Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America

Product Information

Troche’s debut feature, a lighthearted and low-budget lesbian love story, won the Teddy for Best Feature at the Berlin Film Festival. Starring Caroline Ducey and real-life porn star Rocco Siffredi, Catherine Breillat’s art-house stunner about a frustrated French libertine opened the floodgates for explicit content within serious works of cinema. Still, not a great first-date film.

Finally, someone in the MCU has sex. Two people, in fact. The remarkably well-preserved centuries-old couple Sersi and Ikaris enjoy a PG tumble in a break from baddy-fighting. In what Varietydescribed at the time as ‘a masterpiece of discreet romantic eroticism,’ Sally (Fonda) and Luke (Voight) finally consummate their burgeoning romance. His handicap is the elephant in the room, but it does nothing to diminish the quality of their sex – in fact, Sally enjoys her first orgasm. There are many to choose from but perhaps the most controversial is a central hookup involving a hustler with a prosthetic leg and a john with an amputee fetish. No sex. This was 1946 after all. But Notoriousfeatures what is possibly the steamiest, most erotic kiss in the history of film.Sébastien Lifshitz’s award-winning film is a portrait of Stéphanie (Michelini), a transgender Frenchwoman somewhat suspended in love between her two roommates: Djamel (Yasmine Belmadi), an Algerian hustler, and Mikhail (Nikitine), a Russian soldier gone AWOL. The movie is loaded with illicit trysts but the sexiest thing in Unfaithfulis Lane's flushed face as she rides Metro-North home, the memories of a sweaty afternoon playing in her head. Having spent their beach trip scrambling the boys’ image of themselves and their sexuality, Verdú initiates a threesome where, in their orgiastic delirium, Luna and Bernal share a sudden, passionate kiss. A love story? Or a porn film? Michael Winterbottom’s indie romance has been called both for its portrayal of a twentysomething couple in London having sex (real-life rather than simulated) and then going out to gigs.

When 20th-century kids Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon are mysteriously beamed into the monochrome world of 1950s TV show Pleasantville, they bring with them a whole lot of new and dangerous ideas. The film A sunlit crime caper that goes dark in the second half, Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation pairs Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney as a US marshal and career bank robber who turn a cat-and-mouse pursuit into a seriously unlikely but still deeply believable romance. Up there with Some Like it Hotand Annie Hall, this is one of the all-time rom-com greats. Sally (Ryan) and Harry (Crystal) stay friends for over 12 years – through traumas, break-ups and divorce – before they realize they’re made for each other.While nailed to the cross, an angel appears to Jesus and leads him on a guided hallucination of the life he might have lead. That life includes Jesus fathering a child with Mary Magdalene, and it turns out that sex is the best way to do that. Sure, it’s all a dream, and thus rather theologically protected, but that didn’t stop people from losing their minds over it.