NO MEN REQUIRED!

Suddenly there’s a rush of TV and big-screen dramas with a sapphic theme. Naked titillation — or in our MeToo age, a backlash against Hollywood sexism?

THE run-up to Hollywood’s awards season is, as is customary nowadays, being dominated by actresses from this side of the pond tipped for the top prizes.

The Golden Globe nominations — also viewed as a strong indicator of Oscar success — include Olivia Colman, who plays Queen Anne in The Favourite an Irish co-production film up for five awards. She is widely backed to take Best Actress while her co-star, Rachel Weisz, is seen as a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress.

Sadly, Keira Knightley seems to have missed out, despite giving what has been described as the ‘best performance of her career’ in Colette, about the French writer who was pushed by her husband to write novels under his name.

There is another unifying theme behind the roles that have caught Hollywood’s imagination. Each of their movies features lesbian sex scenes. Indeed, publicity stills for Colette show Knightley in a rapturous embrace with her topless female lover (played by Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson). Is it coincidence that we are seeing two new big budget films with a sapphic theme?

Absolutely not. In fact, they’ve become the new staple of mainstream film entertainment, with dramas featuring a lesbian plotline a major trend in forthcoming productions on both the big screen and TV.

So what’s going on? One explanation is that Hollywood has become so wounded and paranoid by a seemingly endless series of stories about women being abused by predatory males, that it has sought what it considers a safe route out of this tawdry episode.

Allegations about the sexual abuse of actresses sent shockwaves through the whole movie industry. Most significantly, the forthcoming trial of film mogul Harvey Weinstein — facing charges of sexual assault — has forced his fellow producers to seek more female-friendly ways of putting sex onto the screen.

Lesbianism, therefore, is an obvious route. Of course, some consider this a deeply cynical ploy. Whatever the case, the fact is that cinema has long been horribly misogynistic — a most notorious example being the 1971 film Straw Dogs, which unforgivably flirted with the idea that rape could be enjoyable.

So, by offering women-withwomen love scenes in this Sapphic Surge, Hollywood believes it is sending out a message that it has moved on from depictions of coercive sex and has listened to its MeToo campaign critics.

Indeed, producers want to show the world they are being more cautious about exploiting women and the female form on screen. For their part, the actresses are keen to explain this cultural change. Speaking about Colette, Knightley said: ‘I didn’t want the lesbian sex scenes to be seen through the male gaze.

‘We were very conscious of keeping it titillating, but not in any way exploitative.’

In one scene, Colette unbuttons another woman’s silk blouse to expose a bare breast, but nothing more is shown. ‘What’s more important is what’s left to the imagination,’ said Knightley.

‘That’s my personal preference; always. You can imagine a lot by being shown quite a little, you know.’

Another contributing factor may be the issue of how sex on film and TV is handled in an age with a range of sensitivities over social issues.

Race has been another problem — with justified howls of protests for the Oscars’ lack of diversity in recent years. Organisers of the Academy Awards tried to remedy this — for example by choosing black comic Kevin Hart to present this year’s ceremony.

But this backfired badly when he was forced to withdraw after it was revealed he had made vile homophobic comments a few years ago.

Of course, films involving lesbians are nothing new. But the tone has changed. Early sapphic adventures tended to concentrate on how pioneer lesbians bravely struggled to break down social taboos in a world where homosexuality was against the law.

Today, same-sex couples account for one in 20 marriages in Ireland.

MANY lesbians are high profile and successful in showbiz, such as model Cara Delevingne and comics Sandi Toksvig and Sue Perkins.

The ‘pink euro’ undoubtedly plays its part, too. Worth up to an estimated €6.6million a year, it’s no surprise that film-makers are keen to cash in. So Hollywood’s cameras are rolling on an increasing number of lesbian stories.

Certainly, we’ve travelled a long way since the first lesbian kiss was broadcast on television before the 9pm watershed, when Anna Friel embraced fellow Brookside actress Nicola Stephenson on the Channel 4 series 24 years ago.

The kiss was seen by an unshocked TV audience of billions when a clip of it was included in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Few eyebrows, either, were raised recently when the hit RTÉ drama Killing Eve showed contract killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in love with, or at the very least having a crush on, the intelligence officer Eve, played by Sandra Oh, who was tracking her down.

Last month, the film Lizzie opened in Ireland, about axe murderer Lizzie Borden, starring Chloe Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Here, a disputed lesbian element is introduced into a true story.

The film contends that Borden — who, as the rhyme goes, ‘Took an axe, and gave her mother forty

whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one’ — killed them because she was in love with the family maid, Bridget, who had been sexually abused by Lizzie’s father.

This is despite the fact that even the most excitable experts on this infamous case have never speculated on a lesbian motive. The sapphic idea seems to have come from a 1984 novel by crime writer Ed McBain.

In several other new productions, lesbian passion is the driving theme. Drama series Gentleman Jack is based on the 19th-century diaries of Anne Lister — dubbed ‘the first modern lesbian’.

It stars Suranne Jones (of Doctor Foster fame) as a landowner who dresses as a man and is desperate to marry her female lover.

A lesbian love affair is also at the centre of another of this year’s crop of films, Disobedience, an adaptation of a novel about an affair between two Jewish women, played by Rachel Weisz (again) and Rachel McAdams.

Also out this year was the film Vita And Virginia — a retelling of the affair between novelist Virginia Woolf and poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West.

All these are central to a MeTooinspired cultural change — one that has developed out of previous, periodic depictions of sapphic passion — such as the 1994 hit film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet, and the 2002 drama series, Tipping The Velvet, based on the novel by Sarah Waters.

The truth is the new generation of movies showing lesbian love scenes are not niche offerings.

Without doubt they are a reaction to the realisation that audiences are tired of seeing the same old, over-sexualised heterosexual dramas — particularly if they think the actresses may have been forced into such scenes by Weinstein-type figures.

YOU only have to look at the fate of Wanderlust, the much-hyped Netflix drama said to be ‘the most X-rated’ ever shown on TV, to understand that wall-towall on-screen sex no longer attracts a mass audience. It got just 2.9million viewers at 9pm.

That was only just enough to see off the embarrassment of being beaten by an episode of Long Lost Family , in which Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reunite people with missing relatives.

All of which is a refreshing development — a decisive shift away from what used to be called ‘cheap thrills’.

What’s more, some studios now have ‘intimacy co-ordinators’ to make sure actors are not ambushed by sexual demands on-set.

At this stage we are more than four decades on from the notorious transgressions of the 1972 film Last Tango In Paris, which reduced actress Maria Schneider to horrified tears that were captured on film and released in the name of entertainment.

Imperatively for film-makers, the audience reaction must be considered. The fact is now that the MeToo generation will boo if they feel women are being objectified.

Yorgos Lanthimos, director of The Favourite, says his film’s lesbian storyline is about far more than just sex.

‘My instinct from the beginning was that I didn’t want this to become an issue in the film, for us, like we’re trying to make a point out of it. I didn’t even want the characters in the film to be making an issue of it.

‘I just wanted to deal with these three women as human beings. It didn’t matter that there were relationships of the same gender. I stopped thinking about that very early on in the process.’

It is telling that producer Ceci Dempsey said that she fought hard to get an early script of The Favourite made in 1998. She couldn’t secure finance because there was a lack of male representation and too much lesbian content, which financial backers thought meant it would flop.

In today’s more sensitive culture, which seeks to pry less into sexual orientations or to punish people for their preferences, these fascinating stories are finally being told.