When Was Real Sex Allowed To Be Shown In British Cinemas?

For as long as film has existed, there have been depictions of sex filmed on it, each of which creates a heavily staged view of what sex meant to people in different eras.

From the moment the rarity box started showing What The Butler Saw, sex and the beauty of the human form have been depicted on film, but for nearly a century there was a highly contentious debate about sex could and could not be acceptably talked about.

It took until the 2010s for sex toy sets to truly become acceptable and for people to feel comfortable enough to have conversations about sex and sexuality in the way we really need to in order to truly live our best lives and have the healthiest and fullest relationships.

One major watershed moment, however, emerged in 1999, when one of the biggest taboos of British cinema was broken, and over the following decade, depictions of sex and discussions surrounding it emerged into the mainstream.

Romance And Intimacy

The question of whether a sex act depicted on screen is pornography or erotica has raged for a long time, but for nearly a century, depictions of sex could not appear in mainstream cinema, although they were always available in sex shops and often advertised in the advertising pages of magazines and newspapers.

Exactly what counted as a depiction of a sex act as opposed to an acceptable sex scene was always contentious and fairly subjective when it came to what was acceptable and what was not.

Films such as Last Tango in Paris set the precedent that erotic dramas could be shown with heavy censorship, and the 1974 film Emmanuelle was the first softcore pornographic film to be shown in British cinemas, albeit with significant censorship.

Eventually, the debate was settled in 1982 with a new set of certification and classification guidelines by the BBFC, which replaced the latter ratings (U, A, AA and X) with the age-based system still used to this day (U, PG, 15, 18).

As well as these four ratings, an R18 rating was also established which allowed licensed cinemas and sex shops to sell films which featured overt sexual content.

However, it was not for another 18 years that films featuring unsimulated sex were allowed to be shown even under an R18 rating thanks to a High Court judge ruling which forced a change in guidelines.

At the same time as the legal challenge was being made, the 1999 Catherine Berillat film Romance was passed under an 18 rating without any cuts, making it the first film with unsimulated sex acts that could be shown in UK cinemas.

The 2001 film Intimacy proved that this was not a one-off, but the 2004 film 9 Songs by Michael 

Winterbottom was the first British film with extensive unsimulated sex scenes that was shown in UK cinemas with an 18 rating.

It set the precedent that as long as there is a “contextual justification”, penetration, oral, handjobs, footjobs, masturbation, ejaculation and soft bondage can all be shown.

To this day, star Keiran O’Brien remains the only actor in a British film to be shown ejaculating on camera.

All of this helped to normalise discussions and depictions about sex and later films such as Shortbus only served to challenge the idea that sex needed to be a taboo that we cannot talk about.