A Hollywood Sex Scene

A Hollywood sex scene can become iconic, revolutionary in its art-form, powerful in its critique of harmful cultural beliefs, and legendary in its impact on cinema and society. A Hollywood sex scene will guarantee fodder for news articles and talk show interviews and sofa-based debates on artistic censorship and open-mindedness with buzzwords like “gratuitous” and “liberating.”

But, often silent in these conversations, behind the Hollywood sex scene lurk stories hinting at sextortion.

Sextortion

While known primarily from blackmail cases involving phone hacks and sexting, sextortion involves any non-physical coercion to perform sexual acts. This sexual exploitation exists and has been reported in virtually every scenario (police officers, judges, teachers, politicians, parents, et al.) where there exists a hierarchy of power, especially when men control a disproportionate amount of that power. Think Harvey Weinstein. Think #MeToo and #TimesUp.

A Few Words on Censorship

[Trigger Warning] The following contains several women’s descriptions of feeling pressured to perform in sex scenes.

Please do not mistake this article as taking issue with nudity or sex. I assure the reader that I disagree with censorship in the arts, along with theories that assume certain human experiences are off limits. I don’t argue against nudity or sex scenes; I argue against nudity or sex scenes that leave women feeling pressured into performing.

No one here claims that every Hollywood sex scene is sextortion. I only want to emphasize that no sex scene ever should be.

A Hollywood Sex Scene Red Flag: Disproportionate Power

Although women spend as much as men at the theaters, and with no lack of aspiring female producers and directors and actors, Hollywood’s continued gender inequality is well documented. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird enjoys the accolade of having the most perfect reviews for a feature-length film, yet she wasn’t included on the (all-male nominated) ballot for best director at the Golden Globes. In fact, only one woman, Barbara Streisand, has ever won best director at the Golden Globes, and only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won best director at the Academy Awards. Greta Gerwig is only the fifth woman ever to receive an Oscar nod for best director.

Here was Hollywood in 2017: of the top 250 films, 81% had male executive producers, 88% had male directors, 83% had male writers, 96% had male cinematographers, and 90+% had no women on set even as assistants to these male-dominated roles. Hollywood’s gender disparity looks an awful lot like Hollywood’s gender disparity twenty years ago:

Considering this imbalance of power, not surprisingly, for every dollar the top-ten highest paid male actors make, the top-ten highest paid female actors make 35 cents. Only 30% of speaking roles go to women, and of that percentage about one third are for roles that require them to be sexualized and/or nude.

So when it comes to even the most tastefully done and critically-acclaimed sex scenes or nudity, often we have to wonder if the women are involved because they want to explore their artwork in that way or due to a lack of other options. Every woman featured in this article has at one point or another talked about nudity as if it is just part of their job. Men are not as relegated to such expectations. As Derek Thompson for The Atlantic succinctly put it, “[i]f these movies collectively formed a single nation, women in this world would account for less than one-third of the workforce and two-thirds of its sex workers.”

Male-dominated power structures, lower wages for predominately younger women, and transient work contracts make up the most common factors involved for industries with the highest rates of sexual harassment. Women in industries like Hollywood with the above makeup face a 50% higher likelihood of sexual harassment; that increase is astounding when we keep in mind 80% of all women workers get sexually harassed.

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit A: Rebel Wilson

With “No nudity” written into her contract, Rebel Wilson signed on to the comedy The Brothers Gimsby. Immediately though, she realized that clause wasn’t going to stop Sacha Baron Cohen, the show’s writer, producer, and star, from pestering her about it:

“Every single day he’s like, ‘Rebel, can you just go naked in this scene?’ And I’m like, ‘No!’ Sacha and I have the same agent in America and I’m like, ‘Sacha, I’m going to call our agent Sharon and tell her how much you are harassing me.’”

“Every day he’s like, ‘Just go naked, it will be funny. Remember in Borat when I did that naked scene? It was hilarious.’ On the last day I thought I’d obviously won the argument and he got a body double to do the naked scene. Then in the last scene … he was like, ‘Rebel, can you just stick your finger up my butt?’ And I went, ‘What do you mean, Sacha? That’s not in the script.’ And he’s like, ‘Look, I’ll just pull down my pants, you just stick your finger up my butt, it’ll be a really funny bit.’ You don’t wanna be a diva so I … said ‘I’ll slap you once on the butt and that’s it.'”

