Fleapit revisited:Sex On Screen.

"If you were asked to do something, especially by a man, you did it" - Jane Fonda

"The Hollywood machine is something to be survived" - Rose McGowan

Sex On Screen (directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, part of BBC4's Storyville strand and currently available to watch on the iPlayer) tells a story that won't surprise many. It tells a story of female actors sitting topless, or naked, in large airy rooms surrounded by fully dressed men, it tells a story of women told that if they don't take their clothes off their careers will flounder, and it tells of male actors and directors exploiting that situation to satisfy their own desires.

It is, of course, quite depressing. When the director Angela Robinson talks about how everyone learns how to behave, sexually and otherwise, from the movies I felt seen. Sex education at school was rudimentary and medical, my parents are certainly not the type to sit their kids down and give them a talk about the birds and the bees, and if I believed the kids in the school playground I'd think some men have 12ft long penises and that vaginal openings were perfectly spherical.

So I stayed up late watching Channel 4 'red triangle' films hoping to see some sex or at least some nudity. As many my age did. In the 1990s, The Bare Facts Video Guide listed the exact minute in several films where you could see boobs, bums, fannies, and willies. Teenage boys and young men soon became masters of the pause button. Masturbators of the pause button too.

But all of this was for men. As the film maker Karyn Kusama correctly points out in Sex On Screen, there are lot of people, a lot of women and girls especially, who are not catered for by these films. Films where the men 'act' and the women are looked at. Some women interviewed talk of once desperately wanting to be the 'object' of desire. Wanting to be objectified.

Sex On Screen doesn't have a traditional narration. It lets the women involved, along with a few men, tell the story from their own personal experience. So we hear from the likes of Fonda, McGowan, Kusama, Robinson, Rosanna Arquette, Lauren "Lolo" Spencer, Sheryl Lee, and David Simon as well as body doubles, film scholars, visual effects artists, writers, and producers. As well as lots of other female actors I probably should have heard of but haven't.

There are clips from a wide range of films and television shows and they all have, of course, one thing in common. Showgirls, Basic Instinct, Fifty Shades Of Grey, Body Of Evidence, Midnight Cowboy, Barbarella, The Sex Lives Of College Girls, The Deuce, Jennfer's Body, American Psycho, Boogie Nights, Gone With The Wind (!), The Color Purple, Game Of Thrones, Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, Live And Let Die, Pretty Woman, Psycho, Coffy, Carnal Knowledge, and, er, Ace Ventura:Pet Detective come at sex in a number of different ways but all help to build up a picture of an industry, and a county - USA, that finds it easier to come to terms with violence than it does sex.

It tells a long history of showgirls. Of literally showing girls. It talks of a long history of young male writers who don't know, and don't want to know, a woman's perspective on sex. But limited imaginations result in limited choice and the sex we see on screen is often the sex we, we men, like to imagine. Idealised, prettified, and not very real.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn't always this way. In the late twenties and early thirties, about 50% of films were written by women. The likes of Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis are described in Sex On Screen as both "naughty" and "dangerous".

They had agency. But the Hollywood Production Code, or Hays Code, changed that. Film makers were banned from suggesting sex outside of marriage, there was to be no interracial kissing, no kissing at all that lasted longer than three seconds, and married couples would be shown to sleep in single beds. Interesting or nuanced women's roles in films had been all but destroyed.

But when sex returned to the silver screen things had changed. When censorship was severely eased, Hollywood went from showing romance without sex to showing sex without romance. Female actors were told, often by male directors, that appearing nude on screen would be empowering for them. Some female actors believe it was and still is. Others don't and talk of leaving their body or going into 'blackout' when having to act out a sex scene. It is to Sex On Screen's great credit that both voices are heard.

Of course, sex was still primarily shown as something to titillate men. Particularly white men. That meant lesbian scenes played out as male fantasies. That meant very few women of colour were shown to have active sex lives. Overweight, and disabled, people fared even worse and trans people? That's a whole other debate and one that films, historically, have either steered clear of or got painfully wrong.

With the advent of the Internet and social media in recent decades, nude scenes don't disappear quickly either. They're made into GIFs and uploaded to websites like PornHub and AZNUDE and, often, people are free to make whatever comment they like beneath them. As prurient, as hurtful, or as abusive as they wish. Imagine having reviews of your body and your (perceived) sexual performance stored online for anyone to view whenever they want.

The body double Marli Renfro describes how, during her career, she was treated "like a chicken dinner:- bring out the legs, bring out the beast, bring out the thigh". Things are improving now and we see scenes of an intimacy co-ordination training class (how to mime a blow-job, watching some very sadistic sex scenes in older films) and a part about how agreements now work.

They're quite involved. An actor may agree to show side boob but not nipple or set a limit on how much bum crack can be shown beneath a slipping towel. In the past many men involved in the film industry simply demanded nudity and sacked female actors who refused to provide it. Blake Edwards and James Franco don't come out of this film looking very good.

Others, of course, went even further. We all know about Harvey Weinstein - current home the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, but I'd never heard of Kip Pardue who sexually violated the actor Sarah Scott on set and seemed to believe that in doing so he was simply enjoying the 'perks' of the job.

Sex On Screen does a good job of naming and shaming individuals who deserve to be named and shamed but it also takes in a whole range of things. From the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge to merkins and modesty garments, from the rise of hardcore pornography to Andy Warhol and the sixties and seventies sexual revolution, and from blaxploitation films to #MeToo and Time's Up. Most of all it tackles an unrelenting, and often squalid, male gaze.

There's a telling moment very early on in Sex On Screen when one interviewee talks about how winning an Oscar means you don't have to get naked anymore. When I Googled to find out who I could attribute that quote to I couldn't find an answer but I was directed to "15 Oscar-Winning Nude Scenes" and "Actresses that got COMPLETELY NAKED onscreen" which, I think, tells you how far we've still got to go.

Sex On Screen does end feeling a bit more positive about how desire and sexuality are now being portrayed on screen but I rather suspect this journey has only just begun and there will probably be more than a few wrong turns along the way. At least it seems like there's a map now.