Joanna Lumley thinks we should axe sex scenes

I'm with her. As my acting mentor put it, "You're always going to be upstaged by your own boobs".

You're never looking at the character's body. You're looking at the actor's. You're not in the moment.

Sex scenes rarely advance the story. We all know what sex looks like. The story point "They are really into each other" has been made once the sex scene begins. There's nothing new to say after that.

If you want porn, go look at porn. There's lots of it. They're about the sex, and they do it well. Sex scenes in films are usually disappointing because they're still trying to establish some sort of artistic merit. Which isn't satisfying when what you want is to look at f*ing.

I wouldn't ban them entirely, of course. There are a few cases where they actually do advance the story. And maybe all of this is about to become moot, as deepfakes mean we "see" everybody naked anyway.

But for the moment sex scenes seem like they put a lot of pressure on actors, especially young female ones, to make their bodies available purely for the titillation of seeing a famous person naked. I'd rather not watch that.

TBH I fast-forward through musical interludes (which are still amazingly frequent in TV shows, though diminishing) and sex scenes, because they almost never advance the narrative. There are musicals and there's porn, if necessary, I suppose - I'm here for the story. If two characters get together, I don't need to see it, just to know that it happened, unless something unusual during the act changes the course of events.