Personally I feel like the reason behind the change is obvious. Pornography is everywhere. People don't get their kicks from 1970s movie love scenes anymore because hardcore fetish videos are a few clicks away. The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. But the culture carries this at-will objectification as bleedover into everything else. And I think it's also why the youngest generation right now is fixated on knowing their exact, granular label for sexual identity and orientation, even though young people are having less sex than they've ever had.
Your explanation relies on the idea that any nudity in movies is exclusively for the purpose of gratuitous titillation. I don't think that's true, nor does it explain the decline in portraying the non-physical intimacy in relationships.
>The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.
The Sears catalog wasn't replaced by porn, it was replaced by insta/tiktok thirst traps.
Yup. And there's a similar theory that both big comedy movies and comedy sitcoms have been largely disappearing because people are getting their comedy fixes from YouTube and TikTok now.
So when they go to the movies or pull up Netflix, almost all the new stuff being produced is drama. (Comedies haven't died out completely, but proportionally they're far, far less than they used to be.)
I agree but I also think that comedy is too risky for Netflix. Look at the Chappelle shitshow, and that was over something that was agreed on by ~100% of America 10 years ago.
There's always someone willing to crybully, so why bother? And, counter to that, if there's always someone offended, why not be Sam Hyde? Offend everyone, fuckit.
The elephant in the room might actually be US-American prudery. But to confirm, we'd have to check if prudery became stronger in the last 20 years and if non-US movies have still the same (or more) amount of sex in it.
But it's actually a well-known meme in the rest of the world that entertainment from the US has no problem depicting violence, but god beware you see the nipple of a woman...
Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
I think it's that and a sort of equal-and-opposite prudishness reaction - those sex scenes no longer fly in mainstream movies, they are generally described as exploitative of the actors (particularly women) and inappropriate in various ways.
To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button.
(That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)
Yeah. I feel like Western cinema right now could use a movement like the Pinky movies of 80's/90's Japan - cheap, titillating, often thoughtful art movies that were also basically softcore pornography.
That's a genre problem, porn is by its definition explosive, too fast to develop anything emotionally, erotica however builds up but it is harder to fund, there is an outlier though, 50 shades, however, for 50 shades to get funding it had to be a best seller for a while, released as an ebook at first. So unless you reach such a level you probably wont be funded, which only exacerbates current puritanical trends.
I don't think those two are connected. Yes, we have access to directly sexual targeted imagery , so there's no need to cram it into everything else. That's good.
But that's not related to today's super specific and fluid sexual identities. People aren't sampling the gullt buffet of sexuality and making their precise choice of their perfect blend. They are making guesses, guessing more wildly now that they have more than 2 options to pick from, and now that it's not taboo to explore, so teens being teens, who are constantly searching for an identity, now can include sexuality in that search.
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
> We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak
Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
> Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
Yes, but that's an artistic and commercial choice in and of itself. Why? One argument is the making of movies for export to China and India, with their censorship, encourages making a sort of internationally compliant pre-censored film.
But the argument doesn't hinge on graphicness; you don't have to be R-rated to imply sexual chemistry. It's one of the things that "pre-code" 1930s movies were good at - and of course got slapped down by American "voluntary" censors for. You don't have to _show_ anything to imply that two characters had sex offscreen, or even that they desire one another.
I would argue that something similar has happened to the Hays code slapdown. The 1980s movies were particularly "objectifying" in their treatment of sex. It was very much a time when female characters were often (not always!) only there for their bodies to be a reward for the male hero and the (male) audience.
(big exception for Sarah Connor in Terminator, of course)
So in the 21st century we've internalised that that was a bad, reductive way to handle sexual relations. But we've failed to _replace_ it with a new set of cinema conventions, or original characters, instead preferring to duck the issue entirely.
I think it’s just a cheap cherry picked argument. Iron man is largely about humility. His relationship stuff is mostly not even off screen, but between films entirely.
The MCU has a fair chunk of horny characters (horniest being overt sexual chemistry, not sex scenes). The horniest off the top of my head being Garfield’s Spider-Man (more Sony, but still), She Hulk, Captain America, most of the guardians of the galaxy, etc.
Top Gun is the emblematic stupid sexual chemistry for no reason film of the 90s for me. It’s dumb. It’s forced. It’s behind the scenes shameful.
