The Bridgerton and sex in the media

Scene nº1: Destruction of property during sex

It is understandable, that people may have different sexual fantasies, one of those being aggressive, athletic sex, but I don't personally understand the breaking of furniture and throwing stuff around.

I get why that may be a fantasy for people, and at the same time, I'd have to say that rough sex is one of the things I see the most talked about by young people as something they may see in porn or movies, and so they may feel confused about in their actual sex lives.

In reality, it's only a small percentage of these people that'd do something that'd draw blood or leave bruises or the kind of thing that we may see, for example in this scene, the breaking of furniture.

Fun in fantasy, not in real life.

Scene nº2: Orgy/Queer representation

In this scene, we do see an orgy depicted with both a bisexual threesome and two men having intimate sex, separately.

In this case, the Bridgerton being a show set in 1813, we live in a world where there can't be gay people but there can be bisexual threesomes. Cool, awesome. (/s)

That lack of representation can be familiar to young queer people who know they're queer, but they've had so little sexuality education that they don't even know what queer sex looks like, they don't know what queer people who want to be sexually intimate with each other would do together, and I feel that if one of those people watched this scene, they'd come out of it knowing just as much as they did when they went in about how queer people experience sexual intimacy.

Personally, Bridgerton being set in 1813, a time where homosexuality was against the law, it does seem like a big missed opportunity by this show to not explore the social and cultural taboo, and instead to reduce it to this one, really short, really unsatisfying background moment.

Scene nº3: Stamina and picking people up during sex

Again, it's a fantasy.

Do we need to talk about stamina? Because as far as I could tell, they were having sex for all of 90 seconds.

A lot of people have sexual fantasies that are conveniently ignorant of real-life details. For example, the detail that holding somebody up while you are trying to also thrust into that person is pretty much something you have to have abs of steel and be a professional bodybuilder to do.l It's not easy and it seems like there wasn't any sort of foreplay, it just seems like some sort of outdoor 'quickie'. It didn't seem like there was any sort of foreplay either, so it doesn't seem interesting or exciting.

I won't yuck someone else's yum, but it does leave a lot to be desired as far as showing what people's sexual negotiations and explorations look like.

Sex in the great outdoors often comes with what some people find very charming awkwardness, and I feel that it could be relatable to people to include some of that awkwardness in these two romantically entangled characters.

Even though it might be sexy in a way to play with the idea of doing this off the naughty sort in public, we do have to emphasize considering risk assessment.

Sexually, what is it you get out of pursuing this fantasy? Could you have it met in maybe another less risky way?

Scene nº3: Women's masturbation and orgasms

Credit where credit is due, it is very rare to see scenes o women masturbating on TV, there hasn't been a lot of progress on seeing women have full sexual agency.

We can appreciate that this scene does contain things like full body touching, imaginative dreaming, etc.

When we talk about women's orgasms, we need to emphasize women being to have orgasms that are very pretty, instead of awkward and sweaty, and certainly not by looking at a flower and thinking of piano music.

We see this character experiencing pleasure by herself, which is good since the better you know your own body, the better you'll be at sharing pleasure with someone else.

Scene nº4: The "talk"

I've heard stories of many parents that dread having "the talk" with their children. Most of them do plan on doing so before they get married even though the character's mother in this scene makes the point that sex is natural, it's not that it's so much natural as is instinctive.

A lot of sexual communication and behavior is something you need to know a lot and be informed about to make decisions that feel right for you.

Even this cute mom-daughter moment still focuses on procreative sex instead of the sentiment I was looking for, which is that it's normal and natural to want to have sex.

The contraceptive options at the time were very limited, as condoms were made with animal intestines, and it's not like you could go down to the corner store to buy a 10-pack of animal intestines for the week.

Scene nº5: Explicit consent

It's a bit hard to watch this scene of explicit consent which is shown as an empowering moment for the female character, knowing that she'll violate the male character's consent very heavily in just a few episodes.

I do find the period-relevant 'it-takes-a-million-years-to-take-all- layers off cliché, but I don't understand why, especially in TV shows, they fully undress before having sex.

Scene nº 5.5: The pull-out method

The pull out method is one of the oldest and least effective contraception methods, mainly because it's a tricky thing to pull off in terms of skill, as it's knowing when ejaculation is going to happen and preventing it from happening inside someone's body, but also as it puts the person at risk of STIs and there are other fluids that are released from the penis during stimulation that contains sperm.

Scene nº6: Sexual assault (TW for the before mentioned)

I have chosen not to watch this scene because of the synopses of what takes place, so I'll leave a quote of this Oprah Daily article explaining what happens:

'The next time the couple has sex, in the midst of their love making, she changes her position to be on top. And unlike before, she doesn't let Simon pull out of her when he climaxes, knowing that this is what will increase her chances of getting pregnant. In the throes of passion, despite his protests, Simon is unable to stop himself from release.'

So, many thanks for your time and lecture, and if there are any more examples of sex in the media you'd like me to analyze, please feel free to leave a comment from wherever you're reading this from.