The small screen is beginning to discover the existence of female genitalia. It was time. In 2023, exit the good old missionary or fellatio to welcome cunnilingus. Several mainstream French series have opened their arms to this sexual practice which places clitoral pleasure at the center of concerns. Created by Ruben Alvès (Miss), Escort Boys, released this Friday on Amazon Prime Video, tells the story of how four struggling men launch into prostitution to save the beekeeping business of their childhood. Suffice to say that sex is a character in its own right in this fiction with numerous guest stars (Carole Bouquet, Amanda Lear, Rossy de Palma, Kelly Rutherford, star of Melrose Place And Gossip Girl…).
In a Camargue setting worthy of the best American westerns, the series shifts heteronormative sexuality and its phallocentric vision towards other pleasures. Mimi (Rossy de Palma), owner of a trendy club and from the gypsy community, lets herself be seduced by Zack (Corentin Fila) in exchange for a few free drinks. In the back room, the young man squats as we have seen so many female figures do in on-screen depictions of oral sex and puts his head under her long red skirt. Fascinated by porn and obsessed with his penis, Zack discovers thanks to this woman the value of putting the pleasure of others before his own.
Three modest looks
These last months, Escort Boys is not the only French comedy to offer a cunnilingus scene with all simplicity. In the first episode ofIrresistible, by Clémence Madeleine-Perdrillat, on Disney+, Adèle (Camélia Jordana), a successful podcast creator, opens her legs to Arthur (Théo Navarro-Mussy), a young romantic mathematician with whom she falls madly in love. The oral sex scene shows the young woman in profile, lying on a sofa, her head thrown back and her hands intertwined with those of her lover. Arthur’s face is hidden between her thighs. Likewise, the second episode of Everything is fine, on Disney+, opens with a love scene between Claire Vasseur (Virginie Efira) and her companion Antonio (Eduardo Noriega). Filmed from a distance, the three female characters welcome their partner’s tongue without showing anything of their anatomy. Three looks that prove that a “cunnilingus” scene can be sensual, elegant and even sometimes funny at the same time.
Is the feminist wave making a splash on French comedies? “In the collective imagination, it is as if the man had something between his legs and the woman nothing, as if we had to dive inside her to search her,” notes Catherine Blanc, psychoanalyst and sexologist, author of Uninhibited sexuality (Flammarion, 2015). Cunnilingus indicates that women also have something accessible. It is both positive to show that it does not become sexual through male intervention and, at the same time, it is a claim: if you have a penis, I have one too and it deserves the same attention “. This is the lesson offered by the character of Amanda Lear to Zack for whom sexual intercourse boils down to expeditious and terribly disappointing penetration. For an escort, that looks bad.
Certainly, oral-genital caresses have already taken over the small screen in recent years thanks to Orange is the New Black (2013), Transparent (2014) or Masters of Sex (2013). Niche series with more critical than popular success (for the last two, especially). “Making the woman orgasm without the man’s penis is something that we rarely see and which is quite revolutionary,” observed Iris Brey, essayist and creator of the very recent lesbian romance. Splitin an interview with Inrocks in 2015.
The series “have a universal reach, they can be watched at home and it is a way of showing sexual practices that we did not see before, like cunnilingus. That we can watch a cunnilingus competition on Netflix is something very uninhibiting,” enthused the author of the Female gaze; A revolution on screen (Edition de L’Olivier, 2020) in the same article. Moreover, the practice has come under the covers of most French people. According to a survey Harris Interactive for Xlovecam carried out in May 2023, seven out of 10 French people have already been involved in fellatio or cunnilingus. The arrival of “cunnis” on the small screen accelerates the normalization of the practice. However, overrepresenting this position on screen is double-edged.
A double-edged standardization
“From the moment there is a recurrence, it becomes the norm,” underlines Catherine Blanc. And to feel normal, you have to practice what is considered normal by society. The series have a real educational power but by showing certain sexual practices too much, they can also produce new injunctions. “If some will flourish there and discover what they would not have dared to ask for, others will feel in difficulty because men, like women, do not like cunnilingus,” she points out. .
“The codes change but we don’t leave people alone with their sexuality and the possibility that they create it as they wish,” continues the sexologist who is surprised by the systematic side of sex on screen. “We teach you to count, but we don’t teach you how to do a particular equation. It is because you are taught to count that you will decide which equations you will solve yourself. Women are not the servants of male desire and it is important to show that, but the image freezes, it does not allow everyone to be given the opportunity to write their own story,” she insists.
Is the absence of sexuality in fiction the last real taboo to be lifted in this area? Some series, like Sex Education And BoJack Horseman, have begun to explore the field of asexuality, that is to say the absence of sexual desire. But the work is not finished.