It would still be harassment if Cohen were just a co-star working with Wilson, but he was also a decision-making producer and writer for the project that had a male director, male cinematographer, and nine male executive producers. Also, Cohen not only ignored Wilson’s contract, but ignored his wife, fellow The Brothers Gimsby actor Isla Fisher, who has been clear about her refusal to do nudity in comedies: “I feel like if you have a female comic character and then you see her nipples, then she is no longer funny.”

But for Wilson, Cohen insisted her naked body would be “hilarious.” He wanted to use her body as a punchline in his comedy, ignoring her contract and refusing to respect her insistent “No!”

And when he goes off script and tries to get her to do an actual sex act that she isn’t comfortable with, she feels obligated to do something. Here was a woman in a studio dominated by men. Here was a woman who felt that honoring her contract and refusing to go off-script to jam her finger into a coworker’s anus would be acting like “a diva.” In order to avoid the pejorative label, Wilson felt compelled to do something she otherwise was not going to do. Here was a woman coerced into spanking a man.

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit B: Jessica Brown Findlay

Sometimes, as a young actor makes her debut in a film or television series, what control she has over how men intend to use her body is not always clear. Jessica Brown Findlay made her big picture debut in Albatross in 2011. The 21-year old actor played a 17-year old character who has an affair with an older man and, in response to a grocer asking to see some ID to buy cigarettes, she flashes her breasts, asking “is that good enough?” as proof of her maturity:

“To be honest, ‘Albatross’ was naivety and not knowing that I could say no. I had no idea what was going to happen and thought I was going to be shot from behind.”

The scene is shot from the grocer’s perspective, so we see the breasts of the story’s teenage character. But really, we see the breasts of a woman who didn’t want or intend for us to see her chest. And why did we need to see her breasts? If the scene was meant to develop her character, then shooting from behind would still accomplish that task. The grocer was a bit character; it wouldn’t be necessary to see things from his perspective.

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit C: Mary-Louise Parker and Halle Berry

Sometimes, no matter how established an actor is in her career, what control she has over how men intend to use her body is abundantly clear. None. Mary-Louise Parker didn’t hold back about a scene she didn’t want of her lying naked in a bathtub in the show Weeds:

“I didn’t think I needed to be naked. I fought with the director about it. [. . .] I knew it was going to be on the Internet: ‘Mary Louise shows off her big nipples.’ I wish I hadn’t done that. I was goaded into it.”

Parker has no qualms with performing nude or in sex scenes, but in this case, when she couldn’t see the nudity as necessary, when she had no say in the matter, it became an issue of coercion.

When Halle Berry negotiated a contract for Swordfish, she saw that the character was required to be topless:

“[I]t was written in the script and when I was offered the part, I was told, ‘That’s who this girl is and it’s not negotiable to be taken out.'”

I wonder who told her that she could not negotiate the need to expose her breasts. The male writer? The male director? The male cinematographer? The two male executive producers?

In the end, Berry agreed to the nudity because “it showed you that the character was in control of her sexuality and very comfortable with herself.”

It’s strange that a character had more control over her sexuality than the woman playing that character.

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit D: Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos

Too often, films that sell themselves as artistic explorations of marginalized people can’t help but reveal who their audiences really are by the makeup of their decision-makers. When it comes to lesbian coming-of-age films, Blue is the Warmest Color takes the critically-acclaimed cake.

It not only became the first film adapted from a graphic novel to win the Cannes Palm d’Or (and did so by unanimous vote) but also the first film ever to win the Palm d’Or for the director and the lead actors. Many critics claimed it was 2013’s best film (73% of film critics: men), and popular review aggregator sites like Metacritic (indicated “universal acclaim”) and Rotten Tomatoes (indicated “Certified Fresh”) collected one gush of praise after another.

