Challengers, the film about a steamy love triangle in the world of professional tennis, is a box office smash. Its female lead, Zendaya, a 27-year-old American on the brink of superstardom, has been described as ‘sizzling’, ‘irresistibly sexy’ and plain ‘hot’ in a movie lauded even by the Financial Times as ‘the kind of old-fashioned romantic thriller, long absent from cinemas, in which the audience is kept in a near-constant state of arousal’.
But the paper’s critic also acknowledges that the film’s sex scenes are ‘quite chaste’ – adding that perhaps that’s the ‘fabulously compelling’ movie’s genius because what viewers see is ‘really only foreplay’.
It’s a good and accurate summary for, although one of the sexiest films of the year, Challengers contains very little sex.
This bears out the findings of a recent survey commissioned by The Economist that shows that, in mainstream cinema, scenes of sex (and female nudity) are in significant decline.
British actor Leo Woodall, 27, pictured playing Jack in The White Lotus
Benjamin Bratt pictured during a scene in Netflix’s Mother of the Bride
Barry Keoghan as Oliver Quick in Saltburn which was released last year
There is a reason why publications such as the Financial Times and The Economist, which are interested primarily in money, are looking closely at this cultural phenomenon. The notion that ‘sex sells’ has excited Hollywood for as long as most of us can remember.
Even in the prudish 1950s, when the standard was set by innocent romantic comedies starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson (prompting the composer Oscar Levant to quip that he knew Doris ‘before she became a virgin’), the merest hint of carnality made audiences sit up.
But sex, it seems, sells no more. With a few stark and stark-naked exceptions, such as the romp Poor Things starring Emma Stone and the psychosexual thriller Saltburn, last year’s major releases contained almost 40 per cent less sexual content than those released in 2000, while the proportion of top-grossing films with no sexual content more than doubled.
In 2019, for the first time in decades, more than half the 250 most commercially successful films were entirely sexless.
For British director Suzie Halewood, quality should be the only issue, not quantity. She says: ‘So much sex and nudity on screen feels exploitative – entirely superfluous to the narrative.
‘So I don’t mind there being less of it but, more than anything else, I want it to be better.’
She points to the 1986 film Betty Blue, about a man who tries to support his younger girlfriend as she slowly succumbs to madness, which she says would have been ‘ridiculous’ without sex and nudity, considering the couple’s youth and passion. Halewood adds: ‘But some films look just as ridiculous with sex and nudity.’
Halewood reckons the distinct trend towards less sex ‘might be Hollywood attempting to clean up its on-screen act – because it doesn’t always seem capable of doing it off-screen’.
Indeed, diminishing sex and female nudity have a great deal to do with the #MeToo revolution that swept through the entire industry following widespread revulsion caused by the crimes of producer Harvey Weinstein and others.
In the wake of #MeToo, actors’ so-called ‘nudity rider’, the clause that stipulates what a performer will, or more usually will not, reveal has been written into an increasing number of contracts, not just those of the biggest stars.
It was once associated with only powerful actresses, the likes of Julia Roberts in the cinema, while on TV, Sarah Jessica Parker insisted on the strict condition that, unlike her co-stars in the hit drama Sex And The City, she would keep her breasts firmly under wraps. But now the ‘nudity rider’ is commonplace. It was invoked by Zendaya not only in Challengers but also in her controversial TV series Euphoria, set in an oversexed American high school. There was a lot of bare flesh in the show yet very little belonged to Zendaya, the female lead and a former Disney Channel star.
The rise of the intimacy co-ordinator is the other hands-on (or perhaps hands-off) way in which the industry has responded to the #MeToo movement.
Seven years ago, no such role existed. But now it is mandated that every production involving ‘intimate action’ must have a dedicated professional on set at all times to ensure that sex scenes are shot with the utmost respect for the actors involved. There must be no threat to the performers’ physical or emotional well-being and scenes must be shot within certain regulated boundaries, such as the genitals not being allowed to touch.
Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall pictured during a scene in One Day
Zendaya (centre) pictured with Mike Faist (left) and Josh O’Connor (right) in Challengers
In Netflix’s Bridgerton, for example, a half-deflated netball is used to keep a barrier between actors while still allowing movement that appears natural.
Some old-school movie stars think this is regrettable.
Michael Douglas, who has starred in some of the steamiest blockbusters of the past 40 years, told Radio Times that the new safeguarding practices ‘feel like executives taking control away from film-makers’. He thinks that the presence of an intimacy co-ordinator would have enfeebled the sex scenes in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992) and claims that his co-stars in those films, Glenn Close and Sharon Stone, agree.
Back then, he says, it was left to the male protagonist to make sure that the woman was at ease with the situation.
‘You say, ‘OK, I’m going to touch you here, if it’s all right?’ It’s very slow but it looks like it’s happening organically, which is hopefully what good acting looks like.’
Any actors who ‘overstepped’ the mark ‘would get a reputation and that would take care of them’.
Of course, many might accuse Douglas of some old-fashioned sexism.
For her part, Brooke Shields recently admitted that, while filming the Netflix movie Mother Of The Bride, it was she who protected her co-star Benjamin Bratt, not the other way round.
Noting that he seemed to feel vulnerable during a nude scene in which he wore only a penis sheath (known in the business as a ‘modesty sock’), Shields explained that she stripped in solidarity, purely to help make him feel more comfortable.
There is a kind of symbolic irony in Shields, of all people, who first stripped for the camera aged 11 in the 1978 film Pretty Baby, now protecting the dignity of her male co-stars. Yet it does also seem to be the case that, just as on-screen female nudity is in decline, male nudity is on the rise.
And that, too, is almost certainly down to #MeToo.
There was a time, not so long ago, when there was next to no chance of catching sight of male genitalia in a mainstream feature film. Only in the theatre might you occasionally see an actor letting it all hang out, and never, even there, without a kerfuffle.
In 2007, Daniel Radcliffe bared all in a West End revival of Equus, the notorious Peter Shaffer play in which a young man has sex with a horse. One theatre-goer reported from the dress circle on opening night that while the audience mostly seemed an irreproachably literate crowd, one woman nearby said loudly to her friend: ‘Blimey, how are we going to see his todger from up here?’
Although one of the sexiest films of the year, Challengers contains very little sex
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal pictured in Normal People
Both on stage and screen, men showing their bits still has a snigger factor in a way that doesn’t apply to women. Think of the famous female stars who’ve gone entirely naked in mainstream cinema (Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Lawrence… it’s a long list). There is no comparable list of male movie stars.
And yet, for better or worse, the rules are changing.
As the industry strives for gender equality, the penis is increasingly and sometimes startlingly conspicuous in dramas on both sides of the Atlantic, in shows such as Sex Education, Bridgerton, White Lotus, Scenes From A Marriage, Succession and A Man In Full – the new Netflix series that has shocked many viewers by showing an erect penis.
Also, Normal People, the hit 2020 drama in which a post-coital scene showing all of actor Paul Mescal (and noticeably less of his co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones), caused a tremendous stir on social media.
Not everything we see on screen is real, however.
One top ‘intimacy co-ordinator’, who prefers to remain anonymous, has said: ‘Prosthetics are used a lot by male actors, so we just get the inference that it’s them, as when a body double is used in a scene showing buttocks.’
And are the prosthetics to make the actor look… bigger?
‘Yes, well, it is often about size,’ says the intimacy co-ordinator, adding that it allows the actor to focus on their performance by not worrying about how they look.
Still, the growing phenomenon of sexlessness on screen may soon make even the need for prosthetics redundant.
But as film director Suzie Halewood says, the future of cinema is ‘all about numbers’.
‘Once Hollywood decides that sex sells again, there will be more of it again,’ she says.
