A little more action, please: Where are all the sizzling sapphic TV sex scenes?
In the fourth season of Sex and the City there’s an episode in which Samantha (Kim Cattrall) openly enjoys a lesbian relationship with a passionate artist called Maria (Sônia Braga).
Charlotte predictably sneers that her proudly promiscuous pal isn’t “a lesbian, she probably just ran out of men!” Once the initial passion of her queer romance starts to fizzle, Samantha gets bored and complains to her besties: “All we ever do is lie around, take baths together and talk about feelings.”
This is a sentiment familiar to any self-identifying queer woman. A running joke within LGBTQI communities portrays lesbians as so engaged nurturing their feelings they forget to fuck.
Whether or not that’s true comes down to the private dynamics of every relationship, but judging from how TV has been depicting sex lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking this tired stereotype is true.
It’s not just sapphic sex scenes. This is an issue in general with TV sex scenes that depict various sex acts from the perspective of a female gaze.
Scenes with an opportunity to be a sizzling celebration of female pleasure instead studiously focus on the emotions surrounding the act – usually before cutting away to a well-timed ad break followed by post-coital snuggling.
