Late in the first season of The Deuce, David Simon and George Pelecanos’s brilliant drama about the sex trade in early-70s New York, Eileen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has a career change. She begins the series fully immersed in “the life” on the streets, but turns to commercial pornography as it begins to arrive in the United States. During one particularly dreary porn shoot, she takes over from the director, Harvey, who is as weary as the performers about the lackadaisical scene happening in front of him.

“Lift up her hips so I can see the inside of her thighs,” she instructs the male performer, looking at Lori, the woman, to make sure everyone is on board. “And take it easy, take it easy.” We see what’s taking place for the cameras – a cheesy threesome involving maids and a bellboy – from multiple perspectives, and under Eileen’s direction, it stops being functional, and starts to sizzle. But our main vision is Eileen’s, not the eyes of a male consumer. As an early-70s porn film, it’s going to end up being consumed by men, but Eileen’s moulding of the scene suggests that when it comes to on-screen sex, there’s a new way of doing it.

It’s a notion that TV shows, particularly those written and directed by women, have begun to embrace fully. Recent series have taken a stark new approach to showing sex and nudity on the small screen. There’s little sign of the old-fashioned soft-focus approach, where the camera would cut away from a couple just after they had started to kiss. There’s a lot of sex, in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and there’s a new frankness to what’s being shown, which, it could be argued, started with Lena Dunham’s brutally blunt depiction of sex in Girls. Sex is no longer romanticised just for the sake of it, though it can be, and sometimes is. It’s monogamous and polyamorous, straight and gay, romantic and casual, lazy and frantic, and all shades in between. As viewers, we’re seeing every side of it, and every angle, too.

She’s Gotta Have It, the Netflix reboot of Spike Lee’s 1986 breakout film, is about Nola Darling’s search for her own identity. As in the film, Nola has three male lovers, and the 10-part series is about her navigating what she wants from each of them, and what they want from her. “As a sex-positive, polyamorous pansexual, monogamy never even seemed like a remote possibility,” she declared in the series teaser. From the off, the sex, and there’s plenty of it, is joyful and even silly, and it’s all on Nola’s terms.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anna Friel (left) and Louisa Krause in The Girlfriend Experience: marks a new phase in on-screen depictions of sex. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

She isn’t the only sex-positive polyamorous pansexual woman on TV right now. In Transparent, which has pushed the boundaries of the kind of sex scenes we’re used to seeing on screen, each of the Pfefferman siblings has wandered down an experimental path. In the most recent season, Sarah is trying out bringing another woman into her marriage, and it’s a strange marker of change that it’s actually one of the more pedestrian storylines in the show. The trope of “married couple proving they’re not boring by hooking up with a free-spirited younger woman” has also appeared in Netflix shows Easy and You Me Her, and it is surely a sign of some significant shift that viewers may be becoming so used to threesomes that they are starting to warrant an eye roll

While Transparent once felt as if it was at the vanguard of busting taboos, The Girlfriend Experience, also on Amazon Prime in the UK, is an icy, arty curiosity that seems to mark a new phase in on-screen depictions of sex. The second season is split into two storylines; one sees a Republican fundraiser, played by Anna Friel, sleeping with a call girl she has used to entrap and then blackmail a political rival, and it shows a woman giving a male client oral sex with an explicitness I’ve never seen on TV before.

Of course, the wide availability of internet porn seems to have made TV sex less shocking, and perversely freed programme-makers from the need to titillate, ushering in a new era of realism. But there are more factors now that may have hurried along the shift. Reality TV has made on-screen real sex seem less of a big deal, at least in the UK. It has been 13 years since Michelle and Stuart first did the deed under a curtain-draped table on Big Brother; as reality TV has evolved, so too has its casual depiction of love and romance, from the Geordie Shore stars tashing on and then some under a duvet on night-vision cameras, to Love Island’s merry-go-round of coupling up and date nights. I wonder, too, if the proliferation of dating apps have had an impact – for good or bad, the Tinder age has certainly heralded a new era of candour that is making its presence known on TV.

Certainly, our responses towards what we’re watching have undergone a shift. The broadcasting regulator Ofcom’s annual survey of audience attitudes is revealing. In 2005, 36% of adults thought there was too much sex on TV, and by 2016, that figure was down to 22%. Of those who found that TV offended them, women are still much more likely than men to balk: 42% of women, compared with 20% of men, found sex or sexual content offensive. Of this new wave of frankness when it comes to sex, many of these shows are either written by, or directed by women, or both; as the Weinstein effect might begin to sweep away the dinosaurs, it’s possible that more women will take charge of their own shows, and we’ll see the male gaze retreating even further. I’d be interested to see if the women who were offended still feel the same way in another 10 years.