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♪My mama said you'll break my heart♪

♪I should have listened♪

♪My mama told me to be smart♪

♪And pay attention♪

♪My mama said you'll break my heart♪

♪I should have listened♪

♪My mama told me to be smart♪

♪And pay attention♪

- [Narrator 1] Uncontrolled sexual behavior,

usually is a sign of an immature and insecure person.

(romantic music)

All things considered,

it's the girl who sets the level of conduct on a date.

(romantic music)

You create or prevent situations

of sexual arousal and demands,

by your manner, your dress, by your general behavior.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator 2] Sex has always made Americans nervous,

particularly in Hollywood.

Why today is a woman still wearing a bra

when she makes love in so many American movies?

Even in the iconic "Sex in the City",

that claims to be addressing sexuality,

the breast is always bursting out,

but the heroin still cannot get rid of her bra.

(upbeat music)

Why is sexuality still taboo,

40 years after the sexual revolution,

and the emancipation of women?

In the '70s, women burn their bras.

America is ready for a sexual revolution.

Women take to the streets

to fight for abortion and contraception.

They gain power and believe that concerning their sexuality,

this will suffice to counter the puritanical

and hypercritical vision of the American mentality.

Hollywood cinema is the main witness.

And that's nothing new.

In the '30s in Hollywood, sex does not shock.

In "Blonde Venus" for example,

Marlene Dietrich and her friends bathe naked

under the lustful eyes of the hunters.

The "Ballets" of Busby Berkeley show bodies

in extremely erotic postures.

Sex sells.

Tarzan and Jane swim totally naked

in the movie "Tarzan and His Mate", in 1934,

in an aquatic ballet,

unequivocally representing the sexual act.

That same year, Hedy Lamarr, the greatest vamp of the era,

has the first female orgasm on screen

in the sulfurous "Ecstasy".

(gentle music)

But so much sexual freedom

finally wakes up the American Puritan League,

and they forced the movie industry

to establish the famous code of censorship,

known as the Hays Code,

which has the mission to moralize Hollywood.

No more breasts and buttocks on screen,

no kissing for more than 30 seconds,

no unmarried couples in the same bed.

Sex becomes banned overnight.

And that pervades for more than three decades.

But this can't continue.

The winds of freedom that blow in with the '60s,

and the mutations that accompany it,

the pill, the sexual and cultural revolutions,

sign the end of the code of censorship.

America wants sex, and believes that the time has arrived.

(gentle music)

- When we think about sex in film, in the 1950s,

it was something very chaste.

You think of a film like "Pillow Talk"

with Rock Hudson and Doris Day,

and they're living separate lives.

They're just talking on the phone,

each lying in their bathtub.

And a split screen has them only just their feet touching.

- You'll find that most people

are willing to meet you halfway.

- American in the 1950s was in a sense

still trying to keep sex from happening both on screen,

as well as in real life.

But as the '60s arose,

those old social mores started to crumble.

Changes in society

and what people had maybe seen in World War II

or experienced in the '50s

could no longer be kept under wraps.

The 1960s became a time of great experimentation,

whether that involved sex, drugs or rock and roll.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 2] America then seems ready

to open Pandora's box, and talk about sexuality,

while still failing to show it head-on.

(upbeat music)

sexuality becomes a serious topic.

Educational films are made for teenagers

in adolescent turmoil.

(upbeat music)

Finally, science can seize the opportunity,

to be able to speak about the unspeakable.

(upbeat music)

- Dr. Alfred Kinsey began as a researcher

looking into the sexual activity of wasps,

and his research soon expanded into humans.

(upbeat music)

So he founded the Institute for Sex Research

at Indiana University in 1947.

And shortly thereafter, the first Kinsey report

on sexuality in the human male was published in 1948,

and created a bit of a scandal.

No one had ever sort of talked about

or studied sexuality in such a kind of plain

and clear and daring ways before.

(upbeat music)

Alfred Kinsey's work

was extended by William Masters and Virginia Johnson

at Washington University in St. Louis.

Their research into human sexuality, using prostitutes,

and other people to study everyday practices

was unparalleled at its time, caused a great scandal.

It was on the cover of places like Time Magazine.