Sexuality (not sex scenes) should not be a taboo trait for a character, or a person. It's still PG13 to be human. Looking at past films and TV shows, even those aimed at children, you can clearly see some characters being flirty, some characters falling in love or being very attracted to the obviously attractive counterpart. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably the most extreme example, but almost everywhere, from Looney Tunes to Terminator, it was OK to be attracted to a beautiful character.
The gist of this post is that this is mostly gone from MCU-like movies, and this makes sense because little kids want explosions and references instead of human connection. I tend to agree although there are still movies today that don't fall into this category.
> little kids want explosions and references instead of human connection
Another hint from extremely fandom-orientated movies like this: just as kpop bands aren't allowed to have boyfriends/girlfriends, maybe the relationships are taken away from the characters to allow the fans to develop the more intense parasocial relationship with the character/actor without any onscreen partner "getting in the way"?
Superhero films don't have to be sexless, even if kid-friendly. The dating scene between Lois and Clark in Superman (1978) (PG) contains more sexual energy and tension than many scenes in modern streamer series where the sex is shown on-screen in a manner explicit enough to have been considered softcore porn in the 80s and 90s. You can see the desire in Lois's eyes as she thirsts up Superman, and under that gaze Clark becomes nervous and off his game even in his more confident Superman persona. He fancies Lois enough to test her desire (by appearing to her as both Superman and Clark in the same night) and to become tempted to reveal his identity to her. Lois gets way more ribald ("what color underwear am I wearing?") than a late 1970s career woman would with a stranger, especially one she's interviewing for her job. She literally can't help herself.
The whole scene hits way, way different as an adult than when I first saw it as a kid. And nobody even gets undressed.
Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales).
i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
it was a deleted scene. also, maybe people forget these things, but it was common for many people to watch these old movies on TV, where they were heavily edited.
Glad Oppenheimer didn't shy away from those aspects of his life. Help really humanize him, in both good and bad ways even if the relationship(s) weren't necessarily a vital part of history outside of "oh his wife was a communist before he met".
It's just interesting because even 2000's superhero movies did this. Society changes quickly when a trillion dollar corporation azures a studio I guess.
> Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
It's comparing mainstream action movies with mainstream action movies. The fact that those mainstream action movies used to be r-rated and are not anymore is the whole point of the article.
It has appeal for kids (I loved it as an 80s child) but it was created, written, and performed by a group of comedians with SNL and other sketch comedy backgrounds. It also has a scene that implies Dan Akroyd is receiving a blowjob from a ghost.
> Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> > The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
In todays gender fluid world, holding back on details, creating more innuendo enables viewers to project their own thoughts into those plot voids when watching tv or film, and obviously it allows more plot twists in future story lines.
Look at the furore thats generated over the TV SciFi character Dr Who kissing companions.
Another way to look at previous tv and films, is, were they more conformist and thus dictatorial to the viewer and society in general?
> Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
So are you saying that terminator is filling in as a father figure in psychological terms?
I think people watch films for the entertainment value as well, not thinking too hard to what is going on, partly because there is alot of detail to take in, its a bit like reading a text book through one sitting, you dont take everything in, but what is taken in and then gossiped about face to face or online, becomes interesting because its meta data for what people think is important.
I watched parts of Silence of the Lambs again the other night, and the FBi Starling portrayal of Buffalo Bill, is arguably academic conformism. This time, I was left wondering how much his childhood messed him up, in particular authority figures, which I dont think gets too much focus in the popular press or law enforcement circles.
The scene with the senator using the persons name broadcast to the hostage takers, to "humanise" the victim, instead of making "it" an object, I think hides the objectification of academia, the law and the state on the populous.
tl;dr authority figures influence the cognitive process, reducing the ability of people to think for themselves, which might not be a good thing.
I wonder if the body positivity movement has anything to do with the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit.
In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health.
I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
Well done for the weight loss. Also funny, I'm quite overweight (a bit lighter than your current weight) and one of the reason I want to get back in shape is because my flirting experience has been dire and non-existent. To be fair, I am not completely in favour of body positivity [1], I wouldn't date myself at this weight, so it's also a me problem.
I guess it's all relative :-)
--
1: In my opinion, accept your body and its flaws, but obesity is not to be celebrated. It is a metabolic disease.
>As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
This really can't be overstated. Dipping your feet into "attractive privilege" is frankly a life-changing experience.
Everybody treats you differently. It's easier to socialize. I frankly think that the reason as to why some women say they just like wearing makeup is that they are feeling this difference and mistake it for just feeling good.
