There’s something else in the episode, too, which I’d never seen on television, and it felt more graphic than the theatrical kink delivered with numbing regularity on cable television. (And here I’m going to describe the scene graphically, because it’s the only way to talk about a sex scene of this type.) The first time that Hannah and Joshua have sex, we don’t see it, just the aftermath, as they dress and exchange data (mainly, that he’s married but separated). Their second time is different. Joshua tugs off his shirt then lies back on his bed. Hannah unbuckles his belt, and she ducks down to the right of the camera out of the frame. Joshua gazes at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and mutters: “I want you to make me come, O.K. Make me come, Hannah.”
Patrick Wilson is a gorgeous guy and it’s a sexy scene. It’s also a reasonably familiar scenario, since we’ve seen plenty of men get blowjobs on adult dramas and comedies. But Hannah flips it and reverses it. She rises into the frame and softly asks Joshua to make her come instead. He does, using his hand. The camera doesn’t cut away: instead, it drifts even closer to their faces as they kiss. This is the opposite of the sex we’d seen between her and Adam, in which Hannah scrabbled to follow his lead, or to negotiate (“not there!”), or pick up clues to his fantasies. Hannah may be self-centered, but in bed she’s almost slavishly generous and, in a superficial sense, the model of “good, giving and game”—Dan Savage’s playbook for grownup sex.
With that nice pharmacist in her home town, she took that bravado so far that he finally had to growl “come on” to get her to stop spooling out fake fantasies. And while Hannah apparently told Adam that he “made her whole body feel like a clit,” you have to wonder whether that was the truth, or if it was Hannah’s way of convincing herself that even though Adam never paid all that much attention to that part of her body, anywhere he touched was O.K.
Either way, this short, potent sequence was a departure from any sex we’ve seen so far on “Girls,” because it wasn’t played for laughs. It stood in contrast with the first-season scene of Marnie rolling her eyes at her attentive boyfriend, and also with the second-season scene of Marnie getting slammed into the starfish position by a pretentious, detached lover (and maybe enjoying the novelty, since he demands nothing). In fact, the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television, which consists largely of the same cynical motifs recycled again and again: perfect lingerie, interchangeable young female bodies (while male body types vary wildly, in age and shape), the sort of “porn with purchase” that studs prestige cable series from “Boardwalk Empire” to “House of Lies.”
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That Sex Scene on Last Night's "Girls" : The New Yorker