And it gradually opened up people into discussing things

that had previously been hidden,

and kind of covered up amongst the American public.

- I ran across this idea for doing a show

about "Masters of Sex", because my producing partner,

Sarah Timmerman read a review of Tom Maier's book

in the New York Times.

It was about six years ago.

And Tom had written this biography of Masters and Johnson.

And he was the only one to have researched their lives

as thoroughly as he did.

People knew that they were famous

and that there were sex researchers

back in the '60s and the '70s and into the '80s.

But really no one had ever explored

what their lives were really like

and explored their work to the depth that Tom did.

(upbeat music)

And when they collected,

they watched over 10,000 individual acts of sex.

They monitored these people, they charted it,

grafted the whole thing.

- [Narrator 2] This scene from the TV series,

perfectly illustrates the real work of Masters and Johnson.

(gentle music)

- When they got done with looking at all this information,

they realized that women were incredibly sexual creatures,

sexually robust,

in fact much sort of a more robust than men.

Men can have one orgasm and then they have to recover,

and the idea of men keeping erections

is all very delicate sort of mechanism

whereas women could have multiple orgasms.

They didn't have to perform in the same way that men did.

And what they discovered was that women

could have incredibly fulfilling and satisfying sex lives.

Now, this was news.

This was real news when this came out,

when they were discovering

in the late '50s and into the '60s,

because the idea of men being dominant in sex

was just prevalent.

So they became, completely without even trying to,

real feminist spokespeople for women

and their relationship to sex,

and its relationship with the feminist movement,

the women's movement that was emerging.

It wasn't really by design,

but the science had led them there anyway.

(people shouting)

- The sexual revolution in America

was probably unlike a sexual revolution

elsewhere in the world, probably having something

to do with the rather puritanical history and heritage

of the United States.

We had lived, sheltered, you might say from sex.

That's a pretty long adolescence

to be sheltered from the idea of genital,

or anything but oral sex in the form of kisses.

- [Narrator 1] Dating calls for the ability

to share good times, to learn from each other.

And when suitable, to show affection,

without endangering your wellbeing,

physical, emotional, or moral.

- So, we Americans, had to go to the movies

to see foreign films in order to see sex.

For example, I was a kid.

I went to the movies in Berkeley,

which was a town that had movies back in those days.

And I saw two films in the spaces of maybe, well,

maybe over a year.

They were both foreign. One was Italian and one was Swedish.

The first one was "The Virgin Spring".

The second one was "Two Women".

They both had rape scenes.

They didn't have a lot of other sex in them,

but these were fairly graphic rape scenes.

(people shouting indistinctly)

Seeing those two films as maybe a, I don't know,

a 15, 16 year old, that was the first time I ever felt,

that there was something to sex,

if even if you're just watching it.

In fact that it moved me in some ways.

And it moved me in ways that I think disturbed me.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 2] Sex Comes from Europe.

The erotic and almost orgasmic dance of Brigitte Bardot

in "Bedrooms" film, and "God Created Woman",

excites and shocks the American public.

These foreign films from the early '60s

will pave the way for Hollywood.

- Another film of the late '60s

that fits into the tendency of American movies

to talk rather than do sex,

is "Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice".

I don't know if I've got the names in the right order,

but this is that tendency of American films

where we were all being...

We were able to be frank and to use words

like virgin and sex,

and we were still not up for showing sex.

So this is a film about couples swapping,

that never shows you anything exciting.

- First, we'll have an orgy

and then we'll go see Tony Bennett.

- We have to remember that the old code

had adultery was one of the things that you couldn't show,

or if you showed it, you had to punish the people

who committed adultery in the end.

But in "Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice",

they planned to have a kind of four way orgy

and you see them undressed in bed,

but they just don't really have the guts to do it,

or the desire to do it.

(gentle music)

And they end up talking, some more.

And then they go to,

I think it's the Tony Bennett concert

as a very tame outcome to the evening.

♪What no one needs now♪

♪Is love♪ So this was a time

when people were talking about encounter groups,

and getting naked and orgies

and all sorts of things like that.

But American films were still very, very timid

about doing much of anything.

- Mike Nichols, who challenged American audiences

with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?",

came back a year later with "The Graduate".

