The problem of intimacy on screen is as old as movies and television themselves.
The very first publicly released film, entitled The Kiss, featured an incredibly chaste kiss between a man and a woman, and was viewed as so completely obscene (this was, after all, in 1896) that it caused near-riots and scores of complaints.
And under the Hayes Code, Hollywood wasn’t allowed to show even a suggestion of sex – married couples even had to be seen in separate beds, and romantic clinches always had to fade tastefully to black.
Now, however, two separate television series are aiming to try and make things more realistic. One’s a documentary and one’s a fictional series by Showtime – but they’re united by their desire to try and show a more realistic, intriguing side to sex.
The documentary, produced by Channel 4 in the UK, has been all over the news for its claims to show people getting busy ‘live on air’ – but in fact the show won’t feature any nudity or actual sex.
Instead, the couples will have sex in a ‘box’ on the set, and speak to relationship experts and presenters immediately afterwards.
It focuses, interestingly, overwhelmingly on the young – an engaged set of childhood sweethearts, a 20-something couple and two gay men in their 30s. So there’s still no negotiating onscreen of the fact that over-50s are more sexually active than ever before, and continue to feel desire long into their so-called ‘twilight’ years.
The whole idea is part of Channel 4’s decision to focus on the ‘real’ side of intercourse – but will it help?
Critics have derided the idea as deliberately salacious without actually using any scientific method, proper control groups or actually changing the way we view on-screen sexuality. It’s also been argued to be invasive, or simply odd.
However, open-mindedness and the ability to talk frankly about intimacy in different stages of relationships can’t hurt – and if the people onscreen display positive, loving behaviour, maybe it’ll encourage more conversations at home.
The fictional American show, called Masters Of Sex, is a focus on that scientific side of things – at the very beginning of the science of sexuality and behaviour.
Remember Kinsey, with Laura Linney? Picture that, but with the very uptight Michael Sheen as William Masters, one of the very first people to want to collect scientific data about what people really did behind closed doors.
Together with his then-wife Virginia Johnson (though we suspect the focus of the drama will be on them getting married in the first place), he discovered many of today’s commonplaces. They found out about female arousal, the clitoral and vaginal orgasm (which they found had the same effect), and the capacity of women to have multiple orgasms – all in the oppressive atmosphere of the early 1960s.
If you’re interested in the science of the bedroom and the long battle behind the first open-minded sexuality research, this is the one for you. Kinsey did most of his work based on interviews, but Masters did just what they’re doing on Channel 4 – observing real-life sexual behaviour in labs.
We suspect, however, that the science might get a back seat to all the objections from the public, Masters’s faculty and everybody else – and, of course, the romantic drama between him and Johnson, played by Lizzy Caplan.
So which one of the two new shows about the bedroom will you tune into?
Image: Masters Of Sex.
