awkward sex scenes

Every Girls Sex Scene, Rated by Awkwardness

Photo: HBO

If there is one aspect about your 20s that Girls keenly understands, it’s that sex in your 20s is embarrassing. It’s awkward, it’s messy, and sometimes you just want your partner to put it in the right hole. From the pilot episode, in which Hannah and Adam first have sex, Girls made it clear that sex wasn’t just a titillation tactic, but that sexual dynamics are just as important to a relationship as anything else. Girls’ sex scenes functioned as ways to develop its characters, as well as explore ideas around consent, power, and desire.

So with the end of Girls, we thought it would be a good time to revisit every sex scene. But some quick notes on the Rules: First, we’re choosing to define a sex scene as one where there’s an act of sexual intimacy between two people where there’s the possibility of orgasm. Second, we’re only counting the sex scenes we actually see onscreen. That means we’re omitting the sex that Hannah and Laird have offscreen in the season-two episode “Bad Friend,” where Hannah offers sex to Laird because he helped her score some coke. Otherwise, we’ve rated every sex scene on a scale of awkwardness from 1 to 10. Get into it: All adventurous women do.

Girls Sex Scenes, Rated by Awkwardness