The Quiet Oppression of “Simulated Sex” on our Public Entertainers
Debates about sexualized films and TV shows often revolve around how they affect children and adolescents. Such a focus, however, is myopic. More attention — or, rather, more serious attention — should be given to how simulated sex affects the actors themselves.
As it turns out, “simulated sex” is something of a misnomer.
To some, that may sound like a radical statement. As practically any moviegoer will say, “Mainstream sex scenes are pretend — no one’s actually having sex.” But this is one area where conventional wisdom diverges from reality.
Part of the problem is that our standard for what constitutes “sexual” has grown illogically narrow. The “no penetration means ‘not sexual’” paradigm contradicts what we acknowledge in most any other setting. For instance, sexual abuse, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are all rightly deemed sexual; the lack, or presence, of penetration might determine the degree of an offense, but not its nature.
Reducing sex to mere penetration makes no more sense than reducing a meal to eating dessert, or reducing the Olympics to the closing ceremonies, or reducing a story to its climax. The sex act involves a domino effect of progressions, culminating — not beginning — with penetration. Sex cannot be defined merely by how it ends.
In narrowing our definition of sex, we’ve grown accustomed to sexual content in our entertainment that affects, and even damages, the consciences of the actors who are asked to perform them. What’s more, much of the “asking” actually involves bullying and intimidation by directors and studio executives.
With Harvey Weinstein in our rearview mirror, we’re more aware of the sexual coercion that takes place both behind and in front of the camera. Such coercion can affect actors at all levels of stardom, including Emilia Clarke, Salma Hayek, and Evangeline Lilly.
But even when outright bullying is not present, actors can still experience an acute sense of violation, as evidenced by the testimonies of Jennifer Lawrence, Margot Robbie, and Sienna Miller, among others.
The sexual violation inherent in many so-called simulated sex scenes becomes more apparent when we listen to the terms actors use to describe their experiences: “awful” (Eva Mendes), “awkward” (Zoe Saldana), “mortifying” (Jemima Kirke), “shell-shocked” (Dakota Johnson), “toxic” (Michelle Williams), “traumatic” (Natalie Dormer), and “terrified” (Reese Witherspoon) — to cite just a few. These are sobering and revealing words.
To moviegoing audiences, sexual imagery is no big deal, just something extra to relish, or endure, or skip over (depending on one’s preferences). But the ways in which we treat the wellbeing of our entertainers is not a trivial matter. Not if the golden rule is to have any sway on our collective conscience.
As someone who writes regularly on this topic, I once had a friend ask me why I didn’t concentrate more on excessive violence rather than something that is, as he put it, “a beautiful and necessary part of human existence?” But it is far from beautiful, and nowhere close to necessary, to pressure actors (either literally or through the enforcement of oppressive cultural norms) to sexualize themselves for our entertainment. Such content is, in a very real sense, violent — not necessarily physically (although sex scenes can sometimes be that too), but emotionally and psychologically.
To be sure, there are some actors who claim to enjoy filming sexually charged scenes. They find such experiences “great [and]…fun” (Amanda Seyfried), or “quite a turn-on” (Hugh Grant), or even “the world’s best job perk” (Mindy Kaling). These responses only serve to reinforce the points made above. Both sexual disgust and sexual delight point to the sexual nature of these scenes. Just as some are turned off by certain sex acts while others are turned on by them, so the response varies to filming sex scenes.
When our society artificially de-sexualizes inherently sexual acts, we lose the value, scope, and gravity of sex. There are disagreements about where proper sexual boundaries lie, but a general, low-bar point of agreement is that sex is something special, something that loses its value if experienced indiscriminately and without the participants’ wholehearted consent.
And yet we fully accept the indiscriminate portrayal of sex acts in our mainstream entertainment, sometimes even without the wholehearted consent of its participants. We may not have completely reduced actors to dispensable pawns like in the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome. But our reductionist view of sex has reduced the humanity of our public performers. And when we reduce the humanity of others, we lose some of our own humanity as well.