Maybe the two things are related: inert, pedestalised objects of desire on the one side, hyper-virilised fantasies of sexual agency - powerful! destructive! Hulk smash! - on the other. Sex as profanation. There's a line in The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, a J. P. Donleavy novel that I'm sure Craner would enjoy immensely, where Beefy and his friend have two girls up in their rooms at Trinity College Dublin, and Beefy says "and now for the vile proddings", just before the college porters come crashing through the door and put a stop to proceedings. Vile proddings!
One of the more interesting things Gavin and Stacey did was to show James Cordon's character Smithy as someone who ostensibly thought about sex and relationships in exactly these terms, as a matter of finding a bird fit enough that your dignity wouldn't be compromised by having shagged her, and then doing it to her with gut-mincing athleticism and stamina - only to have him paired off with, and enthusiastically ravished by, Ruth Jones's indomitable Nessa, who amongst other things is understood to have bummed him with the handle of a toilet brush. Smithy's self-understanding as a sexual being doesn't recognise or acknowledge what he actually likes and wants, whereas Nessa knows both what she likes and, apparently, what he likes as well. This is of course consistent with the general tendency in British sitcoms to show men as fundamentally immature, and women as knowing them better than they know themselves.