Abstract

Until 1968, films produced in the United States were submitted to the Production Code, which was used to determine what was acceptable or not to be presented before an audience. In regard to sexuality, only decent and not excessive kisses were allowed. After the abolition of the Code in 1968, a new system of quotations according to the age of the audience to which films were addressed permitted a greater freedom in the representation of sexuality. However, during the 1970s, a new standardized form of representation began to take place in order to show sex in movies. This is what Linda Williams called in her book Screening Sex (2008) the “Musical sexual interlude” (MSI), which consists of representing coitus as a composition of different shots edited together with a soundtrack. The analysis of the MSI from a corpus composed of US-mainstream romances from 1969 to 1989 and rated between “PG” and “R” seems to highlight another feature: the choice of the sexual positions in relation to the outcome of the couples involved. In the majority of cases, the position used by the couples who end up together at the end of the film is the so-called “missionary position,” which was long favored by the Christian tradition and where gender roles meet the traditional standards: passive woman and active man, and this, even after the freedom brought by the “Sexual Revolution”.