In "The Graduate", director, Mike Nichols

and screenwriter, Buck Henry,

get at the zeitgeists of the 1960s.

You have a young graduate played by Dustin Hoffman,

who's disaffected from the world,

doesn't really know what to do with himself.

He lingers in the pool, and is not sure

what direction to pursue in life.

♪(indistinct)♪

Until Mrs. Robinson corners him in her own bedroom.

This famous scene where Mrs. Robinson seduces Benjamin,

may be disturbing to contemporary audiences.

We're not used to seeing a woman take such authority,

and literally guard the door.

Benjamin cannot leave.

- Oh God! Huh! Let me out.

- Don't be nervous.

- Get away from that door.

- Say something first. - Jesus Christ!

- Benjamin, I want you to know that I'm available to you.

And if you won't sleep with me this time-

- Oh my Christ!

- If you won't sleep with me this time,

I want you to know that you can call me up anytime you want

and we'll make some kind of an arrangement.

Do you understand what I- - Let me out.

- In the 1960s, young people were disaffected in many ways.

They're dealing with the struggle of the draft.

They don't want to serve in Vietnam.

They're not sure what lies ahead for them,

outside of war in Vietnam.

(upbeat music)

And so some turn to drugs, others turn to sex,

some turn to rock and roll.

In "The Graduate", we see a merger

of the '60s sounds of Simon & Garfunkel,

singing a song about Mrs. Robinson.

And then when we arrive at the theater,

we see Mrs. Robinson engaging in activities

that we didn't know that housewives would ever dare,

to attempt.

Mrs. Robinson represents

a certain kind of maybe now 1950s housewife,

who is bold, who is indifferent,

who is just struggling to feel anything for anyone.

And she targets Benjamin, this young college graduate,

as her prey.

And he becomes her way

of trying to awaken feeling in herself, once again, via sex.

The sex in "The Graduate" could be seen as comic,

but it also has a tragic side, as Benjamin takes Elaine,

Mrs. Robinson's daughter on a date,

and takes her to a strip club,

and in a sense, almost embarrasses her,

shames her, and has to apologize

for his own kind of twisted notions of sexuality.

- [Benjamin] Why don't you watch the show?

(upbeat music)

- Benjamin, do you dislike me for some reason?

- [Benjamin] No, why should I?

- I don't know.

(upbeat music)

- We begin to see the '50s and the '60s merged together,

into this messy sexual conundrum,

that becomes a revolution that everybody gets wrapped up in.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 2] Certainly, America is talking about sex,

but it mustn't enjoy it too much.

The failed sexual orgy,

the disenchanted marriage in "The Graduate",

or the impotence of Hollywood sexiest man,

in Bonnie and Clyde illustrate this.

Sex, yes, but no pleasure, please.

- As Bonnie and Clyde

go on their bank robbing escapades together,

it's revealed that Clyde really

cannot perform in the bedroom.

(Bonnie panting)

And his impotence in the bedroom

manifests itself in his violence on screen.

What he cannot do himself, he carries out via the gun.

And so America, this pattern of a sexual frustration

manifesting itself in violent acts,

becomes a pattern that will be repeated over and over,

throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 1] Rapists like dark and lonely streets

where they can search out an unwary victim.

- [Narrator 2] From now on sexuality

is going to be associated with violence.

Sex becomes a national subject,

to the point that the American Army

produces a series of educational films, (indistinct) women,

warning them against sexual violence.

(woman screams)

- Sexuality is now coming out into the open in the 1960s,

as experimentation comes forward.

The sexual revolution in America was unleashed

through a series of landmark court cases,

as well as scientific breakthroughs.

You had the invention of the pill,

a contraceptive device that could just be ingested orally.

It happened in 1960, but it took a court case in 1965

before the pill was widely available to married couples.

The possibilities of taking chances in the bedroom arise

like never before.

(upbeat music)

Unmarried women didn't have access to the birth control pill

until a court case, landmark court case in 1972.

But removing the fear of complications from sexual activity

was a big leap forward in terms of encouraging

what we now call the sexual revolution.

- So the sexual revolution, I think,

could probably be seen as being reflected in movies

through the career of Jane Fonda,

which I find very emblematic of the period,

because there were three films she made

in which her orgasms mattered,

and challenged that male model of sexual excitement

and release.

