From the moment it premiered in 2019, HBO’s Euphoria has been frequently described (and sometimes derided) in the same breath as high schoolers having crazy sex and doing drugs. But the only euphoric part—that is to say, the part that gets rendered with epiphanic and destructive poetry—is manifestly not the sex. It’s the drugs. The characters’ sex lives function less as examples of libertinism than as a careful recording of the contours of their psychic damage. Cassie’s sexual conduct is clearly tethered to paternal abandonment, Rue is too high to feel much sexually at all, and Jules’ horrifying initial sexual encounter in the pilot can’t be defended, much less “enjoyed.” The sex, as much as there is, is hardly sexy.
I felt something like this again while watching Minx, Ellen Rapaport’s comedy about a strident feminist and a louche pornographer teaming up to make a nudie magazine for women. The HBO show contains a florid panoply of penises and breasts but is notable—despite the Sam-and-Diane the two principals establish early on—for a comparative lack of romantic tension. We seem to be at a critical mass of buzzy screen fare where the narrative uses of sex, on television especially, are not what they once were. Take And Just Like That, which featured very little sex at all and most of it (like Big masturbating) wasn’t great. Here we have the benefit of comparing a product to itself: The original Sex and the City famously and scandalously popularized frank discussions of sexual practices and customs and positions at the turn of the millennium. Without its joyful libidinous champion—Kim Cattrall’s Samantha—And Just Like That was, if not exactly chaste, notably less invested in the jubilant shock value that once made it singular.
It’s as if the wide availability of sex—and porn—and frank discussions of various sexual lifestyles have all combined to render purely hedonistic or transgressive approaches to it as retro or passé or even quaint. This is not the stuff of cultural sexual landmarks like 9½ Weeks or 10—movies that find sex (or violation) intrinsically fascinating and libidinal boundaries exciting to explore. The premise of Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal, so titillating to audiences in 1993—what if a MILLIONAIRE offered you MONEY to sleep with your WIFE?—is the kind of situation you might see a beleaguered husband write to an advice columnist about these days with conflicted feelings. (The columnist would likely advise them to communicate, carefully consider whether they want to open up the marriage and on what terms, and perhaps gently chastise him for getting too bent out of shape over what is, after all, just a little sex work.) If shockability in this domain were measurable, it has, for American culture, radically diminished.
But so has tolerance for sex as hedonism, or as a source of enlightenment. You know the theory, mainstreamed during the sexual revolution, that prudery is a repressive social force that must be defeated in order to truly experience liberation, ecstasy, and personal fulfillment. The epiphanic promise of free love has lost some luster as a narrative device. There are many possible explanations, one of which is simply that both sex and depictions of it are widely available and far less taboo. And one result has been that our approaches to sex have become correspondingly prosaic. People had too much mediocre or bad or painful or boring sex to really buy into sex as either transcendent or transgressive. They’ve become more open about disappointing and wounding and abusive sex, too. It’s become just one more thing we chat about, dissect, discuss—and create norms for and principles of good citizenship around.
It makes sense, in other words, that there’s more bad sex than good happening on screen these days. And while much of that bad sex is merely comical, a lot of it serves other purposes too—like permitting us to talk in a detailed and informed way about consent and rape. Even the good sex tends to be more functional—that is, a proxy for character development—than climactic. It doesn’t tend to function as a cathartic exploration of desire itself; that approach has aged poorly. The Americans, a fantastic show that during its run was consistently named as having some of the best sex on TV, couldn’t be less about sex or less interested in it. For the two principals—Russian spies passing as Americans—sex is a tool they have been trained to use with detachment. They’re always playing roles in which they sense and fulfill the fantasies of others. That makes the moments when they have sex with each other, in the agonized context of their ambiguous, strategic marriage, crucially important. The sex is less about the frenzied pursuit of pleasure than a vulnerable occasion for two expert manipulators to gauge (or affirm) the authenticity of their relationship.
