Real Sex

Why is HBO trying to hide its erotic past?

HBO, what the fuck?

Okay, maybe that’s an aggressive way to start this post, but hear me out.

Earlier this week, while searching the depths of HBO Max for a documentary to watch (still taking recs from any of the streaming services if you’ve got’em) I realized that HBO has gotten rid of all its late night adult entertainment shows that kind of helped to put the network on the map. Taxicab Confessions, Cathouse, and, my personal favorite, Real Sex, are glaringly absent from the streaming line up. Basically, they got rid of all the shows about people fucking. 

So this returns us to my initial question, HBO, what the fuck? 

I had heard that HBO had cut back on showing their old, erotic, documentary shows on the network a couple of years ago but assumed they’d still be available to stream. So when we finally got HBO Max and discovered that Real Sex was nowhere to be found, I was shocked. Isn’t the point of having a streaming service for your network so you can include all of your original programming on said streaming service?

If you aren’t familiar with HBO’s Real Sex, it was a documentary series which aired 33 one hour episodes intermittently from 1990 to 2009. Each episode would cover several topics of sex culture ranging from masturbation, phone sex, and swingers conventions to sex workshops, latex kinks, penis puppetry and everything in between while separating the segments with on the street interviews asking every day New Yorkers about their own sex lives. 

Now, it would be easy to write Real Sex off as just some show teens could watch to get off to, but that would be unfair. It was funny, it was entertaining, and it was informative. It brought a lot of aspects of sexuality and sexual desire into the living rooms of people who would otherwise never have heard of things like The Punany Poets or tantric sex and it made it all seem normal and accepted, even if it might also seem a little strange.

Real Sex was so ahead of its time. Run by a crew of mostly women, they got people to be candid about sex on camera for the world to watch. In 2021, that’s still an incredible feat and we’re way more open about sex than anyone was in the 90s! Conceived at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the women behind the show wanted to remind people that sex could still be fun and silly and playful and not something people had to be afraid of.

So for HBO to quietly try to make it disappear is kind of an insult. Quoted in a 2018 article by Tim Baysinger of the Wrap, an HBO representative claims “…there hasn’t been a strong demand for this kind of adult programming, perhaps because it’s easily available elsewhere” as the reasoning behind pulling their adult programming from their streaming line up. Of course you can find more easily accessible videos to fap to on every corner of the internet! Of course you can research any and every form of sexuality and sexual desire just by typing it into Google! But Real Sex was a pioneer of making us less uptight about sex in the first place and deserves the right to find new audiences who can laugh at the terrible styles and fashions of the 90s while maybe also being introduced to new sexual fantasies. 

To me, by totally getting rid of Real Sex and the other adult-centric documentary programming, it just feels like HBO is trying to hide its erotic past. This is a channel that is KNOWN for making any excuse to show a naked woman during their programming and yet, they can’t be bothered to allow a show that was created by women to educate the masses ABOUT sex sit next to the likes of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos on their streaming service? That’s bullshit. If Real Sex was there, people would watch it. 

But, according to former producer Katie Smalheer in a 2013 interview by Molly Langmuir for Vulture, it’s always been that way with HBO, “I think that the corporate powers that be weren’t interested in promoting Real Sex. For Christ’s sake, it was never sold on video. People would ask all the time, how do we order it? It was not how HBO wanted to put itself out there.”

If HBO was so embarrassed of being associated with their own shows that chronicled sex in a straightforward way, maybe they shouldn’t have produced them to begin with. It’s like they let them make shows like Real Sex without ever really believing it would become a hit with their audience and once it did, they didn’t want to seem like the smut channel so they took the budding online porn industry as an excuse to scrub their image clean. HBO wants nudity…but only on their terms and definitely not showcasing individuals who don’t fit the standard 20XX ideal of beauty and sex appeal. 

Shows like Real Sex, Taxicab Confessions, and Cathouse were not just shows to get people off, they were shows meant to inform, educate, and entertain. They were meant to show sex as exciting, interesting, and ever evolving. They were meant as a way for us to see that maybe our own kinks aren’t as out there as we thought or to discover things about our own sexuality we may have never thought of before. Sure, maybe 2021 doesn’t need Real Sex to do all of those things anymore, but HBO shouldn’t get to act like that type of programming wasn’t what got them where they are today. Put some respect on the Real Sex name and bring it back on your streaming service!

What was your first memory of Real Sex or Taxicab Confessions? Do you think HBO was justified in scrubbing their adult entertainment docs from HBO Max or do you think they should put them back and why? Sound off in the comments below!