It's very prescient that Jane Fonda

has sex in a Sci-Fi fantasy in which she's an earthling,

and earthlings have long ago transcended sex.

They just do something like take a pill and touch palms.

And so they have very unmessy sex.

- Five years, I've waited for this experience.

- My group must...

- And then finally, she's captured by the villain,

and is going to be tortured to death

in a particularly sexual way in his machine

that he calls the "exsexive machine".

And the "exsexive machine" looks like a kind of steam bath.

So you don't really see a lot of flesh.

So she gets into this steam bath and he turns on the power,

and she says, "Oh, that feels nice."

And we don't know what's happening,

but pretty soon she has an orgasmic kind of look on her face

and then more and more powerful orgasmic expressions.

And finally the machine starts to go haywire,

and to blow fuses, and she outlasts the machine.

- I don't believe it.

I don't believe it. - Therefore approving,

I think Masters' and Johnson's point

that women could potentially have many, many orgasms.

And it's not really until 1978,

I believe it is, with "Coming Home",

which is interestingly enough, an antiwar film.

And in that film, she plays a figure

who is not very much like Jane Fonda.

She's a good housewife to a soldier who goes off to Vietnam.

And we see them having bad sex.

(man panting)

And he comes back from Vietnam, a wreck, but she,

in the meantime has become something of an antiwar activist,

through her relations to a Vietnam vet,

played by Jon Voight, who has become a paraplegic

and therefore has no sensitivity from his waist down.

And the sex that she has in that film

with the paraplegic vet,

is I would argue the most important sex of American movies

up until that point in the sense

that it pays attention to the pleasure of the woman,

precisely because the man is unable to have orgasm.

(man panting)

- [Jane Fonda] Can you feel that at all?

- [Jon Voight] I can't feel it, but I can see it.

- But it's very interesting because in this film,

Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, her costar,

decided that there was going to be no erection

on the part of the man,

that they were going to play it that way.

But the director, Hal Ashby, had interviewed some vets

and it is true that sometimes

they can sort of get random erections.

And so he wanted to make it a sex scene

in which the vet achieves orgasm,

and Fonda and Voight wanted to make it a sex scene

in which the man enjoys her sensually and visually,

and wants the light on.

- [Jon Voight] Turn the light on! I want to see you.

- So the sex that they have is a bit of a war,

because there was a body double,

who was obeying the director for the longer shots.

And then there was Voight and Fonda for the closer shots

who were presuming that there was no penetration

and that it was a sort of overall

and that she achieves multiple orgasms.

And even at one point says, "Oh, softly,"

rather than the way sex had been portrayed

in all American movies, harder, faster,

what Pauline Kael called a "jabbing thrusting eroticism".

(Jane Fonda panting)

So that film is really interesting to look at

because you do see a little bit of jabbing thrusting,

but you could also imagine that she's just riding his thigh

or something rather than his penis.

And it was that's the direction that the director gave,

"Ride him, ride him," because it was two different ideas

of what sex was played out in that movie.

But I think that Fonda and Voight won.

- [Narrator 2] America of the '70s is disillusioned.

The war in Vietnam drags on.

Protest movements are growing,

and anti-war riots are springing up all over the country.

The icons, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,

are assassinated in the same year, in 1968.

America is in mourning.

In 1971, the oil and economic crisis erupts,

and pushes the country towards recession.

The Watergate Scandal the following year,

forces President Nixon's resignation,

and marks a series of traumas for a country

that believed that the sexual and cultural revolutions

of the '60s would bring a wind of freedom.

(people shouting)

At the same time, America is agonizing

about the legalization of abortion in the United States.

In 1973, the Supreme Court recognizes abortion

as a constitutional right for women.

Only a year later, homosexuality is finally removed

from the list of mental illnesses,

and the US Government lifts the ban on hiring homosexuals

in public service jobs.

America is confronted from all sides,

and forcibly pulled out of its puritan shackles.

It's in this inflammatory context,

that cinema once again, reflects the violence of society.

Sex then becomes an outlet.

Films, such as "Deliverance", "Straw Dogs",

"High Plains Drifter", and "A Clockwork Orange",

all have the means to sexualize the violence of the time.

(upbeat music)

- American films have a very twisted relationship

between sex and violence.

With Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", you see Dustin Hoffman

playing a mathematician with this attractive young wife

played by Susan George.

She just robes and in front of some construction workers.

Is she toying with them, playing with them?

When she eventually is raped by these construction workers,

it turns very violent, very sick and very twisted.

- No, no.

(woman panting)

No.

(woman panting) (romantic music)

No.

- The implication in the film

is perhaps that Dustin Hoffman's impotence

is answered by these construction workers'

virulent and violent sexuality.

But in American film,

it seems to always be getting confused.

1972 in a film like "Deliverance",

you have four businessmen from Atlanta,

going to the outdoors,

wanting to do sort of a rugged canoe trip

and sort of prove their manhood.

And yet what happens, Ned Beatty, one of the four, is raped,

made to squeal like a pig by a back woodsman

who interrupts these businessmen.

- You can do better than that boy.

You can do better than that. Come on, squeal, squeal!

(man squeals)

- So it doesn't matter whether it's heterosexual

or homosexual.

The relationship between sex and violence

is intermingled in really messy ways in American cinema.

In 1969, "Midnight Cowboy" comes to the screen.

It's one of the first major films from Hollywood

to earn an X rating.

It stars Jon Voight as Joe Buck,

a hustler from Texas who comes to New York,

wearing cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

He is the American cowboy,

and yet he is here to make love for a price.

How shocking for audiences to see an American cowboy,

now being paid to have sex with men, with women,

with older women, like Sylvia Miles,

with maybe Jesus' Loving Men,

with scenes that Americans had never considered,

that a Texas cowboy would be paid for his sexual services

in New York city.

- You know who cares?

That's a funny thing you mentioning money,

'cause I was just about to ask you for some.

- You were gonna ask me for money, huh?

- Hey, why you think

I'd come all the way up here from Texas for?

- You were gonna ask me for money?

Who the hell do you think you're dealing with,

some old slot on 42nd street?

- The intertwining of sex and sin and guilt and salvation,

becomes a potent dramatic mix.

In 1969, "Midnight Cowboy", an X-rated film,

was awarded the Oscar for best picture.

What a groundbreaking moment in Hollywood history!

(gentle music)

With Harold and Maude, 1971,

American audiences see a romance

they'd never imagined on screen before.

Harold is a 19 year old, obsessed with death.

- You'll be furious, but I've had such a tragic day.

And with guests coming to see me, oh, I will do that soon.

(Harold chocking)

Tell him, I promise to be in on Tuesday.

- Maude is 79 years old, and defiantly obsessed with life.

There may be a case of opposites attracting.

We've never seen such intergenerational romance,

or such a divide before.

Harold and Maude inverts some of the Hollywood tendency

for the older man to fall for the younger woman.

How strange for audiences to now see an older woman,

who is enjoying sexuality with a younger man!

(gentle music)

Harold and Maude pushes Hollywood to extremes

that it had never imagined before.

- 1972 was an amazing year for American movies

because in that same year,

one had the emergence "Deep Throat"

which was the first popular hardcore pornography

to go into theaters and to be seen by normal audiences,

which is to say male and female, together.

And it was a huge hit, made a lot of money.

And in that same year, "Last Tango in Paris"

by Bernardo Bertolucci was maybe not quite as popular,

didn't get as many people rushing to see it,

but critically, very, very important in the United States.

(upbeat music)

"Deep Throat" was a kind of a crude affair,

but what it did was locate the clitoris

in a place other than where it was expected to be.

That is to say in the throat of the female protagonists.

- Open your mouth wider, wider!

Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! - Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!

- Well, there it is, you little bugger, there it is.

- What? - Your clitoris.

It's deep down in the bottom of your throat.

- That allowed a kind of visibility,

especially visibility to the sexual act of fellatio,

but it became a popular act.

And in novels at the same time, John Updike, Phillip Roth,

novels were having sex in their pages.

And I think it was Jane...

No, I think it was Phillip Roth

who said something like they were amazing fellators,

women were amazing fellators, or became amazing fellators.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 2] "Deep Throat" soon becomes a cult film

for popular culture.

The representative of what is described as chic pornography

from then on.

