We are currently in the midst of Netflix’s sexual awakening. In recent months, the streaming giant has blessed us with a string of steamy original series that skimp on neither sex nor shock value. Following the success of Bridgerton‘s buzzy regency-era sex scenes and Sex/Life‘s headline-making display of particularly well-endowed male nudity, Netflix has now set its sights on one of the most notoriously risqué novels in literary history: Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Earlier, this month, the streaming platform announced a forthcoming adaptation of the 1928 D.H. Lawrence classic, a novel deemed so vulgar it remained tied up in obscenity charges until the 1960s.
I first read Lady Chatterley when I was 12 years old, after wisely figuring out that while parents might try to censor your TV and internet consumption, no one was going to stop their precocious child from reading classic literature at a college level. Under the convenient veil of intellectual precocity, I spent my pre-teen years gobbling up the sauciest novels the 19th and 20th centuries had to offer, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Madame Bovary to Lolita. To be fair, most of the literature deemed scandalous or obscene in those days is actually pretty tame by today’s standards, and typically just involves a young woman losing her virginity/having an affair and being punished for it by society and/or the universe.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the other hand, is a notable exception. Filled with enough four-letter words to make George Carlin blush and detailed descriptions of graphic sex of all kinds, it’s easy to see why this book got 20th-century knickers in a knot that took decades to untie. (It’s worth noting that there’s also a bunch of other stuff in there about class, nature and the growing threat of industrialism to the beauty of the natural world, but obviously no one remembers or talks about that part outside of a college English class, because sex.)
The novel has been adapted for film, television and stage multiple times, but increasingly progressive sexual mores and Netflix’s recent penchant for pushing the boundaries of mainstream sex scenes suggests this Lady Chatterley adaptation may well be the most explicitly erotic yet, a film already rumored to be raunchier than Bridgerton.
Personally, I and my inner 12-year-old who relied on 20th-century literature for sex ed welcome this new era of horny literary adaptations with open arms. And while we’re giving horny classics like Lady Chatterley the explicit screen time they deserve, let’s also breathe some sexual energy into all the books that could’ve been erotic, but weren’t because of tight-laced Victorian sexual mores. Sure, we can read between the lines, but this is the 21st century and most of us are lucky if we can even remember the last time we picked up a book. Enough with nuance and veiled metaphor. We need our horny content right where we can see it. Give me an erotic Jane Eyre adaptation; give me the necrophilia and quasi-incest we all know is going down between the lines in Wuthering Heights. Honestly, don’t bother with Jane Austen though. That shit is the least sexy literature of all time.
Anyway, Netflix’s forthcoming Lady Chatterley’s lover will star Emma Corrin, Jack O’Connell and Matthew Duckett. There’s no official release date yet, but here’s hoping whenever it drops, it will bring with it a prosperous new era of the horny literary adaptations we deserve.
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