“rough” first draft #1 — let’s talk about (onscreen) sex.

tackling my perfectionism head-on means desensitizing the drafting, editing, and publishing experience through repeated exposure. in this “rough” first draft series, i’ll share very lightly-edited essays. some, i’ll give a full edit. others, i won’t. writing and releasing is the goal.

we’re having less sex. did you know?

for the past 10ish years, i’ve been consumed with the impact of our conversations about sex. gen X, millennials, gen Z broadly as undersexed generations in our 20s 30s and 40s and beyond, partly because of how much talking we’ve been doing. how much sharing. ecstatic experiences and horror stories. we have learned from one another’s words and experiences in ways we haven’t fully reckoned with. gen X vividly experienced the impact of the AIDS crisis in their adolescence, which undoubtedly shifted their casual sex thoughts and behaviors (i’d argue more then former than the latter) – about fear, about mortality, about trauma in ways that changed how they talked about sex.

millennials grew up and inherited that fear and trauma, in homes with gen Xers as siblings or parents, constant conversations about contraception combined with propaganda and campaigns about the power of abstinence, and the horrors of teenage pregnancy – think of the popularity of “teen mom” shifting millennial minds and making us witness firsthand the difficulties of parenthood, especially motherhood, on young people, which has directly led to a steep and steady decline in teenage pregnancy in the US. many of our parents were not having healthy or any conversations with us about sex and so we were mainly left to navigate this world on our own or learning from one another and from again, an older generation with completely understandable trauma. millennials and gen X also experienced the internet introduction and explosion during key points of our life (adolescence and early adulthood) – exploring sex in conversations with our peers and people way older than should’ve been speaking to us. we have spent a great deal of time over the past i’ll say 20 years talking about sex very openly on the internet, primarily sharing bad stories and commiserating with one another about the horrors of casual sex. while now in 2026, there are moments for people to share they are having fulfilling love lives and marginalized groups and allies are doing the work to earnestly drag us into a pleasure-centered sex, not movement, but just conversation that we’re having much more often – we STILL spend a great deal of time talking about how shitty sex is in real life and have done so for a long time.

the idea that gen Z would grow up, thinking that sex is not important or it is a place of fear not necessarily because of health like millennials and gen X would’ve approached it, but because of lack of pleasure or it doesn’t offer you an opportunity to have a good time, makes total sense to me. when you also consider that this younger generation has grown up in a time of hyper-perception and social media (your whole existence is online before you know who you are), their lack of comfort with sex due to it being a place where you and your body have to be perceived and present in order for it to be fulfilling and be willing to be uncomfortable in the presence of another person, it is largely unsurprising that they would grow to be uncomfortable with sex in general.

let’s take all of that as the context for approaches to the presence of sex and physical intimacy in visual media. it’s been very refreshing to see either younger millennials, folks at that gen Z-millennial cusp, and gen Z proper who have a healthier approach to onscreen simulated sex, particularly those who are actors or in creative spaces. hudson williams in particular has spoken on this topic during the HR press run.

seeing this in younger people makes me encouraged, because they tend to understand both the role of sex as part of story AND the impact of consensual and healthy stimulated sex environments you know, especially in partnership with an intimacy coordinator. knowing that these young people would’ve been the same ones bombarded with negative reactions about casual sex as well as the uncovering of negative and harmful experiences that actors and actresses have had on sets that were unsafe and didn’t end up producing scenes that looked very good or felt crucial to the story being told, makes me encouraged. they’re able to recognize the importance and impact of art and demand that it be created safely and collaboratively.

but this is of course not all young people. while it is understandable that younger folks would have a pushback to any sex being shown on television or film, i worry about this idea of “gratuitousness” in art because i think it allows for the audience to hold beliefs that that the presence of sex onscreen equals an unsafe environment, and being made to see it means being made to feel unsafe as an audience. and i push back on that – i don’t think the care about the safety of the performers on sets during these intimacy scenes needs to come with what amounts to puritanical views about sex and casual sex from the audience. we’ve just seen that we can have collaborative and consent-heavy sets create simulated sex scenes that feel real. erotic and intimate and lived in.