Although the film is sued for obscenity

by judges declaring it more dangerous

than the worst nightmares found in Sodom and Gomorrah,

psychiatrist called into support the defense,

declare the film quite within the limits

of normal sexual behavior.

And in fact, exhibiting empathy for feminine desires.

Pornography opens the doors to a sexualization,

that is from now on displayed everywhere,

especially in popular culture.

- Americans will think that sex...

I think we still think that it's dirty,

especially for the woman, although, officially,

I don't think we believe that

in most of our standard discourses and ideologies about sex,

the fact that there has been this double standard

for so long, and that double standard

is by the way so much in evidence in "Last Tango"

where you have full frontal nudity

on the part of Maria Schneider,

and then Brando probably would be partly

because he's a little overweight

and partly because he's maybe the most important icon

of masculinity of a slightly earlier period,

hardly takes off his clothes.

There's one scene where you see him from the side,

where he's supposedly naked, but it's from the waist up.

So in American movies, I think that there often is,

women often don't feel good about sex.

And I think of "Psycho" as the good example.

Janet Lee, she clearly has had sex.

She's having an affair with this guy,

but she keeps her bra on the entire aftermath of sex scene,

and then very soon after, she gets brutally stabbed

in a shower, as if being punished.

(woman screaming)

And this is one of the reasons

why I think pornography is interesting

because pornography is at least one genre that shows sex,

and does not believe in punishing women for the sex.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator 2] But these years of sexual liberation

come to a halt in the beginning of the '80s.

On July 3rd, 1981, the New York Times

describes a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.

For the ultra conservatives, sexual liberation brings death.

Ronald Reagan's head of communications talks about AIDS

as the revenge of nature against homosexuals.

It is deemed necessary to bring back morality,

and pull the country out of sin.

Reagan promises to ban abortion,

to bring prayer back to schools,

and condemn pornography and homosexuality,

promises he will have trouble keeping once elected,

but the puritans are back.

(gentle music)

1980, it's also the year of Brian De Palma's movie

"Dressed to Kill",

which marks a turning point in Hollywood cinema.

The beginning of the film shows us Angie Dickinson

in the middle of a full frontal masturbation scene,

mingled with a rape fantasy.

She then has an organism

from the hand of a perfect stranger in a New York taxi.

De Palma shows here pleasure

purely from a feminine point of view.

(woman moaning)

But once the adultery has consummated,

she discovers that the man in question

is suffering from a sexual disease.

And as if this punishment were not enough,

she's brutally murdered in the elevator.

The enjoyment of sin now has a fatal price.

(woman screams)

- The films of Brian De Palma,

I think are kind of twisted and cautionary tales

that reflect a lot of the fears regarding sex in the 1980s.

In films like "Dressed to Kill" or "Body Double",

We see that anyone toying with sexuality

is also maybe risking death.

And so murder, violent murder,

bloody murder becomes a kind of a subplot,

or a result of sexual experimentation in the 1980s.

Cinematic sex in the '80s became risky business.

The dangers and fears created by the AIDS crisis

were reflected in film.

The sexuality that you see in "Risky Business"

almost makes sex look transactional.

It becomes a business proposition.

Tom Cruise may slide in to the scene in his boxers,

but what he's really doing is trying to pay for the damage

that he caused to his dad's Porsche.

So, profit becomes maybe more important than pleasure,

when it comes to sexuality in the '80s.

- [Narrator 2] Indeed, in "Risky Business",

Tom Cruise, a boy from a good family,

turns into a pimp when to make some money.

He organizes a prostitute's evening with his friends,

at his parents' house.

- (indistinct) here?

- Yeah. - You're on, honey.

- The 1980s, it's very interesting

to think that maybe one of the biggest sex symbols

of the 1980s was Jessica Rabbit,

an animated character from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

It seemed that maybe people preferred an animated woman,

than a real woman because of so much tension and fears

regarding sexuality,

that arose from the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

- I think in the '80s, what happens is that sex gets kinky.

That's the word we use in English.

It gets sadistic, masochistic.

Anal people begin to get the idea

of individuals who enjoy being beaten.

Dorothy, in "Blue Velvet" enjoys being beaten,

and wants this young man to beat her when they have sex.

And he doesn't want to do that, but he finally does it.