It's true. Getting expensive veneers, working out, and wearing lifts to bring me up to 6' means I'm treated like a member of a different species - most especially by women. It's truly been a life-changing transition.
I know a lot of guys who believe that their life could have been completely different if they were a little taller or had a bit more hair. Perhaps it's not popular to point out, but I think they're absolutely right. Physiognomy is important and moving from average to somewhat-attractive will change every aspect of one's life.
To people having trouble visualising this: that's 195kg or thirty stone, to 145kg or 23st. That's .. really quite a lot.
> I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself
The problem is there's no real relation between how heavy someone is and how much pressure they apply to themselves. If you feel better at 300lb than 400lb, won't you feel better at 200lb? How about 150lb? 100lb? There's a lot of really quite light people who engage in disordered eating because they feel the drive to be lighter and lighter to be more attractive.
> feel the drive to be lighter and lighter to be more attractive.
Gaining and maintaining some muscle is clearly beneficial (and is actually much easier to do for a significant fraction of the population) but somehow this "lightness" paradigm is so pervasive... And anorexia even doesn't look good imo.
Very interesting, and I generally agree. In other words, how much is enough? If the drug works at 320 but works but works even better at 220, will you succumb to that pressure?
What's troubling is the resulting distortion field. I would love to unpack the brain of someone with disordered eating to hear their thoughts for myself. But also the guy at the gym that's devouring supplements, taking selfies, and wearing a skimpy gym tank to stare at and show off muscles. What's going on in that guy's head?
That said, it is a real and meaningful accomplishment to lose 100 pounds. To that guy, do what you need to do to feel healthy, happy, and confident.
430lb is a severe disability that interfere with almost every aspect of life, including physical intimacy. Except for Internet activities, it doesn't work for anyone. It's well beyond the body's ability to maintain itself.
It's important to begin a journey of self-improvement from a place of mental health, not a place of dishealth. Public shame is one of the quickest ways to damage mental health.
I had this same thing happen to me when I went from 343 to 170. It completely messes with me now going into public and having people actually acknowledge my presence and engage with me. I used to just be a ghost.
All I can remember from my youth was people pounding on me that being fat was basically evil. You see the same sentiment here from time to time so it still exists.
Anecdotally, one of the most charismatic and outgoing people I know is notably overweight. Maybe it's an ingrained compensation mechanism but nevertheless...
Interestingly, I bounce between around 180 and 210, and feel that I get a better response from people when I’m at the lower end. I suspect the effect is mainly as a result of your own confidence and self image.
> In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself
This sounds more like red-state FOX News fantasy than reality. Like when my uncle says, “Portland is a war zone” despite me living here and him living 3,000 miles away.
I noticed this when I watched "Raw" recently [0]. It was remarkable because it portrayed horny young students hazing each other and desiring each other and plenty of unselfconscious peer pressuring, which was itself depicted as covertly appreciated and desired by the girls, by way of a license to let go and have fun for a night (like how people often blame alcohol). I kept waiting for the turn or the emotional beat that called out these heinous, sexist, abusive behaviors, but it never came. I noticed something similar when watching Berlin Calling [1] where sex is used in several realistic ways, as both exciting transgression to expressing warmth, friendship and love. Raw is French; Berlin Calling German.
Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality.
BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid.
I definitely think SSRIs are a big problem, but the sex problem in general is also not just a US thing. I live in Germany and it is really bad here too. To have sex, first of all you need to meet new people, and it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people.
Not quite -- https://obesity.procon.org/global-obesity-levels/. Kuwait seems to be the only 'big' place that's ahead of the US, but your characterization is inaccurate -- there are many middle-eastern countries right around the US's percentage.
>Raw is an extreme case of a an extreme horror movie
I was only commenting on the setup, not the movie itself. I didn't know what it was and when the horror started I stopped watching it. The other poster who considered it a recommendation was wrong.
And in fact it may be possible to interpret the horror as punishment for licentiousness, which is a common horror trope and undermines my point.
I was not expecting this piece to mention McMansion Hell, but I was expecting it to mention how the Chinese market has caused movies to cut back on edgy films. Or how the international market in general has made movies cut back on dialogue. Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film.
The article isn’t bad, it just describes a trend without ever doing the basic role of a reporter: follow the money.
> Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film.
This was my initial impression. No sex on TV? It's a meme that HBO's most popular shows are full of it. Normal People is another recent example of a TV show that did not exactly shy away from intimate moments.
