Sunday, winter wasn’t the only thing that was coming on HBO.
In some respects, the August 27 episode of the Issa Rae comedy Insecure was even more shocking than the events of the blockbuster Game of Thrones finale that aired just before it—at least to the character Issa, who was clearly not ready for what was about to happen.
On the cheekily titled “Hella Blows,” Insecure aired what might be the most graphic blow job and ejaculation scene that has aired thus far on a mainstream TV channel, and, because of the conversation that led up to it, maybe the most important.
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Yes, it’s 2017, and viewers aren’t just conditioned to expect explicit content, but, in essence, demand it. (This is a time in which millions of people cheered a much-anticipated love scene between aunt and nephew in Sunday’s Thrones.) TV creators are in an arms race against seen-it-all audience desensitization. With increasingly bloody acts of violence, language to make the dirtiest sailor blush, and sex scenes that are more and more realistic as respectable firing shots, there is still, really, just one nuclear weapon left in the arsenal. Put simply: the cum shot.
It’s hard to say when it first became “OK” to show semen on screen in a TV show. While everything from intense doggy style sex to anilingus has been normalized even on broadcast television, premium networks like HBO and Showtime aren’t beholden to the same obscenity standards. Thus they have long been havens for the kind of dramatized bumping and grinding that champions praise as essential for exploring the carnal aspects of a character’s humanity—how someone behaves in bed reveals a lot about them—and which critics decry as, well, pornography.
Still, in the time since HBO first showed some splooge—in my unscientific research, a 1999 episode of Sex and the City, “Was It Good For You?,” that takes place at a tantric sex class and plays the money shot off for laughs (naturally at Miranda’s expense)—it has only taken its depiction of sex to such completion a handful of times leading up to Sunday’s Insecure. And rarely has it shown it with such meaning.
In the episode, Issa (Rae’s character) and her friends Molly (Yvonne Orji), Kelli (Natasha Rothwell), and Tiffany (Amanda Seales) are at a L.A. sex convention called Sexplosion, where a seminar on how to give a good blow job triggers their own Carrie Bradshaw & Company conversation on the sex act.
Issa confesses that she doesn’t like to give it. “It’s too intimate,” she says. “Like, I really have to fuck witchu to put your dick in my mouth.” Tiffany scoffs: “But you don’t mind if he puts his dick in you? I just don’t understand black women and their hang-up about oral sex.”
It’s the kind of frank and, for all its humor, insightful conversation about intimacy, power, comfort, agency, and taste that is rarely applied to a sex act often relegated to a juvenile joke in television. More, through the prism of Insecure, there’s the often ignored nuance of how race and community can shade someone’s perspective and values when it comes to sex.
“I just feel like guys see black women as disposable after you give them head. Like you’re forever a hoe if you do it,” Issa says.
“Why do you think black men are out here chasing after white women?” Tiffany replies. “I’m just saying there’s so much power in giving blow jobs. Like I’m the one fully in control… Every man is controlled by his dick. The closer you get to it, the more control you have. And if you’re good at it, sky’s the limit.”
The conversation clearly foreshadows that some sort of shocking oral sex scene to come later in the episode, with Issa’s wheels turning about how she could use this theory about blow jobs and control in her “hoe-tation” phase. When she meets up with Daniel (Y’Lan Noel), she applies her new skills as they hook up—a little too well, as he gets overly excited and ejaculates into her eye, a scene that makes both Issa and, likely, all viewers gasp.
Issa is irate, as she clutches her temporarily blinded eye. “I thought you were into it!” Daniel protests. “I didn’t ask for this,” she shoots back, with him replying in protest: “I didn’t ask for you to suck my dick.” Ouch.
It’s an intriguing lesson on expectations and the pressures we sometimes put on ourselves to get what we think we need. Issa thinks she needs to embrace some sort of “hoe” phase at this point in her life, but she might be realizing that’s a mindset she’s not really comfortable with. More, she’s realizing what it really means to feel safe and respected with a sexual partner, and that no matter how in control she feels, she may not be protected from feeling shamed or demeaned.
Would any of that resonate as much as it does without the jarring and explicit depiction of the ejaculate on her face?
It shouldn’t be a surprise that there are certain conservative groups that think so. Newsbusters, the anti-liberal watchdog group, called the scene “completely unnecessary,” with writer Amelia Hamilton saying she was “horrified that this was being shown on television.”
The Newsbusters piece does also highlight our aforementioned point though, which is that the show “crossed a line that HBO rarely crosses with the” with the ejaculation scene.
In the Sex and the City episode two decades ago, it was a source of comedy. A 2007 scene from the infamously sexually-explicit relationship drama Tell Me You Love Me shows baby-desperate Carolyn (Sonya Walger) giving a hand job to Adam Scott’s Palek, going as far as zooming in on a prosthetic penis that Walger actually simulates the sex act on, but cutting away at the point of ejaculation—though Carolyn is shown examining the emission in her fingers when the act is done.
Like on Insecure, the explicit nature of the scene exposed a layer of the characters’ relationship. “The show is about intimacy, and if you don’t explore the sexual intimacy, then it doesn’t have a leg to stand on if you’re going to explore the emotional intimacy,” Scott told Variety at the time.
There was bodily fluid shown in a brief shot following a threesome in a Season 1 episode of Showtime’s Californication, but it was a 2013 episode of Girls that dared show ejaculation with as much explicit realism and with the mission to spark as intense a conversation as Insecure did Sunday night.
In that episode, Adam (Adam Driver) engages in rough sex with his new girlfriend, Natalia (Shiri Appleby). The encounter escalates so quickly and so aggressively that it’s unclear how much of it she consents to. It ends when Adam is shown finishing himself off on her chest.
When The Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob wrote about the scene at the time, he said, “The semen that Adam deposits on Natalia’s chest is not meant to titillate or arouse. It’s meant to shock the viewer into opening their eyes, to see the damage that Adam perpetuates here, one based upon countless male fantasies enacted in porn. But while other cable shows might use sex and female nudity as window dressing, Girls strives for something both deeper and darker here, a revelation that there are repercussions to physical intimacy, that Natalia’s humiliation and debasement are not sexy, but painful.”
While controversial scenes like these create the opportunity for such dialogue, they’re still rare. Subscription channels aren’t beholden to the FCC and indecency complaints and, short of showing hardcore porn, have free reign when it comes to sexual content. Still, it’s not just bodily fluids that remain lingering taboos. Even just the image of a penis, whether or not it is erect, is a still touchy subject on TV.
After an episode in the final season of Girls had Matthew Rhys’s character expose a partially erect (prosthetic) penis to Lena Dunham’s Hannah, the episode’s director, Richard Shepard, told me that HBO surprisingly didn’t have any notes about the scene: “I think, had the scene been with an erect penis and truly sexual, instead of a comedy-power position, I think there probably would’ve been a discussion. Because of the tone of the show and the nature of the way that sequence was done, it seemed to skirt any issues.”
There’s a similar scene in which a female character is seen with her hand around a male’s penis in the premiere of HBO’s upcoming sex industry drama The Deuce. When I asked the series co-creator David Simon (The Wire) about it for an interview that will run next week, he shrugged off the notion that it should be considered a landmark moment and instead praised a much needed shift toward equal opportunity male-female nudity.
Sex sells, sure. But it’s also something that demands to be part of the cultural conversation, particularly in the ways it forces us to think about agency, consent, and intimacy. Does television need to be porn to start that debate? No. But as Sunday night’s Insecure proved, pushing the envelope does wonders to invite us all to, um, come to the conversation.
