Intimacy by Ita O'Brien: How Normal People can have great sex

When Ita O’Brien was growing up in a strictly traditional Irish Catholic family where no one ever mentioned menstruation, let alone sex, she had no inkling her career would involve sitting with actors, offering them choreographic suggestions as to how they might simulate an orgasm.

Yet as a sought-after intimacy coordinator for films and television, this is exactly what O’Brien does. Not just the orgasm, but the whole build-up – which she strongly believes should be given time and space.

Her mission is to make sex scenes realistic as well as sexy, while respecting actors’ boundaries. While there isn’t enough time in an hour-long episode to film the full 20 minutes (on average) that it takes for a woman to be ‘ready for penetration’, the gradualness should be hinted at.

In her thought-provoking ‘field guide to intimacy’, O’Brien becomes an intimacy coordinator for us all, drawing on her filming work to give us helpful tips on how we should make our real-life sex lives both realistic and sexy, while respecting each other’s boundaries.

People have asked her to visit their bedrooms to help coordinate their sex lives. She does not do that; but this book is the next best thing.

Best known for her coordination of the mutually respectful but highly erotic sex scenes between Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s characters in the BBC drama Normal People (2020), O’Brien is justifiably proud of her work (which also includes It’s A Sin, Gentleman Jack, and I May Destroy You).

Viewers of Normal People were ‘profoundly affected’, she writes, by the scene in which Connell (played by Mescal) and Marianne (Edgar-Jones) make love for the first time. ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Connell asks. When Marianne nods, he says: ‘If it hurts, I’ll stop.’

A bit later, he asks: ‘Does it hurt?’

‘A bit.’ And then she says: ‘It’s nice.’ And they tenderly make love.

I remember how captivated we all were by the eroticism as well as the charm of that series during the first lockdown. Those scenes ‘helped viewers remember all the joy and gorgeousness of their first relationships as teenagers, and how unsure they felt’.

‘The prospect of bringing something to the screen that I felt was representative of the reality of young people in love having sex was really exciting to me,’ O’Brien writes.

Sex is too often portrayed unrealistically. ‘All that bumping and grinding, the thrusting and heads thrown back in simulated ecstasy, rarely bears much relationship to people’s own experience of their sexual encounters. We see penetration after 30 seconds of kissing. Is that how it happens in your life? No!’

The film world certainly needed someone like O’Brien. Before the arrival of intimacy coordinators, directors just used to tell actors to get on with it.

Actress Gemma Whelan describes the multiple intimate sex scenes she had to do in Game Of Thrones as ‘a frenzied mess’. ‘Action! Just go for it!’ the director would shout at the actors. ‘Bit of boob biting, then slap her bum and go!’

Of her role in the Scandi-noir series The Bridge, Swedish actress Sofia Helin said: ‘It’s tense every time you have to cross your own boundaries in order to satisfy a director’s needs.’

Dakota Johnson wishes intimacy coordinators had existed when she was filming Fifty Shades Of Grey. ‘I was just kind of thrown to the wolves on that one,’ she said.

Things have moved on since then. O’Brien’s four main tenets are: open communication, agreement and consent, clear choreography, and closure. Her sessions involve deep breathing exercises to make actors fully present in their own bodies and aware and respectful of their partner’s physical presence.

In one exercise, she advises them to put their right hand on each other’s hearts, and their left hand over their partner’s hand on their heart, and ‘feel the movement of the energy and the dance between you’.

That’s just one of many build-up exercises, some of which verge on the woo-woo. There’s a great deal about the seven chakras, and a lot of visualising of waterfalls, and your own lower body as ‘the base of a tree putting roots deep into the earth’.

When it comes to advising us on how to improve our own intimate lives, or at least how to avoid our sex lives from rusting up over a long marriage, O’Brien says self-love and self-esteem are most important. Look into a mirror and say: ‘I choose to love myself. I am enough. I believe in myself.’

She advises gazing into the eyes of your partner for 60 seconds at a time, and ‘sharing your wonderings’. Gaze at the stars together, as she and her partner do; stand in bare feet on the grass in order to be fully rooted in your body.

She advises us to be honest about what we do and don’t want, and how that might change over time, and to dare to talk about it although it can be ‘difficult and embarrassing’.

She invites us to ‘take a hand mirror and to explore and get to know your vulva’. I might give that one a miss.

To remind us how unique every vulva is, O’Brien gives us a full page of drawings of different-shaped ones, from an art work by Jamie McCartney called The Great Wall of Vulva, which portrays 400 of them. Not a work to show to the older generation in Catholic Ireland, perhaps.

Yet I liked the advice she quotes from the sex therapist Linsey Blair: we should regard intimacy as a kind of tapas menu. ‘You order in bite-size chunks; you don’t just think every sexual encounter has to be a three-course meal leading to penetration and orgasm.’ Sometimes ‘doing small things every day is more intimate than a three-course extravaganza once every three months’.

‘Tuesday sex’ is what she calls the ordinary stuff, which many of us might hope to keep up as a habit over a long lifetime. This is very different from ‘Nine And A Half Weeks sex’ (named after the film of the same name). Online porn has made too many young people think sex must be of the latter variety. Whereas, in reality, ‘intimacy is rarely spontaneous’ – and can be just as satisfying if you schedule it into the diary.

Most importantly, O’Brien reminds us, ‘it’s possible to have intimacy without sex, and sex without intimacy’.