Sex scenes come with a soiled reputation. You’re usually twiddling your thumbs with your parents, deciding on a blank space of ceiling to focus on intently until the longest two minutes of your life fades to black. Or maybe it’s the predestined entrance by your mum at the worst time when watching a TV show, and a staggered, nervous defence that no, I promise, it’s not that. For me, I was a preteen, calculatingly deciding whether or not to pretend I was unsure of what was going on as Kate Winslet’s hand quivered across a car window.

But Gen Z seems to have spurned this awkward rite of passage entirely. 54% of teenagers report having watched pornography before the age of 13 . Their introduction to the adult world isn’t through the titillation and, in fact, the tits of a starlet being glimpsed for a salacious minute in a blockbuster — it’s bypassed that and arrived to a final conclusion of threesomes, gangbangs, and whatever flavour-of-the-year the pornographic industry is serving up to its consumers.

Meanwhile, a recent study has shown that films have fewer sex scenes now, with a decline of nearly 40 per cent in major films.  A UCLA Report surveyed 1,500 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 24, and found that a majority of 47.5 per cent said sex was not needed for the plot in most TV shows and movies. We’ve compartmentalised sex from our day-to-day lives and cultural narratives: it exists in the sleek-grey laptop of pornography. Of course one would not think sex scenes further the plot when sex doesn’t exist as a “plotpoint” in our personal narratives, but rather as a dissociated blip in a vacuum. 

There’s a variety of factors that make sense as to why we’ve seen a decline in sex scenes on screen. The #MeToo movement caused Hollywood publicly to reckon with its seamiest indiscretions, though the layperson had heard whispers and even jokes about the casting couch for decades. Marilyn Monroe initially starred in erotic short films before making it as the most iconic blonde bombshell of the 20th century. Perhaps some of our discomfort towards sex in mainstream cinema comes from the uneasy boundaries between film-acting and sex work, especially when its psychological impact on actresses has become harder to ignore.  

Now, Hollywood has ushered in intimacy coordinators, which is undeniably a net good, to ensure the safety of everyone when filming vulnerable scenes. Though despite these new precautions, there still remains a lack of appetite to see some of the most attractive talents of our generation fall in love and, consequentially, well, get it on. Perhaps because for the latter, we already have an outlet. 

The consequences of pornography have become mainstream and don’t need much explanation. One only needs to look at the growing prevalence of extreme content, abuse within the industry, decreased sexual satisfaction in interpersonal relationships and even addiction to see the negative effects of porn. But we needn’t tar sex scenes with the same brush.

They are synonymous in the way thriller is synonymous with the grim true crime podcast, and our conflation shows how untruly unerotic society has become. The Venn diagram between the sexual, the sexy, and the sex looks less like a circle and more like the Olympic logo. 

In light of our X-rated inundated world, with well-lit genitals and pastel-coloured moans, the symbolic has become sexy again: though this time, inanimate objects or benign circumstances take the place of slow-burn flirtation or the insinuated cigarette. Think of the TikTok anticipatory ooze of a splitting egg yolk, or the subliminal power dynamic of a tradwife creator cooking dinner. The strangely seductive slow-motion stretch from an Instagrammed grilled cheese. 

The word “porn” itself, on the website Reddit especially, has become synonymous with anything particularly good or satisfying. A brief browse can show you landscape porn, architecture porn, food porn, fashion porn, and, of course, porn-porn, in which a cornucopia of desires are catered to us and always a mere click or two away.  We’ve become so pornified that genuine sexiness has been outsourced to the everyday — the space between the object and the abject.

Perhaps it’s time to re-eroticise where we started off: flirtation and tension between two people.

In movies, as in life, sex should have an alchemical and psychic urgency

Historically, sex scenes came from the art scene and avant-garde cinema. “Art film” was in itself euphemistic in the 70s for Italian soft-core. The Doors drummer John Desmore said he went to Truffaut’s 400 Blows in hopes it was, as an art film, actually 400 Blowjobs.  But with the artistic realm becoming increasingly politically bound up in morality-policing and clear boundaries, the artists have left the love-making to the executives, and it’s played out exactly as uncreatively as one would expect.

In movies, as in life, sex should have an alchemical and psychic urgency, as if things as mundane as your morning coffee order or the tragic reality of your roommate all played their unique part in the unfolding desire. We get none of this from pornography, where campy mail men and frustrated step-mums fumble their dialogue before full-frontal penetration takes the main stage. Even these plots have been replaced by the dominant narrative, in which a woman takes her ultimate position: that of slut, and whore, and whatever shape that sluttiness must shift towards to cater towards a predominantly male desire.  

Despite a cultural insistence that men want a little less conversation, a little more action, the prominence of pornographic platforms such as OnlyFans, wherein men often pay to talk directly to an adult content creator, show an appetite for erotic narrative and connection as well. We shouldn’t leave this only for the chicks — there is too much at stake for that. 

Perhaps more difficulty, we’ve tried to move societally away from the inevitability of “he’s a boy / she’s a girl”, and understandably move to a culture that prioritises consent and HR-approved friendships between the sexes. Approaching someone with romantic intent is sequestered to an app. Frisson is often inexorably and inconveniently heterosexual.

Some of the best sex scenes in film history embody (pun intended) the awkward fact of a man and a woman being alone: Dirty Dancing, Titanic, Atonement, Body Heat.

We shouldn’t call for no sex scenes, but rather, better written ones, that capture the full scope of desire through narrative. Though the chauvinist joke points out, tongue in cheek, that men “watch porn for the plots”, perhaps a truly romantic, dynamic and communicative era would come when we’re watching plots for the porn.