"Vagina's everywhere..."
Discretion used to be the better part of TV sex scenes. Even as portrayals of love and lust got steamier, the anatomical particulars were left to the imagination, off camera or under covers. Hollywood's old visual pun, the camera panning from a couple romancing in the foreground to fireworks exploding in the background, was updated over the years. Now the precise style, duration and heat register of sexual fireworks are enacted onscreen, notes Denver Post's Joanne Ostrow, and in cable and broadcast TV dramas, the sex scenes are gymnastic...
The first evolution in TV's approach to sex involved the quantity of the sex on screen. The next evolution, the one going on now, seems to be in the manner of the sex portrayed. No position is too acrobatic, no amount of skin too graphic to depict on television. The potential awkwardness of the act seems to fascinate TV directors. It's not just television: from the popularity of E.L. James' "Fifty Shades of Grey" to the ubiquity of kink on the Internet, from a recent New York Times story on the proliferation of S&M clubs to the nightly prime-time disclaimers (TV-MA, L, S, V), the porning of pop culture is upon us.
Thank cable for ushering more graphic depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence from the World Wide Web into the living room with a wealth of literate (and award-winning) adult dramas. Depictions of sex and sexuality of every flavor are on view, not least in otherworldly settings ( Battlestar Galactica) and fantastical comedic settings (Sex and the City). True Blood and Mad Men raised the stakes. Increasingly, athleticism is the hallmark of small-screen sexual encounters. A bed is often the last place you'd find a sex scene. The unlimited varieties of the act were explored by cable, where customers pay for the privilege of seeing sadistic sexual acts (Game of Thrones), humiliating sexual encounters (Girls), bodice-ripping sex (Spartacus), paid and disabled sex (Legit), beach-chair sex (Magic City), fee-based sex play (The Client List) and more.
Meanwhile broadcast TV showcased more and younger sex, especially on shows about high schoolers played by older actors. Parenthood, Bunheads and Glee toyed with adolescent sexual exploits. The tragi-sex-com Girls on HBO brings the current state of affairs into cringe-worthy focus. This season's penultimate episode "On All Fours," as graphic as its title, explicitly referenced porn imagery in the interaction of Adam and Natalia. First they had fun sex, then they had quasi-rape sex. The dynamics of the positions, the meaning of the physical relationships, the emotions that result from the encounter are meant to be pondered on this increasingly dark post-post-feminist comedy.
Now that graphic style is edging into mainstream commercial TV. Desperate to win audiences back from cable, the broadcast networks do what they can to mimic, imply and suggest. Even a political drama about the White House sneaks off for a quickie in the computer tech closet (Scandal), as parents in the audience scramble to clear the kids from the room. The raunchiest network comedies talk endlessly about "doing it" but don't show much. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) of New Girl on Fox is not nearly as sexually exhibitionistic or self-sabotaging as Hannah (Lena Dunham) of Girls on HBO. Two and a Half Men amounts to a decade's worth of sexual innuendo but actual sex is only implied.
Here's how we know we've arrived at a newly sexualized time in mainstream America, an awkward age of transition on matters of sex: The waitress Max (Kat Dennings) on the CBS half-hour Two Broke Girls recently complained that the word "vagina" has lost its power to shock. "Vagina's everywhere," she said. Cue the leering short-order cook Oleg: "Where!?!" Clearly, the writers share Max's lament about the difficulty of getting a laugh now that the word is commonplace, but they hope for some residual shock value. Ironically, TV's reality shows are the least graphic when it comes to sexual interactions. Series like Big Brother and Jersey Shore offer bad, obnoxious and unethical behavior on display, but the sex is usually blurred, in the dark or beneath the sheets. The TV genre that purports to be most authentic and uncensored turns out to be the least revealing in sexual situations.
The easy inclusion of graphic sex scenes in TV dramas in particular has challenged writers to play with the nature of intimacy in novel ways. This creative rethinking turns out to be good for dramatic character development. The power dynamic involved in sex is now a focus beyond the physical event.
* The husband and wife power-mongers in House of Cards on NetFlix like to share a cigarette in a window late at night, their version of intimacy. We never see them in a sexual encounter with each other; that's reserved for others, their inferiors in terms of rank and power. The result is subtle: The lack of sex between the leading characters (played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) makes the viewer think harder about their intriguing intimate moments, as they borrow a page from "Macbeth."
* In the superior FX drama The Americans, the very idea of sex is fraught since the couple, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, are actually an arranged covert spy team who have yet to develop a real romantic relationship. Can their work blur into a romance? Will things heat up in the bedroom while they pursue the Cold War? Meanwhile, views of Russell's character enduring demeaning, sadistic sex as a trade for information are intensely graphic. (As a lethal spy, she gets her comeuppance.)
* It's not spoiling anything to note that the only really romantic, loving expression of sex in recent TV memory occurred on ABC's Red Widow, just before the central character was widowed. Now that true love seems to be out of the way, the doors are open to more dramatic, aggressive or conflicted expressions of sex.
* FX's Bates Motel finds its starting point as a contemporary prequel to "Psycho" with a Twin Peaks vibe. The sexual tension here is novel for television: mother and son, played by Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore, are intertwined in unhealthy, incestuous ways. The sexual hints are subtle at first as the audience witnesses the psychological implosion of teenager Norman Bates.
We can only hope the sexual tension in that case remains more subtle than gymnastic.
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