Sex is back at the movies!

Really, it never left. But most of the best films of 2023 have at least one sex scene

Other than perhaps the never-ending Marvel/Martin Scorsese cold war, there’s probably no topic that Film Twitter has been more weird about, in the last five years, than the prospect of sex scenes in the movies. 

A few years ago, it became conventional wisdom that “the movies never have sex scenes anymore.” This was never quite true — foreign and indie movies never stopped featuring them — but at some point, film analysts began to notice that major studio movies didn’t have as many sex scenes as was the case in the 1980s or ‘90s. 

There were reasons for this. Superhero and Star Wars movies moved to the forefront of the culture, and those films tended not to have sex in them. Movies’ more sexy genres, like the erotic thriller, have all but disappeared in recent years, as have the type of horny teen comedies that frequently appeared well into the 21st century. 

And of course, the rise of free, easily available Internet porn seemed to take up a space in the culture formerly occupied by sex-filled R-rated movies. (A Twitter interlocutor once stated that Russ Meyer’s movies “could never be made today”- and that’s probably true. But they also couldn’t have been made at any time other than exactly when they were made- and if Pornhub existed in 1968, Meyer might never have had a career.)

The rise of the #MeToo movement, meanwhile, led to something of a rethinking of how Hollywood treats sexuality. However, I’ve never been remotely persuaded by any arguments that “#MeToo has ruined sex.” A scene like the one in 1999’s American Pie, when Jason Biggs non-consensually live-streams Shannon Elizabeth getting naked in his room and his friends all watch it, plays like revenge porn when watched with today’s understandings. 

In the last couple of years, however, sex in the movies seems to have come back in a significant way. And it’s gotten to the point where “sex scene discourse” has shifted in the opposite direction- now, it seems a lot of people, especially younger ones, feel like there is TOO much sex in the movies, and they’d like to see less. 

There have even been wacky fringe proposals to bring back something like the Hays Code, which brought about top-down institutional censorship of movies between the 1930s and 1950s. I stress, however, that no one at any level of Hollywood has expressed any interest in the return of a Hays Code-like regime.

I don’t have any specific figures to illustrate this — I’m not Mr. Skin, after all — but the bulk of the major films released in 2023 have sex scenes in them. And not only that, but they’ve done fascinating things with the form. 

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, probably the best movie I’ve seen this year, is not only loaded with sex scenes but is primarily about the power of female sexuality. Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid has a sex scene — scored with a Mariah Carey song! — fraught with danger that ends shockingly. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn features one outrageous sexual sequence and then gets more and more shocking from there. That film also shattered one particular taboo, also broken earlier in the year by Fair Play (you’ll know it when you see it.)

The sex scenes with Florence Pugh in Oppenheimer set off just as many arguments as the parts about nuclear weapons and communism, while the love scenes in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (a likely 2024 release) were one of many aspects of that film that had festival audiences swooning, as was the case with the coupling of Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek in Magic Mike’s Last Dance. 

And J. Robert Oppenheimer is hardly the only historical figure to get it on screen this year- Napoleon did too, as did Enzo Ferrari. We do not see Leonard Bernstein in a sex scene in Maestro, although we do see him in bed, implicitly after the fact, with both male and female partners. The same is true of Bayard Rustin, in Rustin, with a pair of male partners at different times. 

Ira Sachs’ Passages did fascinating things with gay sex scenes, as did Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers and Sebastián Silva’s particularly wild Rotting in the Sun.

There’s no sex in the year’s numerous superhero movies and cartoon adaptations. Barbie is lacking in sex scenes, but then again it’s also canonical in that film that the characters lack genitalia. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is relatively chaste as well.

There’s been plenty of nostalgia and analysis, as well. This year has seen the arrival of both a full-on documentary, We Kill For Love, about the history of the erotic thriller, and a long series on “Erotic ‘90s,” part of Karina Longworth’s indispensable “You Must Remember This,” which ran throughout the year, following Longworth’s “Erotic ‘80s” season the previous year. 

While the doc mostly focused on direct-to-video movies that most of us don’t remember, the podcast went into the backstories of those 1990s movies, telling hair-raising but often horrifying stories about the likes of Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Poison Ivy, and Wild Things.

A throughline? Just how ridiculously vilified the likes of Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Drew Barrymore, and Alicia Silverstone were for daring to be hot, and/or naked on screen. Another? The way Eyes Wide Shut, in 1999, kicked off the trend of any movie with sex in it being hyped as having the most shocking on-screen sex you’ve ever seen in your life, up to and including a false rumor that the actors really had sex. Don’t Worry Darling, in 2022, repeated the cycle, although I don’t expect a critical reappraisal anytime soon.

On-screen sex has gotten more ethical. There are intimacy coordinators now, and sex scenes are not nearly as heterosexual-only and male gaze-based as they once were. 

In the end, what’s important is not whether sex scenes exist or even if they “add anything to the plot.” What’s important is whether they’re ethically and not exploitively produced, and done in an interesting way. But what the films of 2023 have shown is that the “ew, sex scenes” crowd is losing the argument.