When Y Tu Mamá También first came out, it was noted for its frank and unflinching portrayal of sexuality, in all its embarrassment, ecstasy, discovery, and ruthlessness. Many celebrated this perspective, with Roger Ebert writing, "The movie is realistic about sex, which is to say, franker and healthier than the smutty evasions forced on American movies by the R rating. We feel a shock of recognition: This is what real people do and how they do it, sexually, and the MPAA has perverted a generation of American movies into puerile masturbatory snickering."
Ebert's assessment of a more Puritanical relation to sex in American film can be traced back to American cinema's roots. From its beginnings, American film has had a fraught response to any displays of intimacy in film, starting with the 1896 silent film The Kiss, which portrayed a kiss, and caused a storm of controversy at the time of its release. Religious groups and censorship boards ensured that more erotic confections were kept off American screens, and with the development of the Hays Code, sex in film became something oblique rather than explicit. Traditionally, the European film industry has had a looser approach to the depiction of sexuality, with contemporary filmmakers like Pedro Almodovar, Catherine Breillat, and Lars von Trier approaching sex and its depiction in film as a worthwhile narrative structure in itself.
While Y Tu Mamá También fits many of the credentials of a typical '80s sex film that one might easily have seen in America (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky's, Risky Business), its approach to sex is bolder, nuder, and less packaged than other films of its genre. It not only portrayed the sexual exploration so common in such films, but also less traditional and non-procreative sexual acts such as cunnilingus and fellatio, sex between young men and an older married woman, homoerotic attachment, and all with an unflinching explicitness. In a retrospective analysis of the film in Flavorwire, Jason Bailey writes, "Cuarón’s decision to explore the tensions and undercurrents of such a friendship, within even an independent film scene that tends to see male sexuality as strictly an either/or proposition, remains refreshing, if not revolutionary."