"Follow the money" is right, and the author seems to think that movies in the 80s were full of sex scenes for some reason other than a guy in a suit making a decision that a sex scene would increase revenue. Nowadays porn is on-demand and free so it probably doesn't add as much value to a Hollywood blockbuster.
Maybe I'm just a prude but I find most sex scenes to be awkward and shoe-horned in anyway. Why do we need a sex scene in a movie about a crime-fighting superhero anyway? Maybe characters in modern movies are having sex, just... off camera?
I found the whole thing only applies to American blockbusters.
I watch small budget films all the time and there's sexuality oozing most of the time, specially in European movies. If I have any complaints about those movies it's actually in the other direction: it seems that every time a character looks at another who is their love interest, they immediately hook up and kiss passionately, start taking off clothes after barely a few seconds, and suddenly find themselves having intercourse :D - not that I don't like watching it!! But I don't know, at least for me, it took a whole lot more effort than that to get to that point (and now, being a married man for many years, sex is very, very rare which is why I write in the past tense, hehe).
One thing that is not considered here is that media is far more globalized than before. If you want a big budget movie to do well across markets like China, India, and the middle East, you tone down the raunchy content or run the risk of movie getting banned out of large markets. TV is more fragmented so maybe it gets away with local tastes.
This is it. The source is the spinelessness of studios rather than some greater societal shift. However, that's not to say a societal shift cannot follow from reality mirroring fiction because mass media manufactures much of the attitudes of society.
I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture.
“[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy
That doesn't explain why every single actor has a perfect body. Every man is bulked up, every woman is super slim. 50 years ago it was completely normal that sexy woman on screen had a bit of belly fat, now this is completely unthinkable.
Does it need a more complicated explanation than increased budgets? 50 years ago CGI was virtually nonexistent and now it's close to photorealistic; does this tell us deep things about how spaceships are secretly aircraft carriers and space explosions are a metaphor for Desert Storm, or is it an artefact of trying harder and paying more?
That's not a good explanation because every country can have different cuts of the movie, some containing raunchy content and some not. They already have to do subtitles/dubbing anyway.
Depends on the movie, and it is not always smooth. Also, it leads to higher piracy in countries where cuts are made because people do want the raunchier scenes. Like Oppenheimer had a bunch of cuts in India but it is still doing well, but it is by no means guaranteed.
Also to consider is that it might be easier for Netflix to get away with a semi raunchy movie than it is for cinemas.
So we will likely see raunchy non-English movies made in Europe and which will have world wide audience. A current example is the Swedish 'Young Royals' which has been dubbed and subtitled in surprising many languages.
So cinemas end up with boring violence and Netflix ends up with everything else.
I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny.
BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different
- movies: less horny
- television: slightly more horny?
- books: roughly unchanged
- music: roughly unchanged
- video games: much, much hornier
So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.
Agreed. And another large part of "media", which didn't exist in the 80s: social media.
I think that much of social media has become more blatantly sexual. In the earlier days of Instagram people would post pictures of themselves in scant clothing or somewhat "compromising" positions but always under pretense of something else. It would be accompanied by text in the form of a "thought provoking" quote and/or refer to something in the background of the image. The poster would be trying to say "this is not a picture of my bottom in a small bikini at the beach, it is a picture of the beautiful sunset and I just happen to be in it in a small bikini". People would poke fun at others for posting "thirst traps".
Today it is done blatantly and people often refer to their own posts as "thirst traps".
But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.
Instagram and tiktok exist in the shadow of Onlyfans (+), and quite a lot of those posts are disguised content marketing that goes exactly up to the boundary of what you can do without getting banned from the platform.
(+) or perhaps the other way round; onlyfans exists in the penumbra of other social media, detectable only in veiled references and indirect links, but unable to be mentioned directly.
It really depends on your scope of game. Big budget AAA games more or less abandoned sexualization. CDPR seems to be the only company that bothers with genetalia or sex at all. Compare this to the 90's/00's AAA games and it's not even the same genre.
For adult specific games, no, but yes. In the context of Japan, there's surprisingly little change in VN's. In fact it got a less loss sexual as certain VN realized they didn't need sex scenes to sell a game. But Japanese VN's are still very similar as a whole.
For the english market, it went from "small adult game shareware" in the 90's to absolutely exploding due to PC platforms allowing for independent publishing. AAA level entities (outside of Japanese VN's) never touched that market, but smaller developers always had a steam stream, and Steam allowing 18+ titles opened the floodgates.
