By Dennis Harvey

OK, SO the jar was more than a little bit loosened by the Roaring Twenties' rebellion against hangover Victorian morality, Hollywood's pre-Code lewdness, and the extreme horniness of returning World War II GIs (not to mention their deprived Rosie the Riveters). Still, there's no question that the nascent sexual revolution was kicked off for real by 52-year-old university scientist Alfred Charles Kinsey's 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, plus its equal-opportunity distaff study five years later.

Kinsey's academic surveys revealed the typical American sex life as more polygamous, polymorphous, and even "perverse" than propriety had dared or desired to admit. Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing – it leads to all kinds of expression outside whatever containment standards society imposes on individual behavior. And so the floodgates opened: teenage sexuality, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, bad marital sex, good extramarital sex, homo sex, skyrocketing divorce rates, smut, gay lib, hardcore porn, wife-swapping, general swinging, free love, racial intermarriage, herpes, AIDS, "choosing" homosexuality or being "reprogrammed" from it, nuevo Sodom and Gomorrah, a shave and a haircut.

Almost all these things existed in variably subterranean practice before Kinsey. His crime lay in acknowledging them, which led to their eventual claims on equal-opp legitimacy. As the fog of shame and ignorance got sucked out of the room, prigs commenced a choking cycle that has now become the Holy Biceps of Stars and Stripes fundamentalist oppresso-flexing. I think that mighty arm of some people's god doesn't really want to stop off-the-born-again-grid sex so much as simply halt its acknowledgment. Out of mind, out of sight. Nobody's claiming this makes sense, except in a sort of biblical-interpretive way. That book can be spun more ways than the latest bad news from Iraq, and in fact it will likely be spinning its way further across the entertainment horizon very soon – given the success of this year's flagellating horror film The Passion of the Christ and Hollywood's appetite for bottom line-driven imitation.

But back to Kinsey, which has kicked up some dust among religious and social conservatives. (One such pundit compared its subject to Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele.) The movie does gloss over some of Kinsey's less laudable research tactics and personal traits, in the service of a very secular-humanist plea for tolerance in accepting the true diversity of sexual behavior. The irony, of course, is that for a film that's "all about sex," Kinsey is incredibly modest (that brief flash of full-frontal Peter Sarsgaard asking Liam Neeson, "Would you like to?" is as racy as it gets). It's a very politic, case-pleading, eminently "respectable" biopic – the opposite of a sexy good time.

Indeed, we may be facing a massive turn toward censorship just when mainstream entertainment is arguably the blandest it's been in 40 years. Where was all the screen sex in 2004? Mostly MIA. Searing adult dramas like Closer and We Don't Live Here Anymore talked dirty but showed little, in any case suggesting sex is the remorseless assassin of love. After all the rumors about the studio's prerelease heart attack over "gay sex scenes," Alexander emerged as a retro festival of raised-eyebrow innuendo, its sole naked-grappling sequence 100 percent heterosexual.

For a brief moment in the early '70s, some thought porn movies – which then often boasted story lines, production values, and decent acting – would go mainstream. Barriers were falling so much that many assumed any distinctions between the grown-up Hollywood features and mere "skin flicks" would soon evaporate. That didn't happen. But who then could have anticipated things moving so much in the opposite direction? Entire genres, notably the slasher movie, would grow up around punitive, antisex ideas. Joyful, consenting-adults sex can occasionally be spotted in something like Sideways – only comedies (particularly teen ones like the underappreciated Eurotrip) can get away with making sex look fun, as opposed to guilty, ominous, or perverse.

Elsewhere, you have to look toward the foreign and independent terrains – where mainstream America seldom thinks to tread – for anything that pushes the erotic envelope. Even there, it wasn't a banner year. Bernardo Bertolucci's pretentious The Dreamers felt like a dirty old man pushing nubile young actors into yoga positions for (alleged) art's sake; its two guys-one girl ménage notably shrank from the whole bisexual side of that triangle (as did A Home at the End of the World, an infinitely better film). The Door in the Floor offered good sex, albeit in the conventional fantasy guise of a gorgeous older woman "initiating" an underage male.

Only Michael Winterbottom's sci-fi romance Code 46 – like his forthcoming 9 Songs, which is running into serious ratings-board problems – dared to present grown-ups really enjoying themselves and each other, with tenderness as well as pure chemical attraction. Against that we have to weigh the oeuvre of Catherine Breillat, whose Sex Is Comedy afforded more evidence that the most hardcore-inclined art-house auteur is also the one who seems to abhor sex the most.

Sign of the times: this year's most notorious and explicit sequences both involved the variably sneaky use of inanimate-object stand-ins for organic flesh. Team America's dry-heavingly funny fuckfest was between marionettes. Less open about its artifice was that climatic, ahem, scene in The Brown Bunny wherein Vincent Gallo gave Chloë Sevigny a rubber tree to harvest. Oh, come on: the only thing that big about Gallo is his egomaniacal insecurity.

Clearly, what the screen needs now is more love, sweet love. But there's a good chance the medium is headed toward a new Ice Age instead. The hysteria directed toward Janet Jackson's "accidental" wardrobe malfunction suggested a nation in aggressive denial of its own hearty prurience. Expect private urges to become more publicly excoriated in the immediate future. Robert Knight of the Culture and Family Institute in Washington, D.C., laid out the hyperempowered far right's game plan in plain terms in a November Washington Post article: "Just as Reagan was not content to contain communism but announced a rollback, pro-family organizations are not content to protest the latest outrage anymore, but will seek legislation and will punish sponsors of lewd entertainment."

It's a scary prospect. "Liberal" Hollywood quails easily – boycotts and potential box-office downturns might easily provoke heightened self-censorship. And that dirty little economic secret, the massively money-making U.S. porn industry, could conceivably get "legislated" back into the criminal underground from which it sprang.

The other night I watched an obscure 1971 Canadian movie, Loving and Laughing. Set largely at a hippie commune, it has an attractive cast of English-speaking Quebecois happily romping clothed and un- through a farcical plot whose escapist point is nothing more (or less) serious than "Life is short – enjoy each other." Both sexes go full-frontal fairly often, though nothing more daring than lighthearted soft-core simulation occurs. Most striking was the general aura of free-love euphoria, celebratory rather than smirking, not exclusive of romantic love in the least.

This cultural antique, then an ordinary drive-in release, couldn't possibly be made in our epoch. One fears 2004's sex-deprived cinema was just an early frost. A long, hard winter may lie ahead.

Top 10 (in order seen)

1. Dig! (Ondi Timoner, USA)

2. Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, Germany, 2003)

3. Carandiru (Hector Babenco, Brazil/Argentina, 2003)

4. A Home at the End of the World (Michael Mayer, USA)

5. The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, USA)

6. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, U.K.)

7. Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, USA)

8. Sideways (Alexander Payne, USA)

9. The Manson Family (Jim Van Bebber, USA, 1995-2003)

10. Red Lights (Cedric Kahn, France)