Is the Sex in Movies Realistic?
How reel sex stacks up against real-world lovers
We’ve seen these stories in movies since the beginning of celluloid film: Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love, sometimes after some level of game playing. Boy and girl ride off into the sunset together.
And during the trip, they have passionate sex that sizzles the screen. But how realistic are the sex scenes we see in movies compared to what we experience in the real world?
In order to find out, ZAVA viewed 50 movies — including The Notebook, Shakespeare in Love, Wild Things, Ghost, and My Summer of Love — and spoke to 2,000 people about their sex lives in order to compare the reel world to the real world. Researchers found several key differences between movie intimacy and the sex lives of the people they surveyed.
Foreplay
We know that in the real world, foreplay can be a huge, and enjoyable, part of sexual experiences and study participants confirmed this with 69 percent of people saying they participate in some kind of foreplay every time they have sex. However, characters in movies don’t seem as concerned with foreplay, since only 27 percent of movies included foreplay in their sex scenes.