But in the LGBTQ* community, they were not gushing praise. Many reviewers were understandably critical of the film’s male gaze. Julie Maroh, the author of the book the film is adapted from, said about the film’s sex scenes (keep in mind the story’s main character is 15-years old),

“a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease [. . .] The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were the potential guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen [. . .] as a feminist and lesbian spectator, I cannot endorse the direction Kechiche took on these matters.”

Hollywood is already notorious for white-washing films, but here we have the practice of hetero-normalizing or straight-washing them. Blue is the Warmest Color is a story about a lesbian directed by a straight man, written for the screen by a husband and wife, and showcasing the acting talents of two heterosexual women. In fact, the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, would not allow Julie Maroh on set and refused to communicate with her when he began shooting the project, which was too bad since she would have been able to point out one glaring issue with the project: “It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians.”

Maroh probably would have also noticed how uncomfortable Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, the lead actors, were on set. Here is their (truncated) recounting of the experience in an interview with The Daily Beast:

Seydoux: The director has all the power. When you’re an actor on a film in France and you sign the contract, you have to give yourself, and in a way you’re trapped.

Exarchopoulos: He warned us that we had to trust him—blind trust—and give a lot of ourselves. [. . .] So he asked me if I was ready to make it, and I said, “Yeah, of course!” because I’m young and pretty new to cinema. But once we were on the shoot, I realized that he really wanted us to give him everything. Most people don’t even dare to ask the things that he did, and they’re more respectful [. . .]

[When asked about the difficulty of shooting the 10 minute long sex scene]

Seydoux: For us, it’s very embarrassing.

Exarchopoulos: At Cannes, all of our families were there in the theater so during the sex scenes I’d close my eyes. [Kechiche] told me to imagine it’s not me, but it’s me, so I’d close my eyes and imagined I was on an island far away, but I couldn’t help but listen, so I didn’t succeed in escaping. The scene is a little too long.

Seydoux: We spent 10 days on just that one scene. It wasn’t like, “OK, today we’re going to shoot the sex scene!” It was 10 days.

Exarchopoulos: One day you know that you’re going to be naked all day and doing different sexual positions, and it’s hard because I’m not that familiar with lesbian sex.

Seydoux: Five-and-a-half months. What was terrible on this film was that we couldn’t see the ending. It was supposed to only be two months, then three, then four, then it became five-and-a-half. By the end, we were just so tired.

Exarchopoulos: [W]e wanted to go to Paris and see our families, but he wouldn’t let us. But me, I always took trains in secret to see my boyfriend.

[When asked about their experience in all]

Seydoux: It was horrible.

Exarchopoulos: We wanted to give everything we have, but sometimes there was a kind of manipulation, which was hard to handle.

[When asked if they would work with the director again]

Seydoux: Never.

Exarchopoulos: I don’t think so. [. . .] because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [Kechiche] was screaming, “Hit her! Hit her again!” [. . .] She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, “Hit her!” and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard.

Seydoux: And during the shooting, I had to push her out of a glass door and scream, “Now go away!” and [Adèle] slapped the door and cut herself and was bleeding everywhere and crying with her nose running, and then after, [Kechiche] said, “No, we’re not finished. We’re doing it again.”

Exarchopoulos: She was trying to calm me, because we shot so many intense scenes and he only kept like 10 percent of the film. It’s nothing compared to what we did. And in that scene, she tried to stop my nose from running and [Kechiche] screamed, “No! Kiss her! Lick her snot!”

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit E: Michelle Williams and Vanessa Hudgens and Sarah Silverman and Chloë Sevigny

After her abusive experience on Blue is the Warmest Color, Adèle Exarchopoulos went to Thailand with “no cellphone, no one to tell [her] ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and ‘hit her again.’ And many actors describe their experiences after a sex scene in ways that hint at abuse.

About her experience shooting the critically-acclaimed Blue Valentine‘s most intimate scenes, Michelle Williams said,

“[W]e did the sex scenes and it was … toxic. Ryan and I had stopped relating to each other as Ryan and Michelle. Those scenes took forever. I had a long drive from set to home each night, and I would roll down all the windows and turn up the music as loud as I could and hang my head out the window like a dog and scream. It was my escape.”

Vanessa Hudgens, after filming sex scenes for Spring Breakers with James Franco, put it simply enough:

“I told my agent I never want to ever do it again.”