furthermore, sex moves the plot forward in our lives. in history. the idea that we would not have sex at all in our onscreen stories feels silly to me. i think we can get to a place – and i believe chala hunter and her work on heated rivalry is a fantastic example of it – where the intensity and the desire is being showcased onscreen in a way that feels consistent with humanity, while the experience for the actors themselves is one that is incredibly safe and judgment-free and exciting. it’s a place of creativity and collaboration. we now know that people don’t have to be at risk or feel like they’re having negative, out of body experiences or worse harmful experiences as part of filming simulated sex for our television and film stories. i don’t want to get to a place where more and more people are comfortable saying we simply should not have sex and television and film. because again while it sounds like a point that cares about safety first and foremost and it maybe even DOES care first and foremost, it is telling us a lot more about the growing thoughts around casual sex. even seeing sex itself right as something that is useless or providing no function in our own lives, and therefore has no place in story. it begins to treat sex as a commodity and not something that could realistically be part of a story. or be real at all. i fear a society with young people believing that, because what it’s telling us is that they don’t believe sex is a place for pleasure or learning or communication and more than that they don’t believe that it could even be portrayed as that in television and film. when we start to get into conversations of the utility and function of leisure, pleasure, fun, my alarm bells sound. i worry we have commodified the human existence to a point where we can pick and choose what we think of as necessary to be seen in portrayals of human life, despite us, knowing that in our real lives, these things DO have meaning, and they create obstacles and challenges, but also introduce serendipity and exploration and learning and knowledge and awareness.

i am encouraged by the stories we’ve been receiving lately, notably in 2025, bringing us intimacy in various forms (successful and not) in partnership with intimacy coordinators. i believe that we are fighting against audience’s distaste with sex and making them reckon with their own thoughts about sex and the use of it in story. i think of perfidia in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025) – a large piece of contention with her character is in being hypersexual, particularly as a Black woman. while i do have a great deal of criticisms about paul thomas anderson’s adaptation of vineland, the hypersexuality of perfidia is not necessarily an immediate problem to me because hypersexual people exist and their behavior complicates real lives. the idea that i can’t see a hypersexual person on screen, whose behavior is complicating their lives, is bothersome to me. and i understand it is difficult to see that in a Black woman, especially as a fellow Black woman, particularly when we don’t have nearly enough presentations of Black women as “standard” characters in television and film, and not roles where it feels like her race is the key piece of who she is in ways that strip her of power instead of granting it. i think of kink and how few onscreen stories we have (that don’t feel made for white, cishetero, vanilla audiences), and recognize the less than ideal impact that 50 SHADES OF GREY (2015) had on that very portrayal. being seen as deviant by the general population AND as frustrating and harmful by the kink community itself. i think of far too many onscreen queer stories directly linking the passion and danger of casual encounters to traumatic endings for characters, leading audiences to not want to see the ecstasy because it undoubtedly comes with a tragic ending. and i can see this character, this slice of sexual life, and these stories leading people to believe that because it’s not being done well, it shouldn’t be done at all. but my argument is to GET BETTER AT IT. i don’t want to accept that we shouldn’t portray the plethora of sexual experiences that exists within humanity because we’re uncomfortable. let’s get more comfortable by testing things out and exploring and learning on the way there. sex is a really big piece of human life. it needs to exist in our art. that feels radical to say, but i have to say it.

i’m hopeful we will continue to keep talking about the way sex shows up on screen because i believe we can get to a place where the behind the camera experience is so comfortable that it allows us to feel confident enough about what we’re seeing onscreen. and that’s not to say that intimacy scenes can’t be interrogated. it’s not to say we can’t ask. we can always ask “what is the purpose of sex in this story?” or “do we feel like the scene is working?” these questions will still persist and i think they should because critique shouldn’t go away simply because we believe that sex has a place in onscreen media. alongside relearning and believing sex’s place in story, i absolutely do want us to reckon with actor and performer safety. i want us to continue to understand intimacy coordination as an area of expertise. i want increased access for intimacy coordinators – numbers, opportunities, and demographic backgrounds. i want performers from marginalized groups feeling safe within these environments. i very much appreciate that chala hunter has consistently upfront about being research-driven in her work as an intimacy coordinator, about having pedagogy that she’s referencing and building upon, one that is antiracist and trauma-informed and consent-forward. all of this is massively important. i’m grateful for subject matter experts like amber rose mcneill, who take the time to do the brave and incredible task of helping us understand the art and science of intimacy coordination with us on social media and beyond, providing thorough breakdowns as a way for us to understand context, how the choreography and language is developed as part of (ideally) collaborative partnerships, as well as how the story is being executed through the simulated sex scenes themselves.

