Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

The Department of Health and Human Services did change its policy for grant awardees, limiting how programs that receive federal dollars can teach abstinence. But those groups can continue preaching abstinence in non-federally funded initiatives, even though the evidence suggests that such programs are ineffective or “even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active.” Studies have not found that abstinence-only programs cut pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), or even the age when sexual activity begins.

But more to the point, there’s the idea that if someone is a virgin at an advanced age, they need to be fixed, as if virginity is inherently a flaw or the result of someone being damaged. Sometimes, as The 40 Year Old Virgin put it, sex jus doesn’t happen for people. That movie was probably the most positive way to spin that particular kind of plot arc—Andy wants to have sex, but after some bad experiences, has essentially stopped trying. That it hasn’t happened isn’t really his fault, and he’s not an inherently damaged person. The advice he’s given turns out to be mostly BS, too: there is no secret code for getting with women or having satisfying sex. He just has to find someone he feels comfortable with.

That hasn’t exactly been the case with television recently, though. Glee‘s played out Emma as an incredibly damaged person who does bad things to other people by virtue of refusing to fix herself. I don’t know what will happen in the upcoming arc where Will proposes to her. But the show has not exactly handled her with delicacy and empathy. Now, Are You There, Chelsea? is going to have its bitter, alcoholic party girl rooming with another late-twenties virgin, Dee Dee, who I am informed by the network no longer has her eyes pop all the time. Lauren Lapkus, who plays Dee Dee explains: “She has really strong morals, religious morals. But she’s able to go with the flow. And then kind of help her open herself up in different ways. And over the course of the season she has experiences she wouldn’t necessarily have with different guys.” Which, you know, okay. I like the idea of a sympathetic religious character on network television. But I really hope they treat her as if she has something to bring to the table, rather than having her deliver moralistic sermons on subjects that Chelsea’s already made her mind up on. And as for her getting opened up to new experiences? I’m not sure Chelsea Handler, fictional or otherwise, is someone who should guide someone in a sensitive way towards their deflowering.

*Chelsea Handler’s explanation for why she’s playing a character based on her own sister? “I have a sister. Period. Her name isn’t Sloane. And we had to change her name for legal reasons, so my own family can’t sue me…Everything I’ve been accusing her of my whole life I can now reenact before her eyes.”

It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary.

I guess Brandon Sullivan kind of looks like Roman statuary while finally, painfully reaching orgasm in Shame, maybe in a Laocoon-y kind of way, but that’s not a good thing.

I’m always sort of amused by the idea that the people who are having good sex look all suave and aesthetically appealing while it happens. This is a misconception that both writers and folks who make film and television seem to have. It’s an idea that’s debunked very effectively in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks’ characters finally have sex in the scene that they’re filming for their adult movie, we see the scene first from their perspective, where the sex is transformative and miraculous. Then, we see it from the perspective of the camera crew, who after weeks of ridiculous posing, are disconcerted by the image of two people huddled together somewhat lumpily on a coffee shop floor. In a more sophisticated way, the sex scenes in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (other than the ludicrous sex-up-a-stairway sequence, which would hurt SO MUCH) do the same thing. When people try to have sex on tables, they fall off. They get the giggles. They act kind of stupid and do things, like pour water on each other, that seem like a good idea in the moment but mostly seem sort of weird afterward.

Scenes like this are a lot more intimate than depictions that are about showing off how great a female lead’s hair look, or letting her keep her bra on to stay compliant with the clauses in her contract, or are about letting the male lead look like an awesome physical specimen, or a sensitive dude, or both at once. Good sex gets you beyond those concerns, which is why it’s hard to capture in art.