Bridgerton’s focus on emotional intimacy and slow-burn romance is changing the narrative around women's sexual health.
Finally, sexual desire is being depicted from a female perspective – and women will thank Nicola Coughlan for her empowered, raunchy scenes
“I felt beautiful in the moment, and I thought, when I’m 80, I want to look back on this and remember how f****** hot I looked,” said Nicola Coughlan, of her five-and-a-half-minute-long sex scene in the latest season of Netflix’s hit series, Bridgerton.
Coughlan, 37, and her 31-year-old fellow romper Luke Newton, who play lovers Colin and Penelope in the show, have been teasing the scene to fans for months.
During an interview with Entertainment Weekly in April, Coughlan spilled that the pair even “broke a piece of furniture” because “we were really going for it”.
But while it may sound like sex for sex’s sake, it’s far from it. Bridgerton has long been praised by its fans and critics for its passion-drenched, female-gaze-focused sex scenes.
The Bridgerton formula is this: hours of tension and longing that culminate in a lengthy scene in which we see and hear everything – uninterrupted – from the first touch to the morning after.
In the latest (and longest) sex scene of the series so far, we hear Penelope’s every sigh and gasp as Colin strips her in front of the mirror, telling her he loves her and describing all the parts of her body he adores before he beckons her to a chaise lounge where they finally do the deed.
The lighting is sultry, the angles are considered, the clothing and decor is beautiful. It is, in other words, the perfect watch to get any woman in the mood.
From the online reaction, it seems to have done just that. When part two of series three dropped on Netflix last week, fans flooded X (formerly Twitter) to share their excitement — and that they’d booked the day off work just to binge-watch the four new episodes.
So what is it that Bridgerton gets so right about female desire, and how can other shows learn from it?
Vanessa Marin, a licensed sex therapist whose Pillow Talks podcast has more than six million downloads, thinks she knows the answer. “The reason why these kinds of shows and books appeal to women is because they honour that female desire for emotional intimacy.
“In Bridgerton, for example, there’s a long-standing friendship between Colin and Penelope. Colin sees and admires the entirety of who Penelope is as a human being. She feels safe with him, and therefore allows herself to open up to him.”
But it’s more than just familiarity between the characters. Bridgerton’s sexual success is more about the lead-up to the event than the event itself.
“Romance and erotica do a great job of building tension and anticipation. Research has shown that the anticipation of pleasure can often be more enjoyable than pleasure itself,” claims Marin.
“Women in particular seem to enjoy the ‘slow burn’ appeal of these types of shows and books. Most long-term relationships are severely lacking any sense of sexual tension or simmer, so it’s appealing to find it in romance and erotica.”
This checks out in Bridgerton fan circles, after the distinct lack of sex in season two still led to raving reviews. One critic wrote, “For enemies-to-lovers fans, it was an absolute feast.
“While season two may not have had the same level of actual sex as season one, it’s this humble author’s opinion that it was no less sexy for it. Have you ever seen two people yearn and bicker so deeply and lovingly? It’s delicious.”
Sex therapist Jo Robertson adds that the sexual success of Bridgerton is a result of the “mainstream media finally understanding what the porn industry historically hasn’t, that the majority of women love a slow and sensual build in sex”.
She adds: “For most women, the pleasure is found in the details of a sexual encounter; the way they briefly stroke a part of the back, the small kiss at the temple, the way an item of clothing is removed.
“We’re also seeing more scenes that exclude intercourse, where the sex is focused more on external stimulation – which we know is how most women receive the greatest pleasure.
“Penetration is not the main course, it’s just one of the options… women have known this about their own pleasure for a long time. Media is now catching up.”
Thanks to shows like Bridgerton, sex scenes are getting some well-needed positive PR.
Over the past few years, raunchy scenes have largely disappeared from films. Hollywood productions began including “intimacy coordinators” whose job it is to create guidelines about how sex scenes are filmed and to look after the comfort of the actors with how they are directed in these moments.
The role became standard in films after Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct became public in 2017, and made Hollywood the focal point of the #MeToo movement. Meanwhile, more and more actors have spoken out about their distaste for getting down and dirty on screen.
Last year, Penn Badgley spoke about his request to showrunner Sera Gamble, while filming Netflix show You, to drastically reduce the amount of sex scenes in the script. “Fidelity in every relationship, and especially my marriage, is important to me,” Badgley said. “And, yeah, it just got to a point where I didn’t wanna do that.”
He isn’t the only one. Earlier this year, Man of Steel star Henry Cavill said that he’s “not a fan” of sex scenes, adding, “It’s when you have a sense where you’re going, ‘Is this really necessary or is it just people with less clothing on?’”
And that’s when you start to get more uncomfortable and you’re thinking, ‘There’s not a performance here, there’s not a piece which is going to carry through to the rest of the movie.’”
While it may be the case that sex scenes on screen have historically been superfluous and vulgar, this time it’s different. What we see from Bridgerton and its predecessors — Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Normal People, Sex Education, and even 50 Shades of Grey — is that women very much do want to watch a plotline that will get them hot under the collar.
But female sexual desire is fundamentally different to men, and this should be depicted on screen, too.
Marin summarises this by saying, “One of the main desire discrepancies between men and women is what I call the physical-emotional conundrum.
“There are two types of people in the world: people who want to feel emotionally connected before having sex, and people who want to have sex as a way to feel emotionally connected.
“In one of life’s little ironies, these types usually end up in relationships with each other.”
After polling her followers, Marin discovered that “86 per cent of women want emotional connection before physical connection, whereas 77 per cent of men want the physical connection first.”
These differences may help explain the huge gender gaps we see in all sorts of “romance” cultural products. Men, as well as being more interested in getting to the physical first, are more visual and outwardly focused about sex, research shows.
Perhaps that helps explain why readers of the romance genre of books, from fantasy to historical fiction to every other sub-genre, are over 80 per cent female: women find it more interesting to imagine along with a plot than men, who prefer the internet’s more abrupt offerings.
Unlike Penn Badgley and Henry Cavill, Coughlan’s extended romp scenes in Bridgerton were a desire of her own. “I specifically asked for certain lines and moments to be included. There’s one scene where I’m very naked on camera, and that was my idea, my choice.
“It just felt like the biggest ‘f--- you’ to all the conversation surrounding my body; it was amazingly empowering.”
The third season of the Netflix hit proves that the way we are consuming sex is changing.
After years of in-your-face sex scenes, the slow burn of a historical romance television series narrated by Julie Andrews is the sexiest thing on our screens in years, and all it took was a female perspective.
Bridgerton is available to stream on Netflix
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