Another still-airing show praised for its sex scenes, Outlander, has—at its best—used sex to chart its characters’ dramatic and emotional journeys. In the famous wedding episode in Season 1, the two principals, Claire and Jamie, get to know each other largely through sex, in ways that both fulfill the show’s romance function (specifically, a marriage of convenience that demands consummation between two near-strangers) and do deep and lasting character work. The emphasis is on how two people can work together to have spectacularly good sex, but the path to achieving climax together is psychological, too. The show’s quality has arguably suffered as the seasons have worn on precisely because the show has lost its sense of balance in this respect; there are still plenty of sex scenes, but there’s sometimes a sense that they’re happening because it’s simply what fans expect. (There is also, it must be said, a lot of rape—which has badly diluted the show’s once-judicious use of horrifying sex by repeating awful beats without yielding worthy or surprising narrative dividends.)
If we’re living through a post-hedonic age—where truly good sex is just that and not a statement about the human condition or whatever—we’re also both more casual and more technical about the act. Sex as an end used to be “enough”; it constituted an edgy but artistically respectable cinematic and even philosophical subject. And back in the ’80s, the sex that got depicted as great tended—let’s face it—to be better or less threatening for one party than the other: The number of sexual storylines that required the woman to submit to some form of ego annihilation in order to achieve pleasure is not small! I’m not going to say that a lot of older sex scenes coasted on shock and derived their dramatic frisson from a disapproving society, but if eroticism depends on the forbidden, it does seem like something has been lost. Perhaps sexual fantasy is too cheesy to engage with unironically when it’s no longer frowned on by the culture—especially as more women started having sex on screen. Or maybe we’ve all gotten a little too workmanlike about roles and sexual choreographies. People script roles for themselves or imitate ubiquitous internet porn or map consensual but rather nonspontaneous courses toward sexual fulfillment. That much can wilt fictional as well as erotic possibilities. Is it perhaps that the Victorian hypothesis is somehow true once again, that erotic tension now calls for a retreat rather than an embrace of graphic scenes? Do any of us really know? Take Bridgerton. The hit show’s second season, with its cavalcade of agonized almost-kisses, was shockingly sexless by comparison with its first, which revolved around the clinical question of whether a man would ejaculate inside his wife (and produce the heir he had sworn to never “sire”). Chris Van Dusen, the show’s creator, said of this new, more prudish iteration, “I think the looks between Anthony and Kate across the room and the fingers and hands grazing and touching are just as sexy, if not more, as a sex montage around an ancestral estate.” (If not more!)
Maybe the issue is simply that our expanded fluency in different sexual lifestyles and habits and philosophies has rendered sex itself less potent as a storytelling premise. Audiences are far more sophisticated now about what sex can and cannot do (particularly now that women are better represented). We understand it less as a mystical and primordial force than as a part of life people make deliberate and informed choices about. Some of those choices—polyamory, open marriages, role-playing, BDSM—are ones denizens of former decades would have found titillating in the extreme. In this moment, they’re comparatively normalized, and we know enough about situations including these to understand that, like all relational endeavors, sex is more laborious than libertine. That means messiness, the refusal to engage in our evolved standards of communication and, yes, rule-setting, is seen not as adventurous but as childish and irresponsible at best and abusive at worst. (This may be one reason Adrian Lyne’s return to sexual thrillers with Deep Water has fallen flat.) The great sexual experiments of decades past seem a little naïve now, so convinced are they that they’re about to blow your mind with a new way of doing things that requires taking desire for granted as gloriously self-justifying and a thing to be “yielded to” rather than interrogated and even disciplined.
This is, in other words, an extremely interesting moment. It doesn’t have to mean erotic starvation, however. Hulu’s Normal People is ample evidence that sex on screen hasn’t totally given up on making truly consensual sex sexy rather than drearily polite. We have not tired of romance or of sexual tension. But to the extent that the romantic comedy or the “marriage plot” ended in a cathartic kiss, a wedding, or its thrilling subtextual equivalent (sex!!!), our narrative conventions do seem to have changed. If sex is no longer the answer in life or in our stories, we might be living through something like sexual normcore—where the sheer mundanity is the most provocative sexual experiment of all.