Most explicit sex scenes

New York. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!

Here's the thing. People have sex. Movies have sex scenes. Wouldn't it be intriguing if a movie featured two actors having actual, consensual sex, instead of just mimicking sex in a way that looks great onscreen but is almost certainly very, very awkward in real life? Yes, obviously, we're aware that porn exists, but we are not talking about porn here. No, we're talking about actual, mainstream or, at very least, as the level of "mainstream" achieved by arthouse foreign films and indies movies with actual plots that also happen to feature actual humans engaging in actual sex acts.

Films exploring taboo subjects have existed for nearly as long as the genre of film has existed. The former is remarkable for also containing the first strip tease to be put to film, a feature that was highly risque at the time. It was also fabulously popular. So it is unsurprising that other filmmakers would want to follow in its wake and push the boundary of what is culturally acceptable.

Before HBO and Netflix, you didn't have many options if you wanted to watch a no-holds-barred, graphic, sexy sex scene. But the age of streaming changed all that, and now not only can you watch literally any kind of sex scene you want, whenever you want, you can also catch some down-and-dirty sex on your favorite TV shows Friends would never! Sex is a normal, healthy, essential part of being a human in this world, and it's only right that some of the best TV shows out there reflect that. On that note, here are the most hot, graphic, and in some cases groundbreaking sex scenes we've seen on the small screen.