Movies and television give us a lot of great things: characters to love and hate, witty lines to quote, and an excuse to stare intently at Ryan Gosling (or any other actor/actress of choice).
One area they tend to fall down in, however, is sex. If pop culture was your only reference point for what sex is like in real life, you’d be screwed.
Yes, there have been some great, realistic portrayals of sex on our screens — and we do understand there’s an element of ‘make believe’ at play here — but on the whole movies and TV have been telling us some pretty big lies about the glorious mess that is getting it onnnn. Here are 23 of them, in order of appearance.
1. “Foreplay”… What is “foreplay”?
Movie sex tends to escalate quickly. One minute a pair of characters lock eyes; the next, they’re having simultaneous orgasms. When viewers are treated to a slice of pre-action action, it’s not often a man performing oral sex on a woman.
2. “The Sexy Sink”.
You know — the sex scene trope where two characters start kissing, their passion visibly augments, and then their bodies just mysteriously begin sinking towards the ground in perfect synchrony… But we never actually see how they transition from awkward gradual kneel to hot sex. How does it work?
3. Bras are a snap to remove.
Fact: bras are hard to take off. Even for bra wearers, that whole ‘one-handed-snap-off’ move is difficult — so imagine what it’s like when you’re expected to maintain eye contact and/or kissing energy at the same time. In reality, there’s usually at least four seconds of fumbling (and some frustrated grunting) before it comes off.
4. Taking clothing off is both easy and sensual.
Did we mere mortals somehow miss the high school lesson on ‘sexily wriggling out of underwear while lying horizontal on a bed’? It certainly looks like it. Clothes can be very complex things, with any combination of buttons, zips, press-studs, buckles and/or laces to contend with, not to mention pesky things like feet that can trip you over. If only velcro were more fashionable, right?