Why Does Hollywood Ignore The Pleasures Of Casual Sex?

“We should go see Friends With Benefits,” he said. “See if it’s anything like us.”

“Meh,” I replied. “It’s not like us at all. They fall in love.”
I’m sitting in the kitchen while my former friend-with-benefits is making dinner. He’s doing the cooking and I’m the skivvy – washing dishes, rinsing vegetables and pouring drinks. I’m staying over and tonight we will be sleeping together. We’re like an old married couple. We used to have sex, and on occasion, we still share the same bed, only now pyjamas are involved.
If life were like the movies, we would have fallen in love years ago. Instead we were friends, then friends with benefits, and now just plain old friends again. I love him, he loves me, we tell each other this frequently, but we are not in love with one another. In some ways it’s a pity, because I admire many things about him. He’s smart, funny, considerate, he cooks; we like a lot of the same films, books and music; and to top it all off, he’s very easy on the eye. But whatever that thing is that makes you want to spend the rest of your life in an exclusive relationship with someone, we just don’t have it.
If you are not keen on one night stands and have yet to feel the stirrings of romantic love, a friends-with-benefits scenario seems to be the perfect compromise. A 2007 study by the University of Michigan found that around 60% of college students had had a casual sexual relationship with a friend. These relationships were seen as offering a safe environment for casual sex.
Despite the lack of commitment inherent in a FWB relationship, the Michigan study found that over 65% of couples worried that feelings might develop, and that these would be unreciprocated. That is certainly a risk, particularly if you enter a FWB relationship hoping for something more than sex and friendship.
Nearly a third of the Michigan study respondents were also concerned that sex might ruin their friendship. Again, that’s a possibility too, but it is hardly set in stone. Sex may change the nature of a friendship, but in my experience, this is not necessarily for the worse.
What is unlikely is that a FWB relationship will result in a committed one. Unlike the film Friends With Benefits or No Strings Attached, released earlier this year, the study found that only one in ten FWB relationships become romances.
Hollywood it seems is incapable of producing a film about sex buddies with even a vaguely realistic ending. Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached are supposedly sex comedies, but really they are rom-coms with a slightly risqué flavour. Perhaps that’s not so surprising. Despite its reputation as a town saturated with sin, Hollywood’s filmic output is more likely to promote conservative social values than challenge them. In Hollywood, sex and romance often go hand-in-hand.
There are historical reasons for this. From around 1930 to 1968 or so, the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, limited what could or could not be shown on film. The Code was Christian, racist and conservative to the core. Good had to triumph over evil, homosexual or mixed race relationships were not allowed on screen, infidelity could not be shown in a positive light and sexual relationships could not be depicted in a way that might arouse viewers.
The Code fell out of use because of changing sexual and social mores and filmmakers are now freer to show sexual and romantic relationships in any way they wish. Despite this, Hollywood rarely deviates from the bog standard happily-ever-after ending.
One surprising aspect of modern romantic comedies is how sexually virtuous they are. Modern chick flicks are notable for the chastity of their heroines. Consider some of the biggest hits from the last 20 years or so: Sleepless In Seattle; While You Were Sleeping; You’ve Got Mail; 13 Going On 30; Enchanted; He’s Just Not That Into You; and The Proposal. The romantic leads have no sex at all in these movies, at least not with each other, yet we are asked to believe that these characters are soulmates.
It’s not just the hits, but the box office flops as well, including the truly awful The Ugly Truth and the excruciatingly dismal Leap Year – and many others besides. In these films, boy meets girl, but nothing much happens until the happily-ever-after ending has been established and even then it’s just a kiss.
We are in fairytale territory here. The only major difference between these and classic tales is that film heroines generally have some sort of paying job that is somewhat more glamorous than scrubbing floors like Cinderella, feeding dwarves like Snow White or weaving cloth like poor old Sleeping Beauty.
There are exceptions of course. Katherine Heigl’s romantic heroines have sex in Knocked Up and 27 Dresses; Bridget Jones gets it on with two different men; J-Lo gets her man in The Back-Up Plan, as does Debra Messing in The Wedding Date. But what these films all have in common is that, like Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached, sexual encounters always result in true love.
You’d have to wonder why Hollywood does this when it is unlikely to concur with most peoples’ experiences of casual sex. Here, art does not imitate life, nor does life imitate art.
Back in TV Land, things used to be a little different. The Sex And The City girls had hundreds of men between them, but in part that was because in America, HBO is a premium cable channel known for adult content. Even so, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe from Friends were less than celibate, and got more action than the hapless Chandler.
Perhaps more importantly, these shows had their genesis in the ‘90s, and I’m hard pressed to think of a ‘00s sitcom with a similar amount of sexual content. Even Cougar Town, a show supposedly about older women sleeping with younger men, is not particularly keen on sexual content, and has changed so much from its original premises that the producers have been considering changing its name.
Films and television deal in fantasy. Because they are not real life it may seem ridiculous to wish that Hollywood offered a more realistic portrayal of sex and romance. Maybe you think it doesn’t matter, but I can’t help but think it does.
That sexual purity or chastity is seen as a desirable quality in modern romantic comedies chimes all too well with the conservative sexual rhetoric promoted to American teenagers. Abstinence-only sex education, purity balls and virginity clubs in schools and on college campuses have greatly increased since the millennium. Their existence shows that virginity, particularly female virginity, is increasingly prized in certain sections of American society. Good girls don’t have sex – not in school or in college and rarely in the movies either. It’s depressing.
I’d like to see a film where casual sex was just that, casual sex – two people enjoying themselves and each other without a big emotional blow-out and romantic reconciliation; casual sex that isn’t some sort of life lesson or learning experience; causal sex where both parties go their separate ways without recrimination; or casual sex which has as its happily-ever-after two friends eating dinner and drinking wine on a Friday night.