Since 2000, sex scenes have dropped by 40% in Hollywood

Has cinema become modest? The question arose after an analyst revealed that on-screen sex is gradually disappearing.

In the history of Hollywood cinema, nudity and sex were subjected to censorship. It was once forbidden to show a relationship on screen under penalty of seeing your film revised or worse removed from distribution. To get around this rule, the directors showed ingenuity – like the fireworks used by Alfred Hitchock In The Hand in the Collar to suggest sexual intercourse between Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper. For thirty years, the Hays Code regulated sex on screen, until its total disappearance in 1966. Since then, bodies are sometimes shown quickly as in Basic Instinct, sometimes in length as in the final scene of Saltburn. However, it seems that sex on screen is less and less present.

Recently, the British analyst Stephen Follows conducted the survey of the 250 highest-grossing films in the United States since the turn of the century. Taking into account film organizations' ratings of sex scenes from none to severe, Follows found that there is less sexual content in cinema with a drop of 40%. Taken up by the media The Economistthe results of this study are subject to interpretation:

“Some feel that Hollywood has entered a puritanical era and blame the #MeToo movement, the ubiquity of celibacy in superhero films, and the need to appeal to foreign markets. Others are not comfortable agree and take as an example the highly explicit scenes in recent films like Fair Play And Poor Things, which include sex scenes in public toilets and brothels.”

So more or less sex? Known for his sulphurous cinema, Paul Verhoeven (Show Girl, Basic Instinct), criticized at the time Benedetta mainstream films for being too smooth and no longer talking about sex. It was in 2022. Would this analyst’s results prove her right?

Paul Verhoeven finds that the latest James Bonds lack sex

If the presence of explicit content has fallen by 40%, viewer sentiment seems to follow the opposite trend. According to them, there would on the contrary be more sex scenes. How to explain this discrepancy? For Stephen Follows, there are certainly fewer sex scenes, but the remaining ones are more graphic and therefore hold our attention. The observation is there: Game of Thrones, Euphoria etc. All these recent series have shown sex in quantity and often in a crude manner. This banality and gratuitousness of the sexual act ended up causing collective fed up and questioning on the part of the creators. Thus, the more the seasons progressed, the less Game Of Thrones contained no sex scenes – the same for the spin-off House of the Dragon.

Sex on screen has been strongly questioned recently and more particularly among younger people who, according to a study carried out at the end of 2023 by the University of California UCLA, would like to see less sex in their programs. In total, almost 48% of adolescents and young adults feel that “sex is not necessary to the plot in most television series and films.”

Passed by there, the movement #MeToo. Since the Weinstein affair and the numerous revelations made by actresses about sexual violence, the film industry has been more vigilant when it comes to staging moments of intimacy between actors. Now, most sex scenes we see on screen are discussed in advance and worked on with intimacy coordinators. Sex is regulated to respect each person’s limits. At the risk of disappointing Sean Bean who criticized the presence of these professionals on the set at the risk of losing the “spontaneity” of the actionintimacy coordinators are now essential to choreograph, like stunts, sex on screen.

So, in the romantic series Outlander where the main characters are often driven by passion, Sam Heughan (Jaime Fraser) requested the presence of an intimacy coordinator for season 6 :

“Having someone else who is there to help us explore intimacy and relationships and situation is really good for adding to Jamie and Claire's relationship. I hope people see that, in a way, they are more intimate.”

https://www.premiere.fr/Series/News-Series/House-of-the-Dragon-cette-scene-de-sexe-preparee-pendant-7-mois

Less free sex but more thoughtful, necessary and calculated sex. This is the mantra that allowed a film like Poor Things (starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a young woman liberated from any patriarchal bond, intellectually and sexually) to depict explicit sexual content without appearing to do too much. During the French press conference, the actress declared:

“Yorgos (Lanthimos) was keen that there be an intimacy coordinator. She was great, I met her and I said to myself 'How could I think I didn't need her?' I didn't know enough about the subject. I have such gratitude to these people. They help put us at ease but also help choreograph the scenes. The environment is so much better with them. She was great and I understand better why these people are essential in the profession.”

Proof that we can still make films with sex scenes that work with the public. Cinema would not be more modest but quite simply more conscious.

“Skip the hot scenes”: No, this feature does not exist on Netflix