One of the most sexually charged scenes in literature – the carriage ride in Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – doesn’t allow even a glimpse of the copulating couple. Emma Bovary has met her lover, Léon, in church and they set off on a wild ride across the Normandy countryside, carriage blinds drawn. The horses sweat, the coachman curses, and passers-by wonder, like the reader, what is occurring behind those blinds: “the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel”.  The rise of cable television in the 90s and on-demand in the 00s opened new seams of televisual sex for audiences either side of the Atlantic. What once might only have been screened in the small hours on Channel 4 became staple fare on HBO and Netflix, where you could see writhing nude dragon girls (Game of Thrones) and raunchy lesbian prison scenes (Orange Is the New Black). Here, though, there is nary a nipple on show, just a dark and unsettling tryst as Frank Underwood and his wife, Claire, seduce their unworldly bodyguard, Meechum. In the morning, the first couple of American politics are all breezy insouciance over the breakfast table.  There was a temptation to include a scene from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer , or the equally seamy (if lesser-known) Under the Roofs of Paris. Instead, we’ll go for his lover, Anaïs Nin, whose Delta of Venus is a masterpiece of erotic literature. A series of fragments written for an anonymous collector, the best story in the collection is “Elena”. Focusing on three women, Bijou, Leila and Elena, the narrative skips from one perspective to the next as they move from a cafe to Leila’s bedroom. By candlelight, with incense burning and on a bed of soft pillows, Nin describes in drawn-out, tantalising detail the triangulations of lust between the women, and the final, trembling release.  Blue Is the Warmest Colour  Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos faced speculation that their monumental six-minute sex scene in this Palme D’Or winner was anything but feigned. It is a blistering (perhaps literally) performance, with the girls rubbing, grinding, scissoring and licking each other, their groans and sighs the only soundtrack. The blue-haired Seydoux rather spoiled things by later revealing that they wore prosthetic vaginas. Director Abdellatif Kechiche has since fallen out with the film’s two stars, with Seydoux saying he made her feel “like a prostitute” during the five-hour filming of the film’s central sex scene.  Jean Genet’s only film turns on the same concerns as his fiction: sexuality, power and the body. Less than half-an-hour long, it was a collaboration with Jean Cocteau, and is set in a nameless prison, hazy sunlight coming through the bars. Two prisoners, one Algerian, one French, loll and masturbate on their cots in adjacent cells, watched through a peephole by a guard. Arabic music sways and swirls, heat pulses, the men sweat. One takes a straw from his paillasse and pokes it through a hole in the wall. The Algerian lights a cigarette and they blow smoke between them, the wall becoming part of their lovemaking, the smoke dense with meaning.  The scandal surrounding the sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie blew up before Don’t Look Now was even released. Censors In the US and UK grilled director Nicolas Roeg before grudgingly passing it, while the Daily Mail appeared at once horrified and titillated at suggestions the sex was unsimulated. What makes this one of the great sex scenes is the emotional freight carried by the lovemaking – the release it allows the couple after their daughter’s drowning. Roeg intercuts post-coital glimpses of the pair with shots of their writhing bodies, showing them glowing, transformed, a new intimacy between them.  Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy fed the fantasies of a generation of adolescents (and, judging by the reams of steamy fan fiction online, continues to flutter pulses). The love scene from Smashed, an episode from season six, contains everything we loved about Buffy – cartoon violence, complex subplots, simmering sexuality. It’s also a thing of extraordinary beauty. The recently resurrected Buffy and the punky, malevolent vampire Spike (played by James Marsters) are fighting in an abandoned house when, as if it catches even the actors by surprise, their punches turn into caresses. The sex is strikingly graphic, and as strings swell, the house crumbles around them.  The marionettes of Team America: World Police – created by South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone – felt the ire of the US censors due to a brilliantly earnest sex scene between the hero, Gary (voiced by Parker) and his girlfriend, the Lady Penelope-esque Lisa (played by Kristen Miller). The scene was eventually radically cut to secure an R rating for, but is available in all its glory on YouTube. At once hilarious, unsettling and oddly arousing (particularly given that neither of the protagonists appears to have any genitalia). You’ll never watch Thunderbirds in quite the same way again.  “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” War hero and prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s famous question might have been the dying cry of the old order, railing against a brazen new age. The Chatterley trial in 1960 was a major public event, in which Penguin defended their right to publish in full a novel that had existed only in bowdlerised or samizdat versions since Lawrence wrote it in the late 1920s. The explicit sex was revolutionary, although the consummation scene, when the gamekeeper Mellors leads Constance Chatterley to the shed to ravish her, is oddly restrained, hazy and dreamlike.  Never will the tree-hushed squares of Notting Hill seem so still or innocent after the “bumshoving” scene between the ingenuous Nick Guest and his lithe paramour, Leo, in Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel. Nick, staying with a university friend whose father is a Tory MP, lets Leo – black, older, lower-class – into the gated garden off Kensington Park Road. The sex scene is frantic, breathless, funny. Nick, a virgin, thrills at the newness, the beauty of it all. The descriptions of young lust in Hollinghurst’s debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, were stunning, but this remains the finest sex scene in British prose.
With 50 Shades of Grey about to open in cinemas, Alex Preston chooses the best sex scenes from film, TV and literature