Why 18th-century Versailles outstrips 1970s LA for sexual frankness

It has, one can only assume, been a prosperous time for intimacy coaches. Those guardians employed to ensure the prevention of misdemeanours on film and television sets — astonishing that it should take so long for their obviously correct introduction — are in demand right now. Not one but two 18th-century romps and a shakedown of 1970s California club life are currently bringing some heat into wintry homes.

Neither the new BBC/Canal Plus production of Marie Antoinette nor Starz’s Dangerous Liaisons, a prequel to the acclaimed play of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s elegant novel, are especially sparing in their depiction of the erotic couplings (and triplings) that shape their characters’ lives. The sex may not always be meaningful or lovely but it is, as the saying goes, integral to the action. It turns fortunes upside down and becomes a measure of both morality and reputation.

Here’s the most important lesson: it’s not what you do, nor the way that you do it; it is the complex myriad reasons behind it. In Marie Antoinette, the ingenuous Austrian archduchess arrives at the French court at the age of 14 with understandable trepidation. The seven or eight years of fumbling that led to the eventual consummation of her marriage to Louis XVI are shown in both comic and painful detail.

Sex is valued in this instance overwhelmingly for its procreative function. Without a male heir, the marriage-alliance is always in danger of rupture. But the women at the court rally around and make the big moment happen. The men are mostly hapless in this scenario, driven by lusty intent but unsubtle in their attempts to grasp the bigger picture.

The pivot in this women-on-top reading is Countess du Barry, mistress to Louis’s predecessor on the throne, whose earthy understanding of her appeal and status allows her to dominate the court (a pitch-perfect alpha-female performance from Gaia Weiss), until she overplays her hand. Tellingly, when the erotic manoeuvring is replaced towards the end of the series by men talking about politics, the show loses its zest.

The cynicism at play in the drawing rooms of Versailles is made explicit, and considerably less alluring, in Dangerous Liaisons. Chronicling the events that will lead to the fatal skirmishes between the protagonists of Laclos’s work, the young Camille, a sex worker with attitude, is instructed by her mentor, the about-to-fall Marquise de Merteuil, to take the battle to the enemy: “Avenge our sex . . . conquer or die!”

The ensnared Vicomte de Valmont knows he is in a war, but like a martial artist he seeks to turn the tables on a stronger opponent: “I want an education in the female sex, so I might be its equal,” he tells Camille. More hapless men, presuming to be masters of their largely joyless physical encounters, are undone by the nimbler sensibilities of pragmatic and decisive women.

Here is the twist in these two period dramas (both created by women — Deborah Davis, co-writer of The Favourite, in the case of Marie Antoinette, Harriet Warner for Dangerous Liaisons), in comparison with many of their predecessors: not only are carnal affairs brought to the fore, but the very balance of power between the sexes is shifted as a result. The wiles of the bedroom are given due prominence, and the arid matters of state made to appear deathly dull.

This has not always been the case in the history of TV costume dramas, which, apart from rare exceptions (the boundary-pushing I, Claudius became notorious for its sexual frankness when it was exported to the US in the 1970s), have tended towards coyness in their depictions of times past, obsessing over their characters’ literary eloquence at the expense of any libidinal action. Adaptations of Jane Austen, to take the most notable example, have often seemed weirdly trapped by the taboos of the time in which they are set, instead of seeking insight from today’s more liberated cultured climate.

And so, a quarter of a millennium later, to Los Angeles, where Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales, the torrid and improbably violent story behind the crazily successful male strip joint, might have become some kind of apotheosis of women’s sexual empowerment. Neatly for our purposes, it centres on the only nightclub in Christendom to be named after an 18th-century furniture maker.

But while the replacement of the rustle of silk by the slathering of body oil brings us sharply up to date, there is disappointingly little to say here about sex and power. Yes, the women are watching and happily objectifying the men, who twirl their torsos to order; but the sex here, much of it casual and furiously executed against the nearest weight-bearing wall, is depressingly artless, lacking in ulterior motive or nuance.

It is overshadowed rather by the admittedly compelling story of club owner Somen “Steve” Banerjee, whose inability fully to appreciate the potential of his pioneering venture comes to an ugly end. That it should all climax not with a guillotine but a murder inquiry doesn’t seem like progress, on any count.