Zero-G Spot

"I think he's attempting reentry, sir."

"Making love in a zero-g environment
 May not produce the satisfaction we project.
 The proposed erotic possibilities
 Deny Newton's Laws of Motion
 And how they will affect
 Our romantic inclinations...
 In space stations"

—Diana G. Gallagher, A Reconsideration of Anatomical Docking Maneuvers in a Zero-G Environment

Space. The final frontier. And a completely new environment for indulging in humanity's favorite pastime: sex!

Many writers have turned their imagination to the subject of what sex would be like in zero gravity. The general consensus seems to be that it would be like a Two-Person Pool Party without the water (examples involving more than two people are hard to come by, as no one enjoys dealing with the three-body problem).

Unfortunately very hard to pull off, due to the lack of gravity having weird effects on the body, including (ahem) blood pressure. Zero-G is more accurately called "free-fall" because one is literally falling. Zero-G sex is sex while perpetually falling. The microgravity environment would also mean that the couple would be a slave to Newtonian physics, meaning that any... vigorous movement is going to cause both to careen wildly around their spaceship, resulting in multiple possible injuries.

As of early 2012, this has not been attempted in any actual spacecraft, despite the attempt of a porn studio to hire Spaceship One for the purpose. Virgin Galactic declined the offer, nominally on the grounds that accepting would make their company name exceedingly silly.

No real life examples, please; Real Life is not speculative fiction. Also, once it becomes possible in the real world, All The Tropes is not a gossip site.

Examples of Zero-G Spot include:

Comic Books

  • In the XXXenophile story "Watch This Space" the characters figure that it'll be about twelve hours before their escape bubble is picked up, and they decide to occupy the time with a marathon session of zero-g lesbian lovemaking. One of them comments that in freefall she prefers to do it with another woman because there's less thrusting and bouncing than there is with a man.
  • Y: The Last Man mentions this in an early issue of the series. Later, it becomes a major plot point.
  • Happens to Cherry Poptart multiple times in the story "Space Cookie" in Cherry Comics.
  • Referenced in Astro City: Astra Special #2. Astra's boyfriend tries to persuade her to indulge, leading to this exchange:

Matt: But hey - If they can do localized anti-gravity... I don't know, maybe these guys don't care, living in a cosmic place like this. But I'm from Earth, I'm a guy. Seems to me no-gravity would be pretty interesting for, y'know...
Astra: Sex? They live on planets here, Matt. They do have gravity. Trust me, you're not the first to think of it. They actually have rooms for that, up near the top, where the effect is the strongest. But it's messy, it's awkward, you smack into the walls a lot, and then you have to clean up and it's kinda gross.

  • Buffy and Angel do the 'flying without a plane' version when Buffy develops (more) superpowers during the "Twilight" arc of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer 'Season 8' comics.
  • Appears in the MILFS on Mars pin-up collection from Eros Comix.
  • Starfire and Captain Comet indulge in REBELS #18.

Fan Works

  • Happens in Ethereum Gladiator, given there's no gravity outside the Nethercity's ecodomes.
  • A decidedly not worksafe, but surprisingly well-written Deep Space Nine fanfic, Nothing Like The Sun. Notable for being one of the few DS9 fics to center around the marriage of Miles and Keiko O'Brien.

Film

  • James Bond and Holly Goodhead in Moonraker, making Bond both a member of the Mile-High Club and the 100 Mile High Club.
  • Dracula 2000. Although this used vampiric levitation instead of zero g space.
  • Also done in Underworld Rise of the Lycans, where a vampire and a lycan have gravity-defying sex while hanging off the edge of a cliff.
  • The sci-fi horror film Supernova (2000) featured sex between several of the characters in zero-gravity areas of the Medical Ship.
  • The comedy Moving Violations suggests the main characters, played by actors John Murray and Jennifer Tilly, have an intimate encounter in a weightlessness simulator.
  • Private Media Group filmed a brief scene for the space-themed pornographic film The Uranus Experiment in a Russian aircraft flying a parabolic track (similar to NASA's Vomit Comet). The Uranus Experiment features around 20 seconds of actors Sylvia Saint and Nick Lang (who portray astronauts living on a space station) having sex in freefall. The scene was controversially nominated for a Nebula Award (as a protest against the Nebula Awards' Best Screenplay category), but did not win.
  • Aki and Gray in Final Fantasy the Spirits Within.
  • In Thank You for Smoking, there are plans to incorporate this trope into a movie. Along with cigarettes, of course.
  • In Cube 2: Hypercube, two characters, feeling that their deaths are inevitable, have sex in the center of one of the cube rooms that has zero gravity (and possibly accelerated time) until they apparently die of dehydration and eventually desiccate. One of the other characters, moving through cubes with different time flows, comes across their mummified corpses still entwined and spinning in the middle of the room.
  • Word of God states that original scripts for Sunshine had a planned sex scene between Cassie and Capa.

