Why the only naked bodies you see on screen these days are men’s, not women’s: ‘No nudity’ contracts, intimacy co-ordinators and the feminist MeToo backlash against predator producers like Harvey Weinstein

Challengers, the film about a fiery love triangle in the world of professional tennis, is a box office success. Its female lead, Zendaya, a 27-year-old American on the brink of stardom, has been described as “sizzling,” “irresistibly sexy” and simply “hot” in a film praised even by the Financial Times as “the kind of thriller.” old-fashioned romantic film, long absent from cinemas, in which the public is kept in a state of almost constant excitement.

But the paper’s critic also acknowledges that the film’s sex scenes are “pretty chaste,” and adds that perhaps that’s the genius of the “fabulously compelling” film, because what viewers see is “really just foreplay.” .

It’s a good and accurate summary because, although it’s one of the sexiest movies of the year, Challengers contains very little sex.

This confirms the findings of a recent survey commissioned by The Economist showing that, in mainstream cinema, sex scenes (and female nudity) are in significant decline.

There’s a reason why publications like the Financial Times and The Economist, which are primarily interested in money, take a close look 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 composer Oscar Levant to joke that he knew Doris “before she became a virgin”), the The slightest hint of carnality made the audience sit still. above.

But sex, it seems, no longer sells. With a few marked and starkly naked exceptions, such as the comedy Poor Things starring Emma Stone and the psychosexual thriller Saltburn, last year’s major releases contained almost 40 percent less sexual content than those released in 2000, while the proportion of the highest-grossing films Movies without sexual content doubled.

In 2019, for the first time in decades, more than half of the top 250 commercially successful films were completely sexless.

For British director Suzie Halewood, quality should be the only problem, not quantity. She says: “So much sex and nudity on screen seems exploitative, completely superfluous to the narrative.

“So I don’t mind if there’s less of it, but more than anything, I want it to be better.”

She points to the 1986 film Betty Blue, about a man trying to support his younger girlfriend as she slowly succumbs to madness, which she says would have been “ridiculous” without sex and nudity, considering her youth and passion. the couple. Halewood adds: “But some movies look just as ridiculous with sex and nudity.”

Halewood believes the clear trend toward less sex “could be that Hollywood is trying to clean up its on-screen act, because it doesn’t always seem able to do it off-screen.”

In fact, the decline in female sex and nudity has a lot to do with the #MeToo revolution that swept across the industry following widespread revulsion caused by the crimes of producer Harvey Weinstein and others.

In the wake of #MeToo, the so-called ‘nudity rider’ for actors, the clause stipulating what an actor will reveal, or more generally will not reveal, has been written into an increasing number of contracts, not just those of the biggest stars. .

Previously, she was associated only with powerful actresses, such as Julia Roberts in film, while on television, Sarah Jessica Parker insisted on the strict condition that, unlike her co-stars in the hit drama Sex And The City, she would maintain her breasts tightly wrapped. But now the ‘nudity rider’ is common. Zendaya invoked it not only in Challengers but also in her controversial TV series Euphoria, set in an oversexed American high school. There was a lot of naked flesh on the show, but very little belonged to Zendaya, the female lead and former Disney Channel star.

The rise of the intimacy coordinator is the other hands-on (or perhaps hands-off) way the industry has responded to the #MeToo movement.

Seven years ago there was no such role. But it is now required that any production involving “intimate action” must have a dedicated professional on set at all times to ensure sex scenes are filmed 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 filmed within certain regulated limits, such as no genitals being allowed to touch.

In Netflix’s Bridgerton, for example, a half-deflated basketball is used to maintain a barrier between the actors while allowing natural-looking movement.

Some old-school movie stars think this is unfortunate.

Michael Douglas, who has starred in some of the hottest blockbusters of the last 40 years, told Radio Times that the new safeguarding practices “feel like executives taking control away from filmmakers.” He thinks the presence of an intimacy coordinator would have weakened the sex scenes in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992) and says his co-stars in those films, Glenn Close and Sharon Stone, agree.

Back then, she says, it was up to the male lead to make sure the woman felt comfortable with the situation.

‘You say, ‘Okay, I’m going to touch you here, if that’s okay with you.’ “It’s very slow, but it seems like it’s happening organically, which is what we hope is a good performance.”

Any actor 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, she was the one who protected her co-star Benjamin Bratt, and not the other way around.

Noting that he seemed to feel vulnerable during a nude scene in which he only wore a penis sleeve (known in the business as a ‘modesty sock’), Shields explained that she stripped down in solidarity, simply to help him feel more comfortable. .

There’s a kind of symbolic irony in Shields, of all people, who first stripped naked for the camera when she was 11 in the 1978 film Pretty Baby, and now protects the dignity of her male co-stars. However, it also seems to be true that, just as female nudity on screen is decreasing, male nudity is increasing.

And that’s almost certainly due to #MeToo, too.

There was a time, not long ago, when it was almost impossible to see male genitalia in a mainstream film. Only in the theater can you occasionally see an actor let everything loose, and never, even there, without a fuss.

In 2007, Daniel Radcliffe bared it all in a West End revival of Equus, Peter Shaffer’s famous play in which a young man has sex with a horse. A theatergoer reported from the dress circle on opening night that, while most of the audience seemed to be an irreproachably literate crowd, a woman nearby said loudly to her friend, “Gee, how are we going to see your child from up here?”

Both on stage and screen, men showing off their bits still have a laugh factor in a way that doesn’t apply to women. Think about the famous female stars who have gone completely 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 fights for gender equality, the penis is increasingly visible, sometimes surprisingly so, 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 surprised many viewers by showing an erect penis.

Additionally, Normal People, the hit 2020 drama in which a post-coital scene features actor Paul Mescal (and notably less so his co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones), caused a tremendous stir on social media.

However, not everything we see on the screen is real.

A senior “intimacy coordinator”, who prefers to remain anonymous, has said: “Male actors use prosthetics a lot, so we can infer that it is them, such as when a body double is used in a scene showing the buttocks”. .’

And the prosthetics are to make the actor look… bigger?

“Yeah, well, it’s often about size,” says the intimacy coordinator, adding that it allows the actor to focus on their performance without worrying about their appearance.

Still, the growing phenomenon of on-screen asexuality could 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,” he says.