Hollywood’s slide into sexlessness is a denial of basic desire | Adrian Horton

Comments by You actor Penn Badgley are the latest in a conservative move away from celebrating eroticism on-screen

Twitter may be slowly decaying, but it still finds a way to generate a minor sex panic. The latest micro-iteration blazing through one corner of the pop culture sphere: Penn Badgley, best known for playing Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl and as the star of Netflix's You, said that he no longer wished to act in sex scenes, citing fidelity to his wife. According to his podcast, Badgley asked You showrunner Sera Gamble for a reduction in intimate scenes in the show's fourth season, which premiered last week; his character, the disarmingly bookish serial killer/love addict Joe Goldberg, still has sex in the new season but less so than in prior ones, and fully clothed.

Specific contractual clauses regarding intimacy on camera are not new - Julia Roberts is one of many actors who've said they'll never do on-screen nudity, for example. And Badgley is certainly entitled to his own boundaries. (A new Variety story connects his reluctance to film intimate scenes to his feelings of discomfort as a child actor.) But a segment of the Twittersphere's extension of his personal logic into an argument against sex on-screen in general, and the conflation the professional performance of intimacy with individual fidelity, feels disturbingly puritanical. Some have expressed distaste at any on-screen nudity, or asserted that most sex scenes are gratuitous, unnecessary and rife with issues of consent.