Garrett Graham sits across from Hannah Wells, separated by a few feet of highly charged air. Their eyes remain locked as they – ahem – take matters into their own hands. Together. Separately. You get the idea.
That’s Episode 4 of Off Campus, which dropped earlier this year. The show is a cheesy mishmash of every romantic cliché: Arrogant-but-secretly-sensitive hockey captain, awkward music nerd, fake dating, sassy best friend. What’s refreshing is how little time it wastes getting to the sex. Abs and bosoms arrive in the opening scene. No waiting until Episode 14 to see lingering hands touch. The sex is frequent, explicit, in beds, bathtubs, public spaces. On Reels, the Dean-and-Allie-grinding edits (featuring the show’s second leads) are set to JLo’s On The Floor. It is Prime Video’s third most-watched debut season and, among women aged 18 to 34, their most-watched debut season of all time.
What just happened? Not too long ago, we were in the middle of a Horniness Recession. In 2023, there were think pieces saying that dating apps were dying. That Gen Z was too anxious, too online, or too exhausted to flirt. In 2024, a UCLA study found that 60% of American teens didn’t want sex on screen. By the end of the year, steamy scenes had dropped by 40%.
Looks like we’re over the hump. Off Campus carries the baton from Heated Rivalry (2025), in which gay hockey players Ilya and Shane’s chemistry got social media hot and heavy. In Bollywood, the steamy Saiyyara had audiences collectively holding their breath. In young romance stories now, sex is the point. Yes, yes, oh yes!
Passion project
We’ve come a long way from Bella and Edward’s chaste nuzzling in the Twilight movies (2008-2012). By 2020, when Marianne and Connell get together in Normal People, the intimate scenes are 10 minutes long. They’re so awkward and sensitive, no one would think them pornographic.
Even the classics are getting explicit. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026) wraps both Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in yearning, with BDSM scenes featuring one woman getting whipped in a horse bridle, another chained to the fireplace, crawling on all fours as a willing pet. None of this was in Emily Brontë’s book. Neither was the pink bedroom that we’re told it’s the exact colour of Cathy’s naked skin. In Heated Rivalry, the enemies-to-lovers chemistry between the hockey players is intense, as they turn hotel rooms, supply closets and away games into opportunities for increasingly reckless hook-ups.
“Intimacy on screen only works when it reveals something deeper about the character,” says Rangita Pritish Nandy, president and creative director, Pritish Nandy Communications, which produced Four More Shots Please! (2019-2025). The show follows four women’s lives, and is often called India’s Sex and The City. The characters have affairs, casual hook-ups, queer relationships, open marriages and workplace flirtations. “The intimacy reflects vulnerability, confidence, loneliness, confusion and emotional connection. It always moved the story forward.” The Royals (2025) on Netflix, featuring an almost-always shirtless Ishaan Khatter and a permanently pouty Bhumi Pednekar, explored how intimacy is often intertwined with control and consequence, says Nandy. Indian shows rarely allow romantic chemistry to simmer this intensely while also acknowledging what happens after two people give in to it.
The dry spell
Tanisha Rao, author of You’re Somebody’s Kink, which includes themes of BDSM, queerness and changing sexual identity, traces some of the 2020s anti-sex sentiment to the pandemic. “People were either stuck indoors, far from their partners, or they were in non-stop proximity to them. It forced them to ask: Am I living the life that I want? Are my sexual needs being fulfilled?” Millennials spent lockdown questioning everything from monogamy to dating apps.
This was a generation that had binged Euphoria (2019), which was all thrust, zero foreplay, with graphic rape scenes, and women being choked and sexualised. They’d seen sex from the POV of Game of Thrones (2011-2019), which across 10 seasons, had perhaps three instances of actually loving lovemaking. They’d read horrific accounts of real women being exploited by powerful men as #MeToo allegations hit every industry.
Gen Z dealt with those worries by just letting go. “Young people were craving stability and simplicity,” says Rao. No one wanted to be bread-crumbed, ghosted or situationshipped. They wanted sizzling chemistry, desperate eye contact and drawn-out desire. The kind that Korean romances were already showing. The kind that young adult and romantasy books were already laying out. They offered what Aditya from Hinge couldn’t: Immersive worlds, optimistic arcs, adjustable spice levels. What else could streamers do but follow suit?
Dim the lights
“So far, intimacy has largely been framed through a man’s perspective. Female desire was often idealised, judged, or sidelined,” says Nandy. Sex scenes were about power, danger and bad decisions – women characters (and the women who played them) were rarely represented honestly. And as Indian streaming shows took greater risks with nude and intimate scenes, it came at the cost of how viewers saw women.
It’s why the new crop of shows and movies feel sexy, but balanced. Many of these stories are being told through the female gaze, with female creators, writers and directors. They showcase desire and heartbreak from the perspective of women with full agency. In Off Campus, the jock learns that the path to a woman’s pleasure is not enthusiastic thrusts and a job-well-done expression; it’s by earning her trust. A whole karaoke song, Cherry Pie, is dedicated to a man pleasing a woman.
In India, as with Hollywood, there are now intimacy coordinators, whose specific job is to choreograph sexual activity and keep the performers comfortable and safe. Aastha Khanna, who has worked on The Royals, says the job typically involves finding a “less titillating way to drive the plot forward.”
Setting up chemistry takes work, she says. “We created an arc of intimacy. There’s a lustful attraction, a drunken scene, where they let their guard down, then a scene that is emotionally charged, a scene where they both realise that they’re in love.” Most streaming services keep intimate scenes to under two minutes. “There is a limit to how much storytelling can happen through them.”
It means that it will be a while before a show such as Heated Rivalry is made in India. “Not just because it features a queer romance. But because we’re also still stuck with the taboo intimacy carries. There’s often audience backlash when Indian bodies and private moments are shown on screen. It ties into our cultural anxieties.”
The new turn-ons
“The politics of our time inevitably shape our fantasies,” says Rao. “Heated Rivalry owes its success, in part, to it being a celebration of queer love, at a time when queer rights are being stripped away in the US.” For the rest of us, the fantasy isn’t necessarily to capture the heart of the billionaire, the jock or the hot nemesis. It’s finding someone who listens. Someone who cares whether you’re having a good time too.
India has flirted with this shift. Lust Stories (2018) showed a scene in which Kiara Advani’s character pleasured herself after her husband failed to. But these remain exceptions. “Indian screens are still oddly hesitant when it comes to modern dating,” says Rao. “The messy realities of contemporary romance often get cleaned up before they reach the screen.” Too often, intimacy – if there is any – still needs to be justified by a wedding. But what if we finally let the happy ending be, well, the happy ending?
Source - Hindustan Times