The New Yorker:

At a sex-choreography workshop, a writer discovered a world of Instant Chemistry exercises, penis pouches, and nudity riders to train for Hollywood’s most controversial job.

By Jennifer Wilson

Earlier this year—Valentine’s Day weekend, to be precise—I found myself sitting on the floor of a loft in downtown Los Angeles with eight other adults, learning how to fake an orgasm. We had been told to make three “oo” sounds punctuated by a sharp inhale. Next, we bit our lower lips and exhaled on the letter “V.” “Vuh, vuh, vuhhhhhhh,” we harmonized. After a few rounds of this, I started feeling out of breath. A scene from “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda’s character, strapped into an orgasmatron by a mad scientist, nearly expires from pleasure flashed before my eyes. At the front of the room was our conductor, Yehuda Duenyas, a lithe fifty-one-year-old in a pewter-colored sweatshirt that matched his graying faux-hawk. After our final exhale, he leaped up from a stool and gave each of us a fist bump, adding a heartfelt “Good work!”

I was participating in a four-day sex-choreography workshop run by CINTIMA, which Duenyas co-founded in 2023. It is one of twelve certification programs accredited by sag-aftra to train intimacy coördinators. It is a new job—so new, in fact, that the union offers a definition on its website: “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer” of sex scenes. My CINTIMA classmates were hoping to join a rapidly professionalizing field. In April, for example, the Intimacy Professional Summit, a three-day conference in Minneapolis for intimacy coördinators, featured panels such as “Sex Parties, Orgies, and Other Large Scenes” and, for those interested in depicting, say, Regency-era raunch, “Romancing the Past.”

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