Bridgerton is back for its second season today, and you don’t need to be a fan — or to have even watched a single episode — to know the hit Netflix series is famous for one thing: sex scenes. When the Regency-era romance premiered early last year, the show’s steamy, and prolific, 19th-century sex scenes quickly dominated the discourse. They also turned up (illegally) on porn sites, sparked an increase in four-poster bed sales and have potentially triggered a renewed interest in both romantic and historical-set porn. A 2021 survey from Sssh.com, an ethical porn platform designed with the female gaze in mind, revealed a significant increase in demand for “period piece” porn, which founder and director Angie Rowntree previously told InsideHook she attributes to the popularity of Bridgerton.
But well before Bridgerton ushered in a new era of horny historical dramas for the streaming age, period-piece romance (and sex) has always been popular. Bridgerton itself has precedent in a number of historical films and TV dramas known for sexual boundary-busting before it, including The Tudors, The Borgias and Game of Thrones, as well as relative contemporaries like Outlander and Harlots. And before one could simply show bodice-ripping on television, of course, smutty historical romance novels titillated teens and moms alike with their cookie-cutter plot lines, soft-core sex scenes and abundance of ample bosoms and throbbing manhood.
Meanwhile, these fantasies of ripped bodices and swashbuckling heroes don’t just exist on screens and in bookstores. According to Dr. Justin Lehmiller, Kinsey Institute research fellow and Scientific Advisor to Lovehoney, historical sex is a relatively common fantasy. For his book, Tell Me You Want, Lehmiller surveyed 4,175 Americans about their sexual fantasies and found that 34 percent of adults reported having fantasized about sex in a historical setting. Moreover, while shows like Bridgerton and Outlander are often unfairly written off as female-focused entertainment, Lehmiller tells InsideHook that historical sex fantasies are equally common among heterosexual men and women.
“Historical erotica will always be exciting to us,” says Fern Riddell, a British historian specializing in gender, sex, suffrage and Victorian culture, and author of Sex Lessons From History. “Pornographers have constantly found a way to tap into that, whether they were writers in the 19th century or videographers in the 1980s.”
So what is it about historical sex that has such enduring erotic appeal? Why is it that sex that appears to have happened decades, centuries or millenia ago seems to capture the horniest parts of our imagination?
The eroticization of the exotic
So much of sex appeal is rooted in novelty. That’s why it can be notoriously challenging to keep sex exciting in a long-term monogamous relationship, and it’s also why we tend to code things seen as “exotic” as sexy (e.g. why strippers are sometimes referred to as “exotic dancers”). Sometimes, this can be potentially problematic, such as when certain races or cultures are fetishized. But it doesn’t necessarily take geographical or racial “otherness” to scratch that itch for erotic novelty. While we may not think of, say, early 19th-century England as a particularly “exotic” locale, the chronological and cultural distance is enough to render Bridgerton’s regency-era romance exotic enough to be eroticized.
“Historical sex fantasies are also more common among those who fantasize about sex in exotic places in general — such as on a beach or in nature — and they are especially common among those who fantasize about sex in fantastical locations, such as in outer space or in a science-fiction setting.” says Lehmiller. “This suggests that these fantasies are at least partly about meeting our need for novelty. Picturing sex in a new setting is an easy way of boosting arousal by amping up the newness and excitement factors.”
Essentially, distance — whether geographical, cultural or chronological — tends to breed novelty, and thus sexiness. “Simply put, historical sex adds extra layers to the overall fantasy,” says Rowntree. “The imagination is engaged not only through the sexual arousal, but also through the escapism that comes with being transported to another time and place.”
Moreover, the fantasy of sex in another era can also heighten other senses, all of which can contribute to arousal. “Your senses are probably taking in details that you otherwise would take for granted in something set ‘present day,’” says Rowntree. “Everything from the ways of speaking, the setting and the period attire all mingle together to make the experience more than just the sex; and of course, the desire itself is a timeless part of the human experience.”
This sense of distance can also make it easier or more comfortable for some to express their desires. ”It’s sometimes easier to talk about sex in the past than sex in the present because there is a degree of remove and it seems less tawdry and more elevated, because things in the past are automatically given a sheen of high culture,” says Hallie Lieberman, a sex historian and journalist and author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy. “As I see it, high culture equals low culture plus time.”
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Romanticizing the past
This “sheen of high culture” can also provide a rose-colored-glasses effect, one that tends to make us lust after the presumably more romantic days of yore.
“Fantasies about sex in historical settings is also linked to having more fantasies about passion and romance in general,” says Lehmiller. This, he adds, suggests that people look to historical sex to provide an element of romance they feel is lacking in their lives, or modern society as a whole.
“Some people romanticize the courtship practices of the past,” says Lehmiller. “For example, the idea of being formally courted by a male suitor might feel very romantic, especially as a contrast to modern courtship, which might feature nothing more than an online message saying, ‘What’s up?’ or an unsolicited nude photo.”
Rowntree refers to this as “golden-age syndrome,” pointing to Midnight in Paris, a 2011 film about a writer vacationing in France who is whisked back in time to the glorified era of ex-pat literary giants like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as an example. “We find that our rose-colored erotic fantasies about the past provide a useful escape from the [seemingly] romance-impaired dating scene of 2022.”
A different era of sexual mores
Of course, many of those notions of “romance” are rooted in the dated, patriarchal norms of a presumably less sexually liberated era. So what gets us so horny about bygone eras in which people were expected to wait until marriage to have sex and women and had little to no agency over their lives or bodies?
For some, it may be that the seemingly taboo nature of sex in a presumably less sexually liberated time is itself a turn on. There has always been some sexual appeal in the illicit. So for some, the idea of sex at a time when almost any sex at all was more or less off-limits is inherently arousing. It can also be soemthing of an ego boost to those of us who like to think of ourselves as sexually evolved. As Lieberman notes, “We sometimes get pleasure in watching historic sex themes by noting how progressive our society is compared to past societies.”
But while we may like to think of ourselves as citizens of a more sexually progressive era than our forebears, that’s not strictly true. “The history of sex doesn’t move in a straight line from repression to liberation,” says Lieberman. “We like to think it does, but in some ways we were more liberated about vibrators and gigolos in the early 1900s than we are today.”
Riddell agrees. “We often get historical sex wrong, by seeing it as less progressive than our own time,” she says, noting that, prior to the 20th century, female pleasure was priotized in educational sex and marriage guides becuase it was thought that both partners needed to orgasm in able to conceive. Neglect of female pleasure, AKA the orgasm gap, is something relatively unique to the past century or so.
Even the presumably rigid Victorian era, according to Lieberman, wasn’t nearly as sexually repressed as we’ve been led to believe, citing prominent “free-love pioneers” like Ida Craddock, a prominent sex educator and counselor of the time who “was part of a much bigger movement of ‘free lovers’” rarely associated with the Victorian era.
“Sex and sexual pleasure isn’t new, and in many ways, our ancestors embraced it a lot more than we do today,” says Riddell.
The future of historical porn
But how long does it take for a period of time to become a source of sexual fanasy? How much distance is required to render a bygone era exotic and thus erotic?
“I’m not sure that there’s an exact length of time when the past becomes exotic enough to be considered erotic,” says Lierberman, but she notes that it definitely takes time — at least a few decades or so. Both she and Rowntree agree that it might, mercifully, still be “a little too soon” for erotic early-aughts period pieces to go mainstream.
“The more ‘distance’ there is between “now and then,” the easier it is for creators to establish a unique perspective and ‘storyverse’ that won’t be quashed by the audience’s own lived experiences,” says Rowntree. “In other words, it’s much easier to sell people on your vision of, say, Regency England, when the audience has never lived it personally,” than a more recent era of which some viewers might have memories and lived experience. Suspension of disbelief is key to historical romance, and while historical dramas certainly tend to run a little loose with the facts, it’s more difficult to suspend disbelief when it’s an era viewers themselves may have lived through.
Still, Lieberman suggests an era of erotic ’90s-themed porn and TV dramas may soon be upon us. Nostalgia for the decade has taken over fashion and entertainment, and we’ve already gotten a taste of what a sexy ’90s period piece might look like thanks to the recent influx of biopic series covering high-profile sex scandals of the day, like Impeachment and Pam and Tommy. While we might not call them erotic, per se, those series certainly met the minimum requirement of sex appeal for shows about a sex scandal. Pam and Tommy, to be sure, featured its share of ecstasy-fueled sexual exploration — including a talking penis, which, while not necessarily arousing, is certainly, shall we say, provocative.
Times change. You too will grow old and see the memories of your youth adapted into erotic historical television dramas. But if there’s one truth that reigns eternal, it is, as Lieberman puts it, that “historical sex never goes out of style.”
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