When I think of classic movie sex scenes, I reach for the obvious. Good: the languorous marital congress between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now. Heinous: the “butter scene” in Last Tango in Paris. Each tells us something about how sex works on film, reaching beyond the action on screen to the unconscious material we’re picking up on. Despite the fact that Don’t Look Now was filmed on a camera whirring as loud as “a Singer sewing machine on methamphetamines” (Sutherland), everyone thought they were doing it for real because they really seemed to get into it, and because the sex is stylishly intercut with footage of them dressing for dinner afterwards in a scene of affecting, mundane intimacy.
Last Tango in Paris was developed from the sexual fantasies of its director, Bernardo Bertolucci. Its lead actress, Maria Schneider, had no idea that Marlon Brando was going to use a knob of butter in the simulated rape scene. The details weren’t in her script – they’d been held back for a more “realistic” reaction. Schneider’s movie tears are real: she never fully recovered from the humiliation, and her protests over the years helped consign the film to the ick bucket.
How many of us had ever thought about what’s really going on in movie sex scenes? I know I hadn’t. Game of Thrones started filming in 2010, and the actress Gemma Whelan (Yara Greyjoy) later described its copious rogering as a “frenzied mess… They used to say, ‘When we shout action, just go for it.’” Ita O’Brien, who’d come up through the world of movement and choreography in the drama schools of London, saw a gap in the market for an intimacy coordinator, paid to be on set to ensure that sex scenes “deepen our understanding of characters”, that actors and directors behave themselves and flesh-coloured garments remain in place. Just in time for the #MeToo movement, her work helped lift the veil on an area of cultural life that we see but don’t see. Who came up with that move? The director? The co-star? Was the other actor OK with it? Could they say if they weren’t? And why does that actor have no pubes? Was he told to shave them off?
O’Brien has produced an exhaustive handbook of her work in the film industry which doubles up as a kind of intimacy manual for you and me. Once upon a time, movie sex scenes used to be our porn, but now we have actual porn for that. More now than ever, in our phone-filled life, the screen is a mirror, and in O’Brien’s eyes the intimacy we see on screen can have a profound effect on “real” experience. If sex is represented dishonestly, it makes us less honest and open with our partners, she says. Working as intimacy coordinator on Normal People and I May Destroy You, Gillian Anderson’s Sex Education and Gentleman Jack, she has become known for sex scenes of a different nature: sex with periods, condoms, or with someone asking someone else if it hurts. All of this resonates with a younger audience raised on the alienating impossibility of pneumatic porn stars – the same generation, we hear year-on-year, who are having less and less sex.
Sex gurus fascinate me: how did they end up there, making a living talking about something no one else can talk about? O’Brien is 60 and her biography is perfect: a childhood in rural Ireland, a Catholic girls’ school – then dancing topless in a troupe in Asia. She endured regional panto where household-name comedians of the 1980s and 1990s would expect sexual servicing from their chorus girls, and her first TV job was on The Benny Hill Show, where she wore a Victorian dress with a hole cut at the cleavage in which Hill (“a very sweet man”) stood his menu card. Now, a lifetime later, she resides in Kent, enjoying night-time stretching routines under the stars, and travelling the world spreading intimacy work in her tiny field of one or two. “My expertise has led me to the point where I can walk out and help create a sex scene as a body dance where everyone feels safe and everyone feels empowered,” she says.
Her long list of intimacy guidelines is now in place throughout the film industry, though some points remain ambiguous, such as the instruction that tongues should be avoided in kissing as standard practice “unless the director feels it would serve the scene better to use tongues”.
There is no dirt in this book, on O’Brien herself, or specific actors, or films. The most interesting story is that of Dakota Johnson, who starred in the Fifty Shades of Grey films and, these days, promotes a line of ungendered sex toys. But there are universal truths about sex and intimacy. “In explicit sexual scenes, we nearly always see spontaneous penetration after perhaps 30 seconds of kissing. Is that how it happens in your life? No!”
She points out that intimacy is first and foremost about a relationship with oneself; that desire in long-term relationships is reactive rather than spontaneous, for men as well as women; that it’s normal to feel like you can’t be bothered. When she asserts that no real human is able to activate instant “sex mode” at the end of a long day, I thought of couples in films who get back to the flat and slam each other into the wall. She believes that “Tuesday sex” – her word for average weekday sex that isn’t great and isn’t crap either – is the stuff of life. “It’s the same when you go to see a play. Nine times out of ten you might just vaguely enjoy it – and then once in a while it will absolutely hit the spot.”
There are surprising sketches of differently shaped organs, entire sections devoted to deep breathing and chakras, and a nine-step guide to walking barefoot in the garden (point seven: “It is good to have tissues or a towel with you to clean your feet ready to put your socks and shoes back on.”) But the urge to mock reflects the very problem she’s trying to get to grips with – our embarrassment, our struggle to access a sensuous relationship with ourselves, to know what we want and then ask for it. It is largely unsexy to read about – just as Tuesday sex isn’t something you’d actually want to watch.
Or is it? Maybe one day it will be. O’Brien is evangelical about her work, foreseeing “a utopia where society is shaped around communication and authentic connection”. She imagines a fundamental change in ethics as we teach actors to mirror the most empathic conversations about intimacy in their words and movements on screen. Yet I confess that all the way through this book I was muffling an adolescent snigger. If film stars get too good at this stuff – if every kiss is deeply workshopped and consensual, and every sex scene choreographed “to build an increasing intensity of heat, so you can see the stages of a sexual encounter rather than an instant reaction”, then there will be a whole new kind of chaos in the movie industry, and a whole new kind of film.
Intimacy: A Field Guide to Finding Connection and Feeling Your Deep Desires
Ita O’Brien
Ebury, 384pp, £16.99
[See also: Bridget Jones’s hollow feminism]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 25 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency