Dana Stevens contemplates intimacy on screen:
Sex scenes in movies—the non-pornographic ones, that is—tend to exist in a few rigidly defined categories: they can be erotic (the scene in Boogie Nights when Julianne Moore coaches Mark Wahlberg through his first shoot), comically grotesque (Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig’s excruciating beer-and-cunnilingus date in Greenberg) or deliberately repellant (the bone-chilling coupling of Selma Blair and Robert Wisdom in Storytelling). Sometimes these categories can overlap—Awkward and sexy! Disturbing and hot!—but rarely will a movie step outside their bounds entirely and try something new. Then there is that very rare sex scene—say, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in their Venice hotel room in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, that does it all: turns us on, moves us emotionally, advances the story, reveals something about the characters, and showcases the filmmaker’s art.
Stevens adds the new movie, The Sessions, about a severely disabled man losing his virginity to a hired sex surrogate, to the list for treating "sex neither as titillation nor taboo, but as a necessary anatomical function that’s also humanity’s greatest source of pleasure, connection, and mystery." Tim Grierson is on the same page:
For all its disease-of-the-week trappings, this movie isn't really about the usual feel-good clichés about the triumph of the human spirit. Instead, it's about sex—and, more specifically, the terror of intimacy. … Nonchalant conversations that mention erections, vulvae, premature ejaculation and oral sex are the norm during their meetings, and they do have sex. But all that frankness works to demystify sex (both for Mark and the audience) so that the really challenging work—making Mark feel confident as a sexual being—can begin.
Phil Goldman details his own experience with a sex surrogate.
The Dish 