Lifetime’s Christmas movies have taken a surprising stance on the whole sex scene debate
A Cowboy Christmas Romance apparently has more "you know" than Christmas stuff
Aux News Sarah Drew
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.
72 Comments
Tittyfuck my jingle bells!
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.I swear Hallmark has already made this exact movie. Just, y’know, without any sex.
Hallmark made it a few times. And sometimes the woman is the rancher in the small town and the guy is from the big city! Progressive!
Well, there are a limited number of permutations possible:
Good god that is EVERY movie. I used to bug my wife about it as she put them all on every night. Then she finally threw in the towel as well.
What are we really talking about here? Has anyone watched a basic cable sex scene recently? You’ll see some kissing in bed, maybe a topless woman’s back from the waist up.
You know, Lifetime turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn’t even notice.
We’re gonna need you to post proof to back up your heinous, and titillating, accusations.
Santa Claus: Cumming Down Your Chimney
Next on Lifetime, Eight Maids A-Milking, Volume 12.
It’s only fair. The Christian Broadcasting Network became the home of gay witches and bisexual alcoholics.
Maybe it’s the first sex scene for Lifetime holiday movies, but not the brand as a whole. Gotta have them in the thrillers. Deadly Mile High Club (covered by both the I Love A Lifetime Movie and How Did This Get Made podcasts!) had a guy cheating on his wife, having sex on top of a box that his kidnapped wife was inside, unbeknownst to him. It was hilarious.
It’s a podcast go too. We Hate Movies has a patreon show called Once in a Lifetime where they cover these movies and they did Deadly Mile High Club. Pretty sure most the “Stalked by my Doctor” movies have a sex scene
Everyone wants to talk about that pink fedora!
Oh, man, I used to sharehouse with a woman mainlined these sorts of daytime TV movies like they were heroin and she was Jim Morrison.Since she hogged the TV, us other flatmates had to entertain ourselves by thoroughly ripping the piss out of them. (In her defence, she took it like a champ. Kate knew they were trash, and I salute her.)Like, how the fuck does a New England fishing town with a population of about five able to buy enough flowers at the florist shop the main character runs so she can live while still pining wistfully for a man? (Easily enough that it doesn’t need to be mentioned, apparently.)Does that haunted firefighter really only need some home-baked cookies and the vagina of the baker who baked them to cure his PTSD, and not dedicated, professional psychological healthcare? (Yes.)What’re the odds that the exceedingly handsome European prince happens to stop by the only candle shop in the town of Beaver Falls, Colorado (pop. 831), and Meet Cute with the proprietress? ($1, apparently.)Is that super-perfect husband who is super-perfect and handsome and caring and sensitive and rich and supportive actually a scumbag who’s cheating on you with one of the molls (who’s BLONDE) from the Latvian heroin trafficking ring he actually works for as a hitman and is planning on killing the his wife so he can keep on copping off with said blonde? (Of course – look how long and awkwardly the camera lingered on his face after he explained that second cell phone she found in his jacket as “That’s Steve’s, from work” – THEN WHY IS THE PHONE’S WALLPAPER CUTE, FEMININE, PINK FLOWERS?)
Baker vagina is a well-known folk cure for PTSD, going back to 1600s Switzerland, where it was called “Bäckervagina das Heilmittel gegen die Nostalgie eines Soldaten” by Dr Johanes Hofer. In WW1 England they called it “Shellshock Meat Curtain from the village breadwife.” which even the Cockneys couldn’t improve.
Unfortunately, Big Opioid has effectively killed the baker vagina folk cure movement.
1. You’re my hero. 2. Hey, you gonna finish that (points at left over baker vag)?
Gee, shucks (blush)
To be fair, Swedish vagina cures so many ills, not just PTSD.
My bride cheerfully watches this dreck ironically, and I come through with the occasional “Has her dad told her they’re going to have to shutter the reindeer factory yet?” While the bride herself gives scathing reviews of the Rooms 2 Go showroom level “decorations” in the background.