Literature

  • So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish describes Arthur and Fenchurch having Their First Time while flying. It's not technically zero-g but the Hitchiker universe's method of flight makes it effectively the same thing.
  • Science fiction and popular science writer Isaac Asimov made conjectures in writing about what sex would be like in the weightless environment of space, in 1973 in Sex in a Spaceship. He anticipated some of the benefits of engaging in sex in an environment of microgravity. He also mentions 1/6-gee sex in the final chapter of The Gods Themselves, which takes place on the moon.
  • In Ben Bova's novel Kinsman the astronaut characters consider founding the Zero Gee Club; like the Mile High Club, but higher.

"Think of the possibilities."
"Hmm. Three-dimensional."

  • Lois McMaster Bujold's Falling Free:
    • Inverted when a girl specifically engineered for free fall (with a second pair of arms instead of legs) wonders how 'downsiders' can have sex without bouncing apart, since they have no lower hands to grip their lovers with. Her downsider lover explains that gravity has its uses. She also points out that condoms sure beat chasing bodily fluids around the compartment with a hand-vac.
    • At another point in the series, Miles acquires a zero-g "bed," and decides to give it a whirl, musing on the rumors of the fantastic nature of sex in zero-g. He crawls out a few minutes later after deciding that the bed smells like "at least three" people had recently been investigating those same rumors.
  • Used in at least one Robert A. Heinlein novel (Time Enough for Love?).
  • Eric Idle in The Road To Mars described it as "like having sex inside a water bed."
  • In contrast to QI, the novel Red Lightning has a scene discussing the advantages of sex in zero gravity.
  • The BattleTech novel "The Price Of Glory" finished with the afterglow of such a scene, with the couple in question "turning gently".
  • Spider Robinson goes into heaps of detail in his Stardancer trilogy, including pointing out that a couple making love unrestrained in zero gravity will inevitably end up bumping gently against the air vent — and any foolish enough to try to avert this by turning off the ventilation will suffocate in their own exhalations.
  • In the Alan Dean Foster novelisation of Alien, Parker tells Brett about an inexperienced visitor to a zero-G brothel who started spinning during the 'act', and then started throwing up. In zero-G.
  • Newt Gingrich's books talk about the possibilities of having your wedding night in space. Al Franken, in Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, made fun of this, pointing out that it would probably be quite awkward in reality.
  • Something similar involving buoyancy instead of gravity occurs in Alida Van Gores Mermaid's Song: mermaid sex requires either a heavily padded cave or lots of searoom given the unavoidable propulsive effects of the undulations involved.
  • In one of The Witcher novels Geralt reminisces some Yennefer's "experiments", including use of a levitation spell on them both.
  • Vernor Vinge mentions the problem of obtaining leverage during zero-g sex in A Deepness in The Sky; also, one of the protagonists in A Fire Upon the Deep thinks that zero-g sex isn't what it's cracked up to be (again largely due to the difficulties of obtaining leverage safely).
  • In The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, Anne and George have one suggestion: duck tape.
  • The Red Mars Trilogy mentions that this happens frequently on the initial voyage to Mars. One of the Russian characters also apparent experimented with many forms of zero-G sex while on Novy Mir.
  • In Known Space, zero-g sex is far from uncommon, due to zero-g "sleep fields" which work anywhere. At least one character thinks the sleep field is the greatest invention since sliced bread... But prefers to sleep on a traditional mattress.
  • In Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time, it's mentioned that one spaceflight saw frequent zero-g orgies because the astronauts had no better way to pass their time.
  • In Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, the Lady Macbeth has a fold-out zero-g sex cage. It's probably not a unique piece of equipment.
  • Inevitable on Gemworld in the Star Trek: Gemworld duology.
  • Mentioned in Naked Lunch.
  • In the sci-fi book Fallen Angels, one of the spacemen (who have lived most of their lives in orbit, and so have severe issues with living in gravity again) wonders how people make love in G. His observation? "They probably don't need Velcro."
  • Dread Empires Fall has "recreation tubes" for the inhabitants of their starships. They work for up to two occupants and presumably have versions for all of the species that could be crewing their ships.

