Hey Hollywood, let’s stay horny

It’s been 55 years since the Hays Production Code was removed from the realm of Hollywood and MPAA ratings came along. It’s hard to imagine a time when sex, nudity and anything that’s considered taboo was once censored in cinema. However, it seems like there’s a current rising trend of the sanitization of sex on screen and even people who outright hate sex scenes in general. To this I say, why, and when did we start being so anti-sex?

Mariana Fabian Opinion Editor

Let’s backtrack. The Hays Production Code was a self-imposed, rigorous set of rules and guidelines that films had to follow from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. It harshly prohibited cinema at the time from covering controversial, taboo topics. For example, the films during this time were not allowed to show any kind of nudity, sex in pretty much any manner, interracial relationships, violence, crime, profanity, and the list goes on. LGBTQ characters, which were far and few for films during this era, were depicted with stereotypes, villainized or killed off.

This is not to say filmmakers at the time didn’t make racy, controversial or sexual films. For example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” the main characters, played by Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, share a series of kisses in a pas- sionate three-minute sequence. The code specifically limited kisses on screen to only three seconds long, so Hitchcock had them do just that. Instead of having them kiss once, he separates their kisses into these increments throughout their entire conversation. Grant and Bergman’s characters are practically glued to one another throughout the scene, hugging and touching each other, whilst merely talking about dinner plans. Hitchcock never broke the code because the kisses are only three seconds, but the scene is chock-full of passion.

In “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” R.S. Benedict extensively critiques the modern superhero film and how the genre currently desexualizes its muscular, conventionally attractive head honchos. While her article focuses more on eating disorders and the way bodies are portrayed on screen, Benedict offers an excellent point of how sexless current blockbusters are. In fact, I don’t think I could come up with a blockbuster of the last decade that depicts sexuality in a non-sanitized and horny manner.

While I understand some of the arguments against sex in films and TV, such as plot importance or the exploitation of performers, I’d argue showing sex on screen is more healthy than not seeing these depictions at all. Why should we try to revert to a time when healthy portrayals of sex never existed? Up until the end of the Hays Code, filmmakers had stopped taking it seriously and saw it as a joke, and that’s how it should be remembered. It was restrictive and moralist — which is why this resurgence of anti-sex attitudes is concerning. Sex happens, and it’s a completely normal, human thing. It’s only weird and uncomfortable because we’ve made it that way, and so have the institutions around us.

Part of it has to do with the severe lack of proper sex education existing in the U.S., which inadvertently creates a bubble of confusion and insecurity around sex. When I took this class, we barely went over condom use, STI prevention or any other sex than penetrative. The foundation of the course was abstinence, which is a ridiculous teaching method to offer hormonal teenagers.

Additionally, this anti-sex attitude correlates with the way society treats and views pornography as something to toss to the side or as something to be ashamed of. While pornography has a history of fetishization, poor representations of women and other marginalized groups, it’s still incredibly significant to our culture for its technological advancements and more.

It also doesn’t help that sex in media is almost never accurate to the actual experience, which is a valid reason why it’s heavily critiqued. Sex is vulnerable, awkward and messy, so why can’t we let it be this way on the silver screen?

Thankfully, companies like HBO have long been dedicated to showing sex and nudity on the screen since its beginning. With “Dream On,” one of its first shows, HBO utilized uncensored nudity as the punchline. Even though it was aimed at male audiences, it was groundbreaking to show nudity on cable TV. HBO also saw a huge rise in popularity with the premiere of “Sex and the City,” which is heralded for its representation of the female body, pleasure and sex.

HBO is also a trailblazer as they set the standard for hiring intimacy coordinators in 2018, following the #MeToo movement; all of their shows since then have staffed an intimacy coordinator to aid actors in sex scenes. Having an intimacy coordinator helps the actors feel more comfortable performing simulated sex scenes, and it lets performers have someone to bounce ideas off of. The role is one that’s evolving, and it’ll hopefully continue bettering sex representations in film and TV.

At the end of the day, you can consume whatever media you like. If you don’t like the random sex scene on your screen, just skip forward, try to grow up and move on with your life. For the rest of us sexpositive cinema and TV watchers, I’ll cheer for a random sex scene, because I’ll remember a time when they weren’t allowed at all.