Don’t worry; before her dad tells her she’ll run into the handsome Big City consultant the reindeer factory’s corporate overlords hired to increase efficiency across their manufacturing portfolio by auditing which plants they can ship off to China, when he runs into her while looking for place to “get some sushi, or a poke bowl” and she’ll says they don’t have that but Ellie down at Dot’s Diner does a great Five Dollar plate but you gotta know how to order it right ‘cause Ellie’s sweet but a bit sceptical of out-of-towners, especially ones in fancy suits and Cadillacs and here, she’ll show him, and she’ll go to open the door to Dot’s when they get there because she’s a perfect paragon of small-town hospitality but because he’s such a perfect gentleman he’ll be reaching to open it at the same time and their hands will touch and he’ll know, at that instant, he’ll risk losing the $780,000 commission by performing a sub-par audit and saying the reindeer factory as a fantastic performing asset in order to give himself a shot at this woman who owns her own one-woman millinery business that’s been in the family for generations.
So many reindeer were killed in the making of this synopsis.
That’s why she saved the factory. So we can make more.
THEN WHY IS THE PHONE’S WALLPAPER CUTE, FEMININE, PINK FLOWERS?
Steve is confident in his masculinity.
And in his ability to move 500kg of fine Myanmar Black Tar across international borders every month!
Seeing a movie sex scene and worrying “that the people involved—as in, the characters—may not have consented to being watched” is so stupid it’s almost impossible to believe. The character doesn’t exist. They don’t consent to anything — not to saying dialogue or crossing the street or getting fake-shot in the face. It’s like worrying what a unicorn thinks about having a horn.There are certainly times when a sex scene is not helpful to telling a story effectively, and times where it is. There’s no per se rule. And of course, we always want to be respectful of the real people involved in filming the sex scene. But this whole argument speaks to the weird way that the world’s most conservative people and the world’s most supposedly liberal people often find common cause for the stupidest shit imaginable.
People literally can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality these days and it’s scary. The implications of that go way beyond thinking that the characters they’re watching are real: they also can’t discern between truth and lies and when they’re obviously being manipulated.
Not just “these days”. But you do you, gramps.
I’ve definitely heard people referring to the Avengers as tho they exist IRL
And they come to the most reductive and self-satisfied conclusions of what they watch. Someone recently assured me that Time Traveler’s Wife is a grooming manual, and that Interview with a Vampire is about vampire pedo grooming. To which I replied “Well thank god none of us have time travel or vampire powers, huh?”
That’s been a thing forever. People thought John Wayne was a real tough guy ffs.
I imagine the “some people” in the sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
“Some” implies “more than one”, and that’s too many people believing something that stupid!
I can find eight tweets in favor of any stupid opinion in five minutes.
In a paragraph full of links to references, that bit is notably lacking one.
I’m guessing it comes from here:
LOL. Also, shoot me now.
The “consent” sentence is such a strawman’s argument.“That strawman didn’t consent to his argument being public!”“Why are you assuming the strawman is a he?”
I don’t inherently disagree. BUT. I do find some relief in the idea that anyone is consuming their media with that much critical thought. Weird and silly though it might be, it’s *at least* media literacy.
I would far prefer a person passively consuming media than someone so far up their own ass that they fret about the feelings fictional characters have about being filmed.
They didn’t consent to being watched at any other time, either, and they probably didn’t consent to getting fucking murdered, when that happens!It is truly amazing the mental pretzels people will twist themselves into in order to justify their horribly prudish version of the idea that sex is special.
It’s an argument that doesn’t even hold up under its own premise, since there’s still all the non-sex scenes where the characters may not have consented to being watched.
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…
I really can’t stand the trope in romance stories of the woman going to a small town and finding her happiness there. If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that small towns are hotbeds of resentment and bigotry. To give this story a true small down feeling, they should have trucks rolling coal and Trump flags and signs hanging outside half the houses.
What you didn’t know is that the woman in question is a resentful bigot.
