Yes, Sex Scenes in movies are often pointless. But so what?

Sex is... well, weird. Isn’t it? The whole thing not just our individual kinks and preferences. Not just the faces we make, or the things we end up saying in the heat of the moment.

- RYAN COOGAN

Sex is weird because it’s the closest thing we have to a cultural basilisk: a subject that for some reason we don’t seem able to acknowledge or look at, for fear of causing some great, intangible harm, even though it dictates a not-insignificant proportion of our behaviour and motivations.

I remember going to an academic conference at university about the aesthetics of pornography, and every presentation all of which, I’ll remind you, were about pornography was prefaced by some variation of the phrase: Obviously, I don’t actually watch this stuff myself.” It’s one of those statements that’s always stuck with me as being especially cowardly. The time for prudish behaviour was before you decided to include a slide called The ontology of oral sex”. This isn’t The phenomenology of Ingmar Bergman”, this is a conference about sex.

I was reminded of that same kind of clinical self-denialism when Twitter went discourse-crazy over the past week as it debated whether or not there’s still a place in movies for sex scenes. It’s one of those arguments that pops up about once every six months: should we still have sex scenes in films when they don’t do anything to move the plot along? Aren’t they just exploitation for exploitation’s sake? Aren’t they sort of outdated, in an era when you probably have your favourite NSFW subreddit open in another tab as you read this that’s right, we all know)?