- [Dorothy] Beat me!

- No, no!

- Go away! Go away from my bed! Go away!

(gentle music)

- So, he's seduced into a lot of very adult

and scary things, especially given the fact

that for American, sex is dirty rather than pleasurable.

I think "Blue Velvet" is a really important film

in America's new found ability in the '80s to,

shall we say, witness sex.

This young man finds himself multiple times

hiding in the closet of the woman he is curious about,

as a voyeur, watching her have very kinky sex

with Dennis Hopper, who is the villain of the piece.

But in this case,

the sexual act has to do with Dennis Hopper,

looking at the woman's genitals

and breathing through some kind of mask that excites him.

So it's very, very kinky.

- [Narrator 2] With the Reagan years,

comes the explosion of blockbusters and teen movies.

But at the same time, films are also made

where sexuality and feminine pleasure are more accepted,

such as "Nine and a Half Weeks", and "Flashdance",

which makes the director of these films, Adrian Lynn,

a symbol of the '80s.

(upbeat music)

- "Flashdance", it begins with this amazing shot

of Jennifer Beals onstage.

And really the film could have been called splash dance

with this moment where the water

just comes barreling down on top of her.

When you look back at "Flashdance" now,

and just look at the story of a welder by day,

exotic dancer by night, who aspires to be a ballerina,

you say like, "How did this become a hit?"

But it appealed to maybe the fantasy side of filmmaking

that characterized the '80s.

- Before the movie, before we shot the movie,

I just knew I wanted to do a "wet" dance

'cause I knew that the water would look nice on skin,

that it'd be interesting it flew around,

like sweat or whatever, you know?

And so, but I didn't really know how to do it.

I just knew that I was gonna do a wet dance.

And so I remember the studio was very,

very sort of pessimistic about it,

and they just didn't believe in me really.

And so I remember I got a dancer and a hose.

I remember I had a hose

that I sort of wound round this poor girl,

and tried to make the studio understand

that I was going to do a wet dance.

And I just remember their faces or their skepticism,

that it was going to be a disaster.

- [Narrator 2] Far from being a disaster,

the film was a phenomenal success.

This sexy dance of Jennifer Beals in her wet body suit,

is still a cult scene, almost 30 years later.

- People said, I remember when I...

'Cause I had just done "Flashdance" before it,

which was a huge success,

and people said that "If you do this film,

"Nine and a Half Weeks",

it'd be like committing professional suicide," they said.

And in a way it was in America

'cause the version that they showed in America

didn't make any sense.

There was none of the sadomasochism at all.

There was a scene for example, where Kim plays a whore,

a prostitute, and she's picking up dollar bills

and she doesn't want to do it and he makes her do it.

And then they make out afterwards.

But there's elements of say to masochism in that.

And the Americans were terrified of it,

and they made me take it out of the movie.

So the movie didn't make any sense in America,

but it did very well in the rest of the world.

It played forever.

In Paris it played for six years or seven years

or something.

- Pick up the money.

- I don't wanna pick up the money. (indistinct)!

- Pick up the money!

(woman crying)

- What I think Americans and English come to Anglo-Saxons,

I guess, are embarrassed to sit with their wife,

and be aroused sexually, looking at a movie.

They're embarrassed by it. Now, French don't give a shit.

- [Narrator 2] It's the same

for Paul Verhoeven's "Basic Instinct" in 1992,

for which the studio decided to release two versions,

a soft one for the American market

and an unabridged version for Europe.

Because sex and violence always work well together,

the film is a perfect example.

Right at the beginning, Verhoeven films two lovers

in full sexual congress, on a bed,

in the center of a room full of mirrors.

The woman, whose lower back and blonde hair

are all that can be seen,

has a white scarf to tie her partner up with.

(gentle music)

(man groaning) (woman moaning)

During orgasm, she pulls an icepick

and stabs her victim in the throat and face.

Only five minutes have elapsed.

And the audience is already electrified by a scene

mixing sexuality, and extreme violence.

- "Basic Instinct" is amazing because it offended women.

It offended gay rights groups,

and offended maybe everything,

but audiences who turned out in droves.

"Basic Instinct" involves a bisexual woman

who likes to live dangerously

when it comes to both sex and her relationships.