Like, what’s with the assumption that the woman’s open-minded? Maybe she moved back to Bumfuck, Idaho, because she was appalled at the amount of actual bumfucking going on in the city.
“After I gave him some Narcan, he opened those big, soulful blue eyes…”
From my small town experience, unless the sex scene ends with the trailer rolling over from the sheer size and weight of the participants, I call bullshit.
“small towns are hotbeds of resentment and bigotry”This is an oversimplification on par with “cities are hotbeds of crime and disorder.”Horseshoe.
…and then the redneck is revealed to be Santa?!
… small towns are hotbeds of resentment and bigotry. To give this story a true small down feeling, they should have trucks rolling coal and Trump flags and signs hanging outside half the houses.I love the irony of that bigoted statement. The truth is that small towns are mostly filled with generally mellow and friendly people. Crowded big cities have plenty of people who want nothing to do with anyone around them and certainly don’t trust strangers. There are plenty of good and bad in both.
Now I sort of want a Yorgos Lanthimos Lifetime movie with sex scenes as graphic and uncomfortable as those in Dogtooth.
“This December on Lifetime, ‘A Christmas Cumshot’.”
Sounds like a simple case of evolution to me. The target demographic isn’t religious/conservative women born in the 1950s and 60s anymore.
Kum in From Kwanzaa
Fucking through Festivus.
Humping for Hanukkah.
A Tits Out Tết
“and that the people involved—as in, the characters—may not have consented to being watched”wat
Oh, so you only care about the feelings and consent of REAL people, you anti-fictionalist monster?!?
The Seasonal Romance Genre is so weird , I’m not going to judge ,I mean each to their own , but its crazy how many of these are pumped out with fairly standard recipe Mix a small town , newly moved from the big city /returning main character , with a ridiculously good looking love interest, add several quirky townspeople , a sick relative and the holiday of your choice , simmer for 70 mins and serve up a schmaltzy ending, warning not suitable for diabetics or anyone with seasonal depression , not recommended for anyone under three glasses of wine .May lead to ‘wait…what day is it??” binging in extreme cases
If it’s about a big-city woman, she’s a career-obsessed corporate ladder climber who needs a small-town humble hunk to melt her icy heart.If it’s about a small-town woman, she runs a quaint and Instagram friendly shop (bookstore, bridal shop, bakery, florist, etc.) and she falls in love with a hunk who happens to hold the key of saving said quaint shop from bankruptcy.
‘It’s Hot Santa who fucks. I think that’s what the audience wants.”
Wait until you see my hardcore porn parody of the genre! Somebody’s gonna get pegged!
Not sure why you had to shoehorn two whole paragraphs about sex scene discourse into this, but okay
I would not mind having somewhat more adult content in Christmas movies. Every single one ends up in a chaste kiss.
My only question is: will this cause Jeebus freaks like Candace something Full House girl to protest Hallmark and collaborate with Ben Shapiro to produce a faith-based Hallmark knockoff?
Starring Kevin Sorbo and Gina Carano?
Sorbo quits in anger when he realizes he’s not playing Jesus. Gina, ironically, IS playing the Virgin Mary, but only as a blown plastic lawn decoration of her. Even then, producers worry she lacks the charisma to pull it off.
So it’s now progressive to fret about depicting sex in art like someone who throws fundraisers for Focus On The Family? I feel like I’m living Opposite Land lately, I swear.
Wow, who knew April Kepner had this in her? Then again, if the actress who played April Kepner was to write movies, this is exactly the type of movie I would expect her to write.
On Monday, AV Club sister site Deadspin uploaded an article accusing a child of wearing blackface to a Kansas City Chiefs game, a claim that was quickly debunked. Today the site updated the article, but still failed to correct the erroneous claim.
To me this suggests that G/O Media websites not only publish false information, but stand by it, and therefore cannot be trusted. I will no longer be reading AV Club or any of its sister sites, and I strongly suggest any who continue to do so fact-check their claims vigorously. Please help stop the spread of misinformation!