No Hard Feelings begs the question: Have women really come a long way in Hollywood?

In No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence plays Maddie, a floundering 32-year-old so down on her luck she’s willing to make a deal with the parents of a sheltered 19-year-old to “date” him in exchange for a car (which she needs for her job as an Uber driver). The quotes around the word “date” are made explicit in the film after she meets with the folks (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) and it becomes clear that what they really want is for Maddie to be their son’s first sexual encounter.

It sounds like the premise of a throwback sex comedy, with a couple of notable twists. First, the story is told from Maddie’s point of view. She’s in a financial bind of her own making, and her miserable track record with relationships is also self-inflicted, but she does have agency in the film. Secondly, the kid, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), isn’t a closet hound dog who dreams of getting laid but can’t relate to women. And he’s not looking for a conquest or a fling. Much of the comedy is derived from Maddie’s failed attempts to seduce Percy. The setup could be problematic from any perspective, but the modern version tries to be more nuanced.

It’s not difficult to imagine a raunchier version of this movie if it had been made in a different era. If this were a sex comedy in the ’70s or ’80s, it would likely have put Percy at the center of some kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment aimed at adolescent boys. Think Risky Business. Revenge Of The Nerds. Weird Science. No one really thought of the women in these films beyond how they related to the lead male characters, at least no one with the power to change that perception. Like it says in the cigarette ad, “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

From the top: Hollywood’s Golden Age

Hollywood’s obsession with sex is as old as the town itself. Before the Hays Code—the industry’s first self-censorship initiative intended to curb depictions of sin and decadence on screen—was adopted in the early 1930s, sex scandals were common, onscreen and off. Women were allowed to be funny or sexy, but seldom at the same time, and usually served as a foil for the male protagonist. Few comedies of this period embraced the radical notion that women are complex human beings just as likely as men to get themselves into zany situations by following their libidos.

One of the first comedians to own her sensuality on screen was legendary actress Mae West, who came to Hollywood from Broadway in the late 1920s, where she’d written and starred in a number of plays featuring racy, smart women. In the movies, West often played liberated characters with a wicked sense of humor, throwing in risque lines just to see what she could get away with (“Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” is a West classic still quoted to this day).

West managed to make a career out of playing bad girls in films like She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, but the zealous enforcement of the Hays Code in the ’30s and ’40s meant that West had to tone down her bawdy persona. Sex in this era was no laughing matter, though actresses with guts and clout, like Katherine Hepburn and Carole Lombard, were sometimes allowed to play around the edges of it in films like Holiday and My Man Godfrey. Their jokes and innuendoes directed at the men who courted them could be construed as teasing foreplay, if you used your imagination.

A slow-motion sexual revolution

Society began to see slow but perceptible changes in the 1950s, and those changes accelerated and became more overt in the 1960s. Playboy launched in 1953, the same year Alfred Kinsey released his groundbreaking and controversial report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. People were starting to accept that women were having sex outside of marriage, which opened the door for comedies based around the games men and women play in and out of the bedroom. Some examples include Pillow Talk, starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, and The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Sex is rarely the end goal for the women in these films, however. It’s merely a tool to entrap chronic philanderers into a loving relationship. Hollywood was still selling the idea that for women, sex is merely a path to settling down and getting married.

With the arrival of the ’60s, Hollywood started to catch on that teenagers were an untapped audience of reliable ticket buyers, and the industry began catering to more prurient tastes. Studios began taking risks, and more overt references to sex began to creep into films. The relatively tame, winking innuendos in earlier comedies gave way to a more brazen approach. Bikini-clad women were ubiquitous in pictures tailor-made for drive-ins, like Beach Blanket Bingo and How To Stuff A Wild Bikini. The generation gap and the clash of morals between teens and their parents became comedic fodder in films like Take Her, She’s Mine, How Sweet It Is, and The Impossible Years. These movies didn’t gloss over the sexual liberation of young women as other films around this time did, but sex was presented mainly as a source of tension between daughters and their horrified parents.

The final growth spurt before maturity

When you think about sex comedies as a subgenre, the examples that come to mind will most likely be from the ’70s and ’80s. As if fed up with decades of repression, a new generation of filmmakers burst onto the scene ready to embrace sex and all its comedic complications. It was a time of sexual liberation and freedom from shame—for young men, at least. Since the majority of these filmmakers were men, their projects catered to a demographic of horny guys just like them.

The crass level of humor in these films is evident in their titles: Porky’s, Screwballs, Joysticks, and Hardbodies (a tradition that No Hard Feelings cheekily references). Onto this trash fire we can also toss films like Animal House, Revenge Of The Nerds, and Weird Science, all of which have some genuinely funny moments but are overshadowed by outdated views of consent and a skewed portrayal of women as little more than sex objects (not to mention their issues with racism and homophobia).

The main characters, usually young and male, are depicted as sex-starved. The obsession with losing one’s virginity is a common theme, as is the appeal of older, more experienced women. But rarely do these guys ever set out to make a connection beyond the physical level. More often than not, women are the targets of lowbrow jokes. These films are rife with voyeurism, exploitation, harassment, and even assault dressed up as boyish pranks. Women are tricked into sexual situations without their consent. Sometimes they’re shown to be satisfied by the experience, as if that justifies it. And it’s played for laughs, because the film doesn’t see female victims as real people.

In the midst of this regrettable wave, a few films stand out. 1980’s Little Darlings starring Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol follows two girls who make a bet over who will be the first to lose her virginity. It offers a female-centered perception of sexuality in a plot loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility, but couched in the guise of a sex romp set at a summer camp. We also have to give an honorable mention to director Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High (written by Cameron Crowe), released in 1982. That film incorporates a lot of the familiar conventions of the ’80s, yet it was ahead of its time in its realistic depiction of teenagers, and actually gives its female characters some emotional depth, without judgment or distance.

Modern sensibilities even the score

The ’90s brought some improvement, but only marginally in the case of films like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary. Their gross-out humor is often based in the humiliation of the characters, though that was starting to be divided more evenly between men and women. The trend continued through the 2000s with films like Superbad and 40-Year-Old Virgin, even if they still focused mainly on relationships between male characters and sidelined the woman as either love interests or comic support.

Women finally came into their own about a decade ago, with films like Easy A and The To Do List following in the footsteps of Little Darlings and employing the tropes of the sex comedy genre to tell stories from a female perspective. In 2018, Hollywood came full circle with Blockers, a film about a trio of parents trying to prevent their daughters from losing their virginity on prom night, recalling the generational panic in the films of the late 1960s.

Do we still have a ways to go? Of course. Equality in Hollywood, on and off screen, is a constant struggle. But it’s worth appreciating how far women have come in the industry, and the range of stories that can now be told about them. A film like No Hard Feelings could have been made in any decade, but it would look a lot different than it does today. And later this summer, we’ll see the premiere of Bottoms, a teen sex comedy with a lesbian twist starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri. Wonder what William Harrison Hays (for whom the code was named) would make of that.