WORDS ANNA SHEERAN
On 12 January, Lena Dunham’s brilliant and divisive Girls will be returning to HBO for a third season, bringing more uncomfortable sex scenes to our screens. Girls and other emerging shows differ from what we have come to expect from representations of sex on television in its portrayal of the female body and its refusal to signify what can be shown. Yet the limits placed on what we see are themselves problematic.
Dunham’s portrayal of the young, white middle-class “girls” seems to fit into the ambivalent category of postfeminism, in which gender equality is achieved yet somehow unsatisfactory. The same could be said about much of what we see on television. Sexual politics are frequently glossed over in a manner that would have been impossible in the past. Avoiding so much as an implication of sex in the 50s, America’s I Love Lucy depicted husband and wife, Lucy and Ricky (though played by a married couple) sleeping in separate beds. Couples talking in bed (and unnecessarily turning the light on to do so) became a feature of television shows in the 60s, and in 70s Ireland The Riordans was provoking discussion about sexual activity, illegitimacy and contraception. The show may have been condemned for raising these issues, yet it ensured they weren’t ignored in mainstream culture. The representation of sex on television happened gradually, through suggestion and implication, and the controversies that were sparked were more often to do with sexual politics than how sex was portrayed on screen. Now that sex is commonplace on post-watershed television, the issues it raises can seem equally unremarkable. When nothing is scandalous, nothing is discussed.
Girls opened a discussion. The graphic sex Lena Dunham’s Hannah has is seldom satisfying, frequently humiliating, and almost invariably determined by the influence of pornography. The damaging nature of this influence is made apparent by the normality of Dunham’s body, which she freely exposes to further her argument: girls do not look like porn stars, and are not obliged to act like them. Dunham has called the show a “rebuke to porn” and expressed dismay on discovering a porn parody of Girls was in the making. However, Catherine Scott of The Independent has scathingly declared she will not be “watching a plump young woman having disempowered, demeaning sex and claiming it as a feminist victory”. Yet Dunham’s figure is not the show’s “feminist victory”. The issues of degrading sex, sexual health, abortion and the stigma that has developed around virginity are raised with both humour and authenticity, acknowledging that much of what needs to be taken seriously cannot be coped with without laughter.
Of course there’s no reason to wait until January for an honest sex scene. Masters of Sex, still in its first season, depicts the revolutionary scientific study by William Masters and Virginia Johnson that began in 1957. The series has a glamour lacking in the many more factual sexual education style programmes (such as the intriguingly named but spectacularly dull Unprotected Sex in the City). The study’s aim to demystify sex is mirrored in Michelle Ashford’s directing, and the discomfortingly analytical voyeurism of Michael Sheen’s Masters reflects that of the show’s audience. The sex we see is seldom romanticised, save in Ethan’s (Nicholas D’Agosto) obviously unhealthy obsession with Virginia (Lizzy Caplan), a romance undermined by his comic equation of love with fellatio. As in Girls, the signifiers that so often stand in for visual representations of sex are stripped away. In the opening credits, we are presented with a boy meets girl moment in which the three stages of sex explored in the study are replaced by images with obvious Freudian implications. Instead of arousal, plateau and orgasm we see a towel drop to the floor, a train entering a tunnel, rockets launching, volcanoes erupting… Such suggestion parodies representations of sex in other programmes. The object or action onto which desire is displaced becomes fetishised, such as the disturbing sexualisation in The Fall of a father and serial killer washing his daughter’s hair after washing the hair of a naked female corpse. Both Masters of Sex and the research it dramatizes struggle to separate sex from the “smut” condemned by the hospital’s provost. However, while Masters is fascinated by an older couple who are still sexually active, on screen they are seen but not heard. Homosexual activity, deemed “deviant” by Masters, is excluded from the study, his later work even including a program to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality. It is difficult to gauge whether Ashford limits queer sex to “fade to black” scenes in order to reflect the attitudes of 1957 or the prejudices of 2013.
Sex is not always accompanied by a progressive agenda. Unashamed eroticism can be found almost everywhere. Game of Thrones had an alleged average of 5.6 breasts per episode in the first season, and very little male nudity. The sex shown on-screen is deliberately provocative: incest and the violent misogyny of rape and prostitution recur more frequently than common or garden sex, yet what should be the comparatively tame ground of homosexual relations is shied away from. The practice of setting scenes in brothels while ignoring the commodification of women, also evident in Love/Hate, Boardwalk Empire and many others, reflects the chauvinism of the show itself. The scene in which a young squire is stunned to be given his money back for simultaneously pleasing three or four prostitutes so much they refuse to be paid is comical not for his unintentional success, but for the obviousness with which the series panders to the fulfillment of an insecure male’s fantasy.
It is often forgotten, but women have fantasies too. Bad sex and scientific experiments, though realistic, are far from erotic. In a hilarious online video — HBO Should Show Dongs — the impossible is demanded. No channel will show an erect penis. It’s the rule. If it’s not hard, it’s just not erotic (see Hannah’s father falling out of the shower in Girls and an eyeful of Hodor in Game of Thrones). Yet the representation of a woman’s arousal is somehow deemed acceptable, female orgasms are considered unthreatening, not quite pornography. Technicalities aside (yes, it is possible for a woman to fake an orgasm, so there doesn’t have to be actual arousal involved to get it on camera), there is a dismissal of female sexuality involved in this distinction. If sex scenes are acceptable without an erect penis, there is an implied prioritisation of the male: without the phallus it just doesn’t count as sex.
Whether you like your sex explicit or signified, , eroticised, or even politicised, there is probably a show to meet your needs. Yet every representation is to varying degrees a misrepresentation: all depictions of sex are in some way “-ised”.
