Hello, and welcome to the first paywalled issue of The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex! I hope you enjoyed your month’s free trial. I hope it gave you a taste of what I’m going to be doing here and whet your appetite for more.
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Strong sex
As I mentioned in last week’s essay, one of the things that has helped me expand my horizons over the last year, as well as provided some sorely needed alone time, is going to the cinema. In fact, I’ve been to the cinema almost every week since the beginning of the year. I never used to be a Film Person but I’m pleased to say that I am now well on my way to becoming one. So much so that I wanted to discuss one with you. But when I started writing about it, I also started reading about it, and that led to reading other things and thinking about other aspects of it and suddenly the entire newsletter is about film. Oops!
Anyway, last month, I went to see “Passages.” I knew little about it except what I’d seen in the trailer the week before and I certainly hadn’t read anything about it. When the film’s certification flashed up on the screen showing it had been given an 18 certificate, I didn’t think much of it. One thing that did catch my eye, however, was that in the advisory notes it read “strong sex”. Now, what does that mean?
Figuring out exactly what “strong sex” means in the context of movie classification is, it turns out, not an exact science. Other 18s such as “Shame,” “The Handmaiden,” and “Blue Is The Warmest Colour,” all contain “strong sex” according to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). But, interestingly, so do “Carol,” “Call Me By Your Name,” and “Disobedience,” and yet these are rated 15. The difference in classification makes sense to me. The sex in the latter three movies feels qualitatively different, both in terms of its depiction and in terms of its place in the story.