Welcome to Long Live the Sex Scene, a special project by Cosmopolitan that explores why these steamy television and movie moments truly matter, especially right now. Join us as we rewind, replay, and then rewind them all over again.
Over the summer, more than 450 people over the age of 18 took our survey all about sex scenes, which yielded some surprising results. For instance—despite those claims about Generation Z being more puritanical and prudish than previous generations—we found that the vast majority of our Gen Z respondents (a whopping 86 percent, to be precise) love seeing sex in film and TV. We were also excited to learn about the differences in what straight respondents were looking for in sex scenes as opposed to queer respondents.
Of those 450+ folks surveyed, 26 percent reported something other than “straight” as their sexual orientation. And of those LGBTQIA+ respondents, only 46 percent expressed a preference for sex scenes with full nudity (whereas 61 percent of heterosexual respondents said yes to seeing more skin onscreen). Similarly, 76 percent of queer respondents told us they don’t think a good sex scene requires any nudity at all, as opposed to the 67 percent of straight respondents.
So...does this mean that LGBTQIA+ audiences aren’t into nudity? Of course not. It just seems that—of the group we surveyed, which includes folks who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, and other—nudity isn’t as high a priority in a sex scene as it is for our straight respondents. What is a bigger priority? Representation.
While 67 percent of LGBTQIA+ respondents said they enjoy watching sex scenes with queer characters, only 15 percent of straight respondents like to see queer sex onscreen, which...is pretty telling, no? With so few queer love stories depicted in TV shows and movies, it’s not a big surprise that queer audiences don’t necessarily need to see non-hetero folks getting naked to have sex—they just want to see non-hetero folks having sex, period.
Until we get more of that, at least we have season 1 of The Hunting Wives and that scene between Margo and Sophie in episode 4 (you know the one).
