new technological concerns for any performer who appears nude or simulates sex. A Pandora’s box of deepfake videos and other nascent forms of digital manipulation popped open around 2017 and immediately became popular as a way to reimagine adult content. On Pornhub, a search for “deepfakes” yields no results, but on Redtube and YouPorn, a dozen videos, each buried deep within the uncanny valley, surface. They became harder to watch with each frame, but one clip in particular, starring a superheroine, shook me to my core. If I didn’t know better, it would be difficult to believe it was fake.

For now, the celebrity deepfake market seems focused on exploiting women. When I searched through one such site, not a single video starred a male actor. Female nudity in film has plummeted since its peak of appearing in about six percent of all films in the 1990s to less than three percent of all films in the past 20 years. This still eclipses male nudity, rarely full-frontal, which appears in only 1.67 percent of all films since 1950. The imbalance of gendered nude scenes was promoted in DeepNude, an app launched last summer that virtually undressed women using neural network technology from online nude photos. While DeepNude was taken down within a day, and measures such as California’s proposed SB 564 (backed by the Screen Actors Guild) could prohibit the creation and sharing of digitally rendered sex scenes without the performers’ consent, no single federal law protects against deepfake pornography.

The war over how our most intimate moments are digitally disseminated will be waged in our lifetime, with private citizens soon to face the same concerns as celebrities when it comes to how they’re represented online. In the meantime, Hollywood has responded to performers’ concerns about filming sex scenes with the creation of a new crew position: the intimacy coordinator. Just as stunt coordinators ensure that a balletic action sequence won’t injure actors, an intimacy coordinator ensures that actors feel safe and comfortable while filming intimate scenes.

Alicia Rodis, co-founder of Intimacy Directors International, is currently working with SAG-AFTRA to create guidelines for shooting sex scenes while overseeing the sets of shows like The Deuce. Euphoria’s intimacy coordinator, Amanda Blumenthal, no doubt had a hand in creating the scene between Ferreira and Abrams that had me scouring Tumblr like it was 2007. With the of-age actors playing high school juniors, the scene could have read as exploitative or gratuitous. Instead—thanks to Blumenthal’s presence, I imagine—their coupling felt raw and relatable. It thrilled me on a visceral level.

When I was the age of Ferreira’s character on Euphoria, I was terrified someone would find out about my film-sex fascination. I didn’t want to be the stereotypical hypersexual fat woman, who’d been revealed to me in films like Road Trip as the only option for my sexuality. As I’ve grown more comfortable with my sexuality (and seen it reflected in Shrill, My Mad Fat Diary and other media), I feel grateful for my early erotic adventures across the cinematic canon. Through all sorts of viewing I learned to appreciate every subtle gesture of affection between two actors pretending to be in love, and I came to crave the tactile, electrifying intimacy captured by films such as The Piano and Morvern Callar.

The feelings-first fervor from my adolescence never fully dissipated. I still seek sex scenes that challenge what I think I want from romance, especially as my own sexual spectrum continues to expand. Hollywood may be failing when it comes to depicting the many facets of contemporary sexuality, but we have also moved beyond the regressive sexual politics of Manhattan and Disclosure (think Tangerine, The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Professor Marston and the Wonder Women). As more women step behind the camera, we could soon see sex scenes from radical new perspectives that will shift how we think about sex at the movies forever—as long as Hollywood is willing to showcase them.

When we talk about diverse and inclusive storytelling, it must include depictions of our sexual lives and desires. To deny the essential role of sex in cinema is to deny a core truth about why we watch in the first place: desire. Desire to live a more thrilling life. Desire to experience something that fascinates us but is too frightening to touch in the real world. Whether we admit it or not, this is what keeps us coming back to the cinema. Great sex scenes project the secret, unspoken desires hiding in a viewer’s heart onto a screen in front of them. Sex at the cinema has taught me more about my own desires than I could ever have imagined. I can’t wait to be surprised and shocked by the next era.