Live-Action TV

  • This subject came up on QI. Fry pointed out three drawbacks to this: your you-know-what will be smaller, you have problems maintaining contact and there's the danger of stuff drifting around the cabin and getting into things. Not that this deterred Bill Bailey and Alan Davies from vividly describing the possibilities of space porn in front of an embarrassed Stephen Fry.
  • This came up on a particularly good game of Press Conference on the British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, in which Tony Slattery had to guess who he was - the first man to make love in space - by the questions Stephen Frost, Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles asked him. In case you even needed to be told, there were double entendres galore.
  • Red Dwarf references it while making fun of regulation numbers: "No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity". And again: "Hey, Pop-up Kama Sutra! Zero-gravity version, that's mine!".
  • The idea was floated (if you'll pardon the pun) in Salvage, the pilot for the TV series Salvage 1. However, being a PG sort of show, nothing comes of it.
  • The Red Shoe Diaries episode "Weightless".
  • Defying Gravity: Done with the Cranes in the pilot.
  • This topic was the focus of the final story on the night of June 29, 2010's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He struggled (without success) to keep a straight face. They showed clips of a History Channel documentary about the subject in which two speculative experts postulated that "One thing everyone does agree upon is that one or more of the mating partners needs to be restrained."
  • Dave's sexual fantasy on News Radio is making love on the Space Shuttle...with a space prostitute.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Once More With Feeling". At the end of Tara's love song "Under Your Spell" she levitates into the air over her bed, and it's strongly implied she's doing it so an off-camera Willow can perform cunnilingus on her.
  • Steven Spielberg's Taken miniseries did this with the mating of the two Half Human Hybrids who produced Allie.
  • Not quite genuine Zero-G, but a couple on CSI New York got busted for public indecency because they were having sex while bungie-jumping. It's strongly implied that this is the female jumper's personal favorite kink.

Magazines

  • In Grlz-R-Us, a comic strip that ran in the skin mag Barely Legal, the girls (and their frat boy partners) fantasize/hallucinate that they are having sex in outer space after drinking spiked punch at a fraternity party. The strip was later included in the collection The Erotic Art of Reed Waller.
  • The National Lampoon had a pictorial zero-gravity sex guide, the NASA Sutra.

Music

Tabletop Games

  • GURPS Biotech mentions, for no apparent reason, that the modifications that would make someone especially useful as an engineer on a starship also open up all kinds of kinky possibilities.
  • Forgotten Realms sourcebook on Netheril back when the goddess of Magic was Mystryl tells that her followers use Starflight ceremony - that allows the subject(s) to fly until sunrise - to "provide a very special beginning for one's marriage", among many the other things. According to Word of God, they weren't the only ones - at least Lliiran (what's with their focus on "celebration" side of everything) customarily use divine magic in similar way.

Video Games

  • There was a (PG rated) zero-G romance scene in Final Fantasy VIII.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, when the heroes go into outer space because the Tower of Salvation goes extremely high up, an optional cutscene has (who else?) Zelos going on about this, and (who else?) Lloyd completely missing the point (Zelos didn't actually mention sex, which is probably why Lloyd didn't get it; Also because he's an idiot).

Web Comics

  • Twenty First Century Fox:
    • An anthropomorphic cow couple at least on their way to fulfilling this trope. Their activity was largely offstage.
    • Cecil, Barb, and Beth had their honeymoon in space for a reason.
    • And now Jack and Jenny are getting in on the experience.
  • Unity: Sam and Juni, sitting in an observation pod...
  • Questionable Content had it discussed in this strip: apparently the main problems of "zero-G hanky-panky" are constant collisions as you tumble and pinball around the cabin... and (mood-)killer robots.

Web Original

  • Used a lot (not all the time due to artificial gravity) during space travel in The Journal Entries.
  • Shot down in the Cracked.com article 6 Reasons Space Travel Will Always Suck. Sex in microgravity will fail for at leats two reasons: a man needs gravity to make enough blood pressure for an erection, and embryos need gravity to develop properly.

Western Animation

  • Futurama has a magazine called "Zero-G Juggs" that Scruffy is often seen reading that plays with the idea of this trope, even if only the name is shown. Use your imagination.
  • Peter Griffin of Family Guy once masturbated in space. He later said that the inside of the shuttle began to look like a snowglobe after a while.
  • Archer: Sterling Archer and Pam, whom he had stowed away specifically for the purpose in "Space Race Part 1".
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