ACTION!

Inside the world of intimacy coördinators.

- BY JENNIFER WILSON

Earlier this year—Valentine's Day weekend, to be precise—I found myself sitting on the floor of a loft in downtown Los Angeles with eight other adults, learning how to fake an orgasm. We had been told to make three “oo” sounds punctuated by a sharp inhale. Next, we bit our lower lips and exhaled on the letter “V.” “Vuh, vuh, vuhhhhhhh,” we harmonized. After a few rounds of this, I started feeling out of breath. A scene from “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda's character, strapped into an orgasmatron by a mad scientist, nearly expires from pleasure flashed before my eyes. At the front of the room was our conductor, Yehuda Duenyas, a lithe fifty-one-year-old in a pewter-colored sweatshirt that matched his graying faux-hawk. After our final exhale, he leaped up from a stool and gave each of us a fist bump, adding a heartfelt “Good work!”

I was participating in a four-day sex-choreography workshop run by CINTIMA, which Duenyas co-founded in 2023. It is one of twelve certification programs accredited by SAG-AFTRA to train intimacy coördinators. It is a new job—so new, in fact, that the union offers a definition on its website: “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer” of sex scenes. My CINTIMA classmates were hoping to join a rapidly professionalizing field. In April, for example, the Intimacy Professional Summit, a three-day conference in Minneapolis for intimacy coördinators, featured panels such as “Sex Parties, Orgies, and Other Large Scenes” and, for those interested in depicting, say, Regency-era raunch, “Romancing the Past.”