Sarah Silverman has gone public about how she felt violated while shooting a sex scene for a comedy (she did not specify which one):

“I was looking around going, ‘Is there gonna be a board or something between us?’ I fell on deaf ears and the next thing I knew it was happening. It hurt to walk for days . . . [I expected] someone would have thought beforehand and protected me in some way. [. . .] He is completely naked except for not even the thickness of a sock. I can completely feel his boner. He’s not even a real actor, he’s an extra. And he’s smashing me and fucking the shit out of me in the scene. I did [put on panties] but you couldn’t see. It felt very violating. It made me realize I’m a very strong woman and this happened to me. It’s not rape but it was kind of a wake-up call.”

And Chloë Sevigny, an actor who has been nude in Hollywood sex scenes for three TV shows and ten motion pictures, has said:

“When it comes to sex scenes, I’m not comfortable doing them.”

To learn that Sevigny is not comfortable doing sex scenes should encourage us to consider these scenes as problematic. In the highly praised, independent film Kids, we see her playing a teenage character and being raped while unconscious. And in The Brown Bunny, we see a close-up of her actually fellating the director/actor of the film. Regardless of the character development and the story’s needs and the artistic vision, what we witness is a woman in a sexual act that she is not comfortable being a part of.

A Hollywood Sex Scene Red Flag: The Workplace

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit F: Helen Mirren and Jimima Kirke and Mila Kunis and Olivia Wilde

Like Chloë Sevigny, Helen Mirren has done her fair share of iconic nude roles as well. And also like Sevigny, her feelings about doing so may sound surprising:

“I might seem inhibited but believe me, I’m not. I’ve always had a problem doing nudity. In fact, I hated it. It has never been a comfortable thing. I’ve never enjoyed it. It’s always mortifying. But I always felt it was something I should get over. I did those scenes because I didn’t want to be uptight.”

Just like Rebel Wilson, the pressure of a negative label damaging her career compelled her to perform in sexual acts when she did not want to. So not only are sex scenes uncomfortable for Mirren, who felt pressured into them, but she now had to perform in her discomfort in an enormous workplace:

“I was always afraid. Always. It’s not fun to be on a film set and be one of the only ones naked.”

Here’s how Jemima Kirke feels about shooting scenes where she has to get naked and simulate sex:

“They are mortifying. You’ve got hundreds of people watching.”

And Mila Kunis about shooting sex scenes for Black Swan:

“It’s hard to have a sex scene, period. It doesn’t matter if it’s a friend, a male, a female. You’re with 100-something crew members, lighting you, repositioning you, there’s no comfort whatsoever.”

And Olivia Wilde:

“There is always a particularly large and hairy man holding a boom wearing a crop top. I don’t know if they’re like, ‘Ooh, sex scene, where’s my crop top because I need to hover above Olivia, make sure my hairy belly is somewhere in the vicinity of her face.’ People imagine it’s this really glamorous and sexy thing, but I always laugh because in reality there are 50 people in the room.”

Considering the above-mentioned gender disparity in Hollywood, when these actors generously refer to all of the “people” in the room, we should understand that when a woman gets naked and simulates sex in Hollywood, she does so in a room filled with men.

A Hollywood Sex Scene Red Flag: Self-medication

Hollywood Sex Scene Exhibit G: Keira Knightley and Jennifer Lawrence and Lizzy Caplan and Margot Robbie

An alarm should sound in a studio when a woman feels so uncomfortable performing in a sex scene that she cannot do so while sober.

In order to shoot a sex scene where her character is tied to a couch and spanked (simulated), Keira Knightley had to self-medicate in order to get through the scene in A Dangerous Method:

“I did a couple of shots of vodka – definitely – beforehand, and then a couple of glasses of champagne as a celebration of never having to do that again.”

Jennifer Lawrence, for her first ever sex scene in Passengers, had to get drunk and points out why that’s so problematic:

“I got really, really drunk. But then that led to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, ‘What have I done? I don’t know.’”

As well as Lizzy Caplan when shooting her first sex scenes for Masters of Sex:

“I was so nervous and then I was so drunk that after I shot the scene I was going up to the crew members — I had just met all these people the day before — and I was going up to all of them being like [imitates drunk self], ‘You gotta boner! You do! You got one!’ It was horrible.”

