The Sex Scene That Made Me: I Owe a Lot More Than a Sexual Awakening to Christian Grey and Ana Steele

Welcome to Long Live the Sex Scene, a special project by Cosmopolitan that explores why these steamy television and movie moments truly matter, especially right now. Join us as we rewind, replay, and then rewind them all over again.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a lot of things. It’s an unapologetic romp filled with a fantastical version of BDSM and a romance that is, quite frankly, a little disturbing. It is very uneven and full of one-dimensional characters. It is also the first of its kind—an R-rated studio film about a woman’s sexual awakening, directed by a woman, Sam Taylor-Johnson. Ten years after its release, it remains a kind of Hollywood unicorn, and while some might see the film’s legacy as a bit of a joke, Fifty Shades of Grey was actually way ahead of its time.

It’s easy to dismiss Fifty Shades of Grey as an R-rated chick flick. A soft-porn hybrid made for bored housewives and horny women. But that’s far from the whole story. The movie isn’t just wish fulfillment or an adaptation of poorly written Twilight fan fiction, it’s one that tried, and sadly failed, to rewrite the cinematic language of sex scenes.

I have seen a lot of movies in my life, and because I grew up with a French mother who doesn’t have America’s puritanical sensibilities about nudity and sex, this means that I have also seen a lot of sex scenes and even more flawless, thin, nude female bodies. So in 2015, when I sat down to watch Fifty Shades of Grey, the most explicitly sexual movie that I had seen up until that point, what stood out wasn’t the nudity or even the kink, it was the way the sex scenes glorified the female form without feeling predatory, in part by prioritizing female desire and pleasure.

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In Fifty Shades of Grey, there are four main sex scenes: Ana’s first time in Christian’s apartment, the second time they hook up at Ana’s apartment, and two scenes of Ana in the Red Room (Christian’s BDSM dungeon where he normally enjoys all of his trysts). Each has a different function story-wise, but they all have one clear goal in common, which is to depict sex not as an act of male desire fulfillment but as one where the man—Christian—gets pleasure from giving pleasure.

And the camera follows his lead. Never is this more noticeable than in the very first sex scene. After Ana (Dakota Johnson) tells Christian (Jamie Dornan) that she’s a virgin, he decides to skip the kink and give her the slow, romantic first time she deserves. He treats her like glass, worshipping her with slow kisses down her torso and thighs. But it’s not the delicate way Christian guides Ana through the scene that makes it so special—it’s her body hair.

Watching Christian focus on Ana changed my idea of what sex could be.

The director uses the lighting of the scene to highlight the fine hairs on Ana’s legs. It’s peach fuzz, barely noticeable, but it is there. This one small detail marks a huge shift from Hollywood movies, which tend to favor clear-skinned, perfect women without any blemishes or body hair, and also illuminates a fallacy American women are conditioned to believe, which is that men won’t find you desirable if you don’t shave your legs. In Fifty Shades of Grey, he doesn’t even give her body hair a second thought. He’s focused on her, not any patriarchal ideas of what a woman in bed should look like. It’s been 10 years since Fifty Shades of Grey, and I don’t think I’ve seen a mainstream movie or TV show that has shown women’s body hair in the same way since.

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In typical Hollywood films, sex scenes are either boring—slow fades and translucent sheets—or scandalizing, but in Fifty Shades, it’s all about the yearning. In the kinkier scenes, as Christian introduces Ana to his BDSM preferences, he continues to prioritize Ana’s pleasure. In fact, a majority of the Fifty Shades of Grey sex scenes focus on foreplay, with Christian making Ana moan while she’s fully (or mostly) clothed. This is, of course, far from the PG-13 Hollywood sex we’re used to, where there might be some making out and a close-up of a woman’s breasts, followed by some simulated thrusting and mutual moans of completion.

Granted, the sex in this movie isn’t perfect. At the time of the film’s release, an article published by the Huffington Post asked the question: “Why Doesn’t Fifty Shades of Grey Show Ana Having an Orgasm?” And it’s true that the film doesn’t explicitly communicate to the audience that Ana had an orgasm with Christian. But I would argue that the abundance of moaning communicates that, at the very least, Ana’s having a good time. Instead, it’s Christian who doesn’t noticeably orgasm during their encounters. Every explicit sex scene in Fifty Shades of Grey ends before Christian does. Every. Single. One. And that, my friends, is feminism.

Granted, the sex in this movie isn’t perfect.

Audiences do get to see Christian orgasm in the two follow-ups, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed—which were directed by James Foley, who replaced Sam Taylor-Johnson after reported tension on set between Taylor-Johnson and book author E.L. James. The director has never explicitly cited reasons for their disagreements, noting only that they had two different “creative visions.” It’s possible James wanted to stay closer to the source material than Taylor-Johnson did.

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It’s a shame that the director never got to fulfill her vision for the trilogy. The sex scenes in the next two Fifty Shades films aren’t bad, but they lack the care and consideration of the first film. They also lack leg hair. Yes, the sex scenes still cater to female pleasure—and female viewers—but they don’t have the same intention of normalizing women’s bodies.

Until that first Fifty Shades of Grey movie, years of watching sex scenes in mainstream films had me believing that I needed to lose weight, pluck my chin hairs (thanks, PCOS), and shave my legs for anyone to want to be intimate with me. And I was wholly convinced that any reasonable, attractive adult would be turned off by my virginity.

I could see myself in Ana—in the hairs prickling her thighs.

But in that first sex scene, even though I wasn’t thin and poreless like Dakota Johnson, I could see myself in Ana, in the hairs prickling her thighs. We were both recent college graduates and non-waxed virgins interested in sex and turned on by Christian’s dominant fantasies.

Watching Christian focus on Ana—and not on the patriarchal idea of what a woman should look like in bed—changed my idea of what sex could be. I was so ashamed of being a plus-size adult virgin with body hair and stretch marks, but Christian didn’t see Ana’s virginity or body hair as a deal-breaker, and that made me feel, just for a moment, like I wasn’t a deal-breaker either.