Michael Douglas engages in this cat and mouse

kind of interaction with Sharon Stone,

involving this famous interrogation scene

where she is torturing him

by crossing her legs back and forth, back and forth.

(gentle music)

- It's nice.

(gentle music)

- And this is a throwback

to the film, "Fatale" of the 1940s,

the dangerous female who if you dare to have sex with her,

you may die in the process.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator 2] Yes, sex is dangerous in America,

and the country is going

to experience its biggest sexual scandal,

one that even Hollywood doesn't dare dream of,

with the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky,

which will push American puritanism to its limit.

No democracy had ever gone so far,

forcing a president in office to submit to a DNA test,

and testify before the grand jury

live on television in front of the whole world,

to justify a sexual relationship out of wedlock.

- I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

It constituted a critical lapse in judgment,

and a personal failure on my part,

for which I am solely and completely responsible.

- [Narrator 2] Bill Clinton was asked an essential question.

"Did you touch Ms. Lewinsky's breasts?"

The act of having touched her breasts

constituted for America, a sexual relationship.

This case is not trivial.

It shows the obsession with transparency and truth

at all costs, and especially, the fear of sex.

It is also this fear that pushes America

to encode its love relationships, in sports terms.

When it comes to dating,

the American guy advances in the art of seduction by bases,

like in a baseball game.

- If you go on a first date, you might kiss,

and that might be first base.

The baseball is the illusion.

So, you progress around the bases in baseball.

So you might get to second base on another date

where you might feel her breasts.

Third base, you're getting closer.

And of course the whole model is genital penetration.

Home run, score, would be to go all the way.

- We've always talked about sex in maybe baseball language

or sports language, all these strange metaphors.

And it's maybe a way

of kind of getting around our discomfort

in terms of the sexuality in the body.

We're comfortable talking about sports.

We're comfortable talking about baseball,

but maybe not, still not so comfortable talking about sex,

even when it comes to things involving our own president.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator 2] With the new millennium, 911,

the war in Iraq and the new economic crisis,

America has changed.

Since the Bush years, America has regressed

to its strictest form of puritanism.

For example, in 2000, 13 states were hostile to abortion.

In 2014, 43 have adopted restrictions against it.

Today in the Trump era, the Governor of Arkansas

wants to remove from women who are raped,

the right to an abortion,

without the consent of the man who raped her.

(upbeat music)

And the movie industry follows this conservative,

senseless movement.

Because it is primarily an industry,

it must be acceptable to the four corners of the world,

and be visible by a 13 year old teenager in Russia,

as well as by a 50 year old woman in India.

The film adaptation of the scandalous novel,

"Fifty Shades of Gray", is the perfect example.

We are far from the torrid scenes of the novel,

because the film can not be X-rated.

- Somewhat symptomatically, the American film version

of that novel was incredibly tame, and boring.

I would say that we see more sex at the movies,

but we see it in categories

where you can't be surprised because first of all,

there's the ratings that will tell you in advance

what you're likely to see,

so you don't have the unpredictability

of sex suddenly erupting.

And that's one of the interesting things about sex

is that it can just erupt.

- [Narrator 2] Ironically, television

has never been so daring in terms of sex.

TV series such as "Masters of Sex", "Game of Thrones",

"Mad Men", "Californication", "Girls",

or most recently the "Handmaid's Tale",

are mainly based on sexual dynamics,

and even sexual violence.

(gentle music)

We no longer count the number of rapes, incest and orgies

on HBO, Showtime, or Netflix.

Mainstream cinema and television,

thus reveal a very specific American approach to sex.

- Americans have always been more comfortable

with violence than sex.

Perhaps it goes back to our frontier roots.

We're comfortable with cowboys.

We're comfortable with settling the wild west.

But when it comes to bringing women

onto that pioneering stage, we get a little bit nervous.

America's puritan forefathers had very strong ideas

about what is appropriate and when.

And those puritan roots, I think are reflected in our films.

And I think those Biblical roots of kind of blaming women,

as the source of sin, as the root of temptation,

I think carry over into film.

So women are often punished on screen

for sexual feelings or sexual activities.

And I think that's rooted in the American puritan ideals

that are still very much with us.

(gentle uplifting music)