And lastly, the story behind Margot Robbie’s rise to fame in The Wolf of Wall Street makes for a summation of all of these red flags involved in a Hollywood sex scene. The movie was directed by a man, adapted for screen by a man, based on a book by a man, and executively produced by a majority of men (four out of six). When it came to Margot Robbie’s character, the script only described her as the “hottest blonde ever.”

At the beginning of her career, Robbie did not see much chance of her landing a main role in a Scorsese picture, but she auditioned anyway.

“Right from the beginning of my career, I said I would never do nudity. And I’d made that clear to my team, so they all knew that from the beginning. [. . .] We never expected it to go any further than perhaps [the first round of auditions]. So we found ourselves in the predicament where Marty wanted to test me, and we then had to go back to him and say ‘she actually doesn’t want to do nudity, but the part requires nudity.’ And they came back to us, ‘well, why did she audition?’ And we said, ‘honestly, we never expected you to want to see her, so we just didn’t think this was ever going to be an issue.’ [. . .] And my team kind of sat me down and they’re like, ‘look, if there’s ever going to be a time in your career to do nudity, this is it. [. . .] So, I was so trepidatious. And for a while, I was thinking, ‘hey look, maybe it’s just not meant to be. Maybe I just shouldn’t do it.'”

It was never an option to negotiate whether or not the scenes could be filmed in a suggestive yet non-exposing way. No, the assumption was that if she wanted the part, then she would have to be the one who changes her mind about nudity. And, in the beginning of her cinematic career she already has her agents trying to convince her to do nudity, which they knew she was not comfortable with. The “if there’s ever a time to do nudity” pressure talk came at the beginning of her career. So for Robbie, there was never a time in her career to choose not to do nudity.

Eventually, she signed on to the project, and filmed the sex scenes with no degree of comfort. In one sex scene, they (read men) had her lying naked on a bed on top of fake money, and the roughness of the simulated sex on the paper bills left her back covered in paper cuts.

“I got a million paper cuts on my back from all that money! It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. If anyone is ever planning on having sex on top of a pile of cash: don’t. Or maybe real money is a bit softer, but the fake money is like paper, and when I got up off the bed, I turned around to get my robe and everyone gasped. I said, ‘What is it?’ And they said, ‘You look like you’ve been whipped a million times. Your back is covered in a thousand red scratches.'”

And in order to prepare for the film’s most famous sex scene, Robbie was so uncomfortable that she had to self-medicate:

“I did three shots of tequila at like nine in the morning, right before doing it.”

When we as an audience see her completely nude, a woman who never wanted to do a nude role in order to have a career in Hollywood, we are looking at a woman who had to take three shots of hard liquor in the morning in order to stand there naked in front of us. When talking about the character she played in The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie was tragically adding commentary on the character women are forced to play in a male-ran Hollywood:

“The whole point of Naomi is that her body is her only form of currency in this world.”

End Scene!

What also makes Robbie’s story so tragic is how interviews and glossy mags talk about her decision to grin and bare it all as if it was the best decision she made in her career. And it is hard to argue with that, considering it was that project that catapulted her to stardom. Though, I would argue nudity had nothing to do with her rise to fame. She is an incredibly talented actor. And incredibly talented actors shouldn’t have fewer roles to choose from based on their unwillingness to let men sexualize them.

If young, aspiring actors see over and over again stories spun in this way, then it will always be the status quo. And such a norm leaves vulnerable up-and-comers all the more vulnerable. The above stories came from a few days of research and in no way assume to be exhaustive. I doubt this article scratches the surface.

For one, it deals predominately with white, able-bodied, heterosexual women. If the industry leaves little room for them, then I can’t even imagine how exploitative it becomes for marginalized women with even less power and even fewer roles to choose from.

Something sick about the research exists in the sources I found these stories in. They were not found in investigative journalism but right there in the buzzy limelight of popular click bait and marketing tours promoting a studio’s latest product. The institutional sextortion of women in a profession should not be the juicy scoop in gossip mags or the laugh-track cue for an interview.