The necessity of sex scenes in fiction has been a weirdly consistent talking point on the internet this year, with some people arguing that they’re uncomfortably voyeuristic and that the people involved—as in, the characters—may not have consented to being watched. Yorgos Lanthimos recently joked that Poor Things is his contribution to that discourse, Quentin Tarantino noted that they’re too “problematic” to film and so he finds them unnecessary, The Weeknd argued that the bad sex scenes in The Idol were actually bad on purpose and served the plot, Penn Badgley revealed that he’s personally uncomfortable with filming sex scenes, and Ciarán Hinds offered a Game Of Thrones veteran’s take on the idea of intimacy coordinators.
Now, a surprising voice has joined the pro-sex scenes side of the debate, with a new Lifetime holiday movie introducing the brand’s first-ever sex scene. That means Quentin Tarantino says that sex scenes are unnecessary in his work and the people making Lifetime movies feel differently—and that’s cool as hell. Humanity is beautiful! We cannot be contained in tiny little boxes! We reject easy definitions!
Anyway, the film in question is A Cowboy Christmas Romance with Jana Kramer and Adam Senn, which is about a real estate agent who goes back to her small hometown and falls in love with a rancher at—get this—Christmas time. That’s according to Variety, which says that Kramer shared some details on her Whine Down podcast with A Cowboy Christmas Romance writer Sarah Drew, including this huge reveal: “Spoiler alert—he lays me down on some hay, and then we, you know.”
She clarified that “it’s still Lifetime” and “it’s still family,” but she says “it was pushing limits there, too… they didn’t cut anything.” Drew added that she purposefully wrote it to have “the steam and the sex” and was happy that the people in charge didn’t take any of that away.
But that’s not the only thing that sets A Cowboy Christmas Romance apart from the rest of Lifetime’s holiday offerings, because the movie also apparently has very little Christmas in it: “We barely mention the word ‘Christmas,’” Kramer explained. “There’s no gingerbread bake-off, there’s no festival, that town that’s going to hell and you gotta save it.” That means this movie with that title, that is premiering on Lifetime on December 9, does not have a lot of Christmas stuff but does have sex scenes. What a time to be alive.