During his appearance on the “Podcrushed” podcast last week, You star Penn Badgley did more than spark nostalgia for somewhat decent Gossip Girl plots and raise questions about why his name sounds like a fake moniker you’d give while lying to the cops, inadvertently added more flame to the -  why are these people f***ing on my TV fire.


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On February 9, Badgley took a break from his busy schedule of cosplaying as the target consumer of natural deodorant to chat with hosts Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari about his lone request while filming the highly-misinterpreted Netflix series’ fourth season — “Can I just do no more intimacy scenes?”



“It’s really important to me … Fidelity in every relationship — and especially my marriage — is important to me, and it just got to a point where I didn’t wanna do that,” explained Badgley, who tied the knot to Domino Kirke in 2017. “Before I took the show is there a question of, ‘Do I have a career if I don’t?’ I mean, you know, think about every male lead you’ve loved. Are they kissing someone? Are they doing a lot more than that? It’s really not my desire to.”


Yet instead of taking Badgley’s remarks with the required salt — you do you, babes — or discussing the pressures actors often face when it comes to-onscreen intimacy, a battle of horny vs. puritanical broke on Twitter, with fans questioning whether sex scenes actually add *that* much to their favorite films or are just softcore porn for softcore porn’s sake.



After sparking questions surrounding the consumer-driven nature of modern media and voyeurism as it pertains to fictional entities (they’re not real, ya’ll) the debate surrounding whether sex scenes add important visceral context or prove poor writing quickly, devolved into a series of wild, existential assumptions and Freudian psychoanalysis about the parties on the other side of the screen.






“I am once again seeing the ‘sex scenes don’t further the plot’ discourse and sometimes the plot is that two people want to fuck! some of my best days have had that exact plot,” wrote @roastmalone_.



Remember, friends, some of the best films have sex as a plot point — just ask Lars Von Trier, Tommy Wiseau, and the Oscar-deserving writers behind the “Lemon Stealing Whores” porno.