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Entertainment Weekly

EW.com: Most embarrassing sex scenes

The 10 most wince-worthy (and often hilarious) bits

By Gary Susman
Entertainment Weekly

Carell
Steve Carell focuses in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- As Woody Allen said, sex is dirty only if you do it right. If you do it wrong, however, it's pretty funny.

Case in point: the new comedy "The 40 Year-Old Virgin." As the film reveals in flashbacks, one reason protagonist Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) has never had sex is that his many attempts have been hilariously klutzy disasters -- getting stymied by an unyielding brassiere, accidentally kicking a woman out of bed, and getting spewed on by a drunken date.

If "Virgin" joins "Wedding Crashers" on the list of raunchy comedy hits, we could be seeing a lot more embarrassing sex scenes like these.

Not that Hollywood has ever presented sex scenes with much seriousness. The studios avoid graphic depictions of sex that will run into opposition from the movie ratings board, network TV censors, or the DVD department at Wal-Mart. When sex does appear in mainstream movies, it's glossed over and presented as a gauzily lit event that finds the man and the woman harmoniously in sync.

No wonder Hollywood directors are finding it less troublesome to present sex in comedic terms, as an activity that's awkward, unsatisfying, and above all, humiliating.

Besides, it's the comically embarrassing sex scenes that moviegoers remember most vividly, as the following EW.com galleryexternal link reveals. To keep the list honest, we've left off solo performances (out goes Ben Stiller's ''hair gel'' moment in "There's Something About Mary") and encounters between people and foodstuffs (out goes Jason Biggs' liaison with a pastry in "American Pie" and Meg Ryan's apparently pastrami-induced orgasm in "When Harry Met Sally ..." ).

The 10 sex scenes remaining in our Hall of Shame are the ones that made us laugh and wince the most for the way they humiliated the characters -- and sometimes the actors.

Click hereexternal link to see the gallery.


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