i want us to get to a place where we understand the purpose and the significance of keeping sex as a part of storytelling that we see on screen, enough to interrogate the art and how it was created and not our comfort as the key area where critique should be focused. asking art to prioritize our comfort feels…i don’t know, really. i fear how swiftly we can pivot into placing sex into an even tinier box than the one it’s existed in societally for centuries. it is so swift to move from “why do we need to see sex onscreen?” to casual sex or any sex is toxic – we know this because we’re basically there. young people being the primary holders of this belief or at least ones feeling more comfortable saying it scares me very much because it closes them off from sexual experiences that could safely and consensually enlighten them.

also, the idea that we’ve “progressed” past needing to see sex onscreen when we haven’t even grazed the surface of the types of stories we’re telling in television and film is preposterous. room has yet to be made for everyone and all the while marginalized creators consistently work to MAKE ROOM. we don’t yet have enough stories from Black, brown, indigenous, queer, kink, trans, poly, demisexual voices being showcased. we haven’t had enough representations of sex within these types of partnerships and relationships in order for them to not be tokenized the first or second or even the third time we see them. i can’t say it makes sense to remove sex from media when we haven’t seen it in all its forms yet. and when i know it’s clear we’re deeply uncomfortable the presentation of sex, even sex that’s largely white and hetero and cisgender, you’ve never going to hear me say “you’re right! we’ve had enough sex.” no. NO.

one of the many reasons i think heated rivalry is so important is because it presents pleasure-forward, desire-led sexual experiences with young people AND we know through information shared during the press run, that these scenes were created in the setting that tierney and hunter developed and fostered for hudson williams and connor storrie to be safe and to feel like they could explore. we got story-relevant sex that’s hot as hell and it was created safely. we got the ideal circumstance. the magic we’re seeing on screen is that safety and that room for collaboration and that commitment to the material that they were given and the choreography on the part of the intimacy coordinator. we can get these types of scenes where we have people who care about putting forward something that feels true, if not true to real life at least true to the story, and those same people care about the experience of bringing the story to life being one that is healthy and safe. knowing we can have exactly what we want makes me want to fight harder for it; not argue that we don’t need sex at all. i think we need to keep having conversations about what sex can mean for story and keep having conversations about the need for more support and more care put into portraying the scenes on screen.

and lastly, as we bask in the glow of heated rivalry and understand the impact it already has and will undoubtedly have on simulated sex scenes we see in the future, i also am incredibly encouraged by the possibilities of what it’s season two could mean. while season one presented us with an image of a sex forward, physical relationship that transformed and transitioned into love over an extensive period of time, the overall story is one we’re used to – strangers to lovers. not often do we explore what happens next as a couple, and not with a story that will introduce new problems on a path to deeper connection and a happily ever after or happy for now. this is a romance here. and we basically never see committed with sex as a place of consistent communication for them while the internal and external pressures mount around them. desire is usually where the threats to established partnerships lie. jealousy, infidelity, questions about monogamy and emotional cheating, etc. we’ve yet to, or i can’t remember the last time when, we’ve seen a committed couple where desire is not the area where they’re being tested. and we will here. i won’t go fully into the long game spoilers, but i think the second season has an opportunity to be even more revolutionary with its intimacy coordination and presentation of onscreen sex because we will be able to see an established desire-led relationship, one that is being strengthened through sex. if it’s done right, it will provide us with an opportunity to see how sex can (and does) function as a consistent form of communication in partnership that may be dealing with internal and external pressures. not only do i find it personally important for romance media, and especially the series in particular to push back against the idea that love confessions mean what was previously hot and intense must now shift into something that feels much more romantic and intimate, but i think it’s important in the lessons that we want our young people to learn about sex and through portrayals of sexual experiences. it is impactful for young people to be able to see this prioritization of pleasure and desire as a form of consistent communication and a language that partners are capable of speaking to one another, even if they’re not comfortable baring their souls before they are together as a couple or even after.