Then there's the mobile scene. It's more or less not a factor for western branches (indie nor AAA. AAA is obvious, but the Indie market simply targets Steam), but Japan is starting a second coming with the market. It's mostly a difference in market; Google/Apple don't allow 18+ titles, so Nutaku is your best bet in the west. Meanwhile, DMM is a humongous entity in Japan has always had an entire separate 18+ wing of titles for media. Mobile games are no different, and Asia in general has a huge attach rate with mobile games.
It was scandalous when Madonna sang about sex, and masturbation in 1986, not as much when Christina Aguilera did it in 1999. And today you have people like Troye Sivan singing about taking poppers and the biggest drama is that the music video only has skinny and athletic young people.
In my opinion music, specially pop music, got horny as (the proverbial) f…
It might depend whether the GP equates horny undertones and horny overtones.
Popular music has always been horny as hell, but used to have more lyrical fig leafs. When Elvis sings about parking where it's nice and dark, it's not to play connect 4 (especially given it didn't exist yet).
HBO certainly traded on some raunchy TV: Californication, Sopranos etc. GoT had raunch and nudity, but overall that trend feels like it peaked and is trailing off too.
It occurs to me that those shows are pre-Netflix. Netflix and the other video streaming platforms could be pushing for more family friendly content in general, and discouraging anything remotely like "porn" on their platform..
GoT is a great example of the evolution of raunch; explicit nudity and sex scenes were HBO's bread and butter for a while, especially obvious in S1 (even episode 1) of GoT.
But as it got successful - and the actors set boundaries - they realized the show didn't actually need it.
If sex scenes and nudity were a crutch to hide bad writing, I'm all for getting rid of it. Of course, you can have both.
Maybe the movie audiences, particularly the blockbuster theater-going audiences, are skewing older and more conservative/old-fashioned now. So the sexuality there tends to be a lot more repressed (while at the same time needing to be optimized around those highly defined abs, in order to maximize profits).
I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off.
Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
I think a lot of other folks elsewhere throughout comments are right when they say more overt sex, rather than anodyne “sexiness”, just doesn’t have much of a place anymore in (western, at least) movies now. Everyone has a device in their pocket that can instantly deliver you whatever kind of sex you care to see.
Anime is weird and honestly got less horny when comparing to the 80's. Even the hentai market in particular has been shriveling for a while; the days of full adaptations of eroge like Bible black are long over. But it can still be comparatively more sexual compared to most other medium, especially western medium.
Manga has always been a steady stream, and never really stopped. Maybe the largest publishers have toned it down, but the manga market has always been a wide medium with dozens of different publishers. And The doujin market has only grew over the decades.
It's the censorship of the distributors. Video games are distributed directly, for the most part, and don't have to deal with religious censorship pressure like Hollywood.
Maybe there is a backlash against the "obligatory sex scene".
I have always find them boring and it is not because of the lead couple bodies. First, they tend to feel out of place. When an epic battle is coming up, I want to see an epic battle, not a couple fucking. And then the fucking is often done in the least exciting way possible, as if the producers main goal was to minimize the number of erections in the audience. You don't want your movie to be mistaken as porn do you?
So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. The alternative of making really good sex scenes would push the movies into 18+ territory, and I understand the reluctance. And looking and actors with great bodies and sexy outfits is enjoyable as it is, no need for a half assed sex scene that reveals nothing more.
> So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it.
My opinion is that, just like with "foul language" and violence, we are speaking of artistic devices. These are tools. Does it aid the story or detract?
I was a child of the 80s, so I remember the 90s very well. I remember people complaining about "gratuitous" sex scenes.
But how do you tell the story of Basic Instinct or Cape Fear without the sex scenes? You know, the ones where the murderer kills during sex.
In forbidden love stories, a well placed sex scene can represent crossing the Rubicon. The point at which the characters decide to break taboos and expectations and proceed with their relationship, despite the inevitable consequences that are to follow.
I never read or saw 50 Shades of Grey, and I know it's probably a bad example due to it's reception, but from what I understand of that story it could not work without sex scenes.
As with everything, use the right tool for the job. If a sex scene is a good way to drive home an important beat in a story, then I say go for it. Just like if a well placed "f-bomb" in a stand-up comedian's joke can drive impact.
One last example / analogy: during the early 00s I began to develop an extreme distaste for CGI and action sequences in movies. Just like with the "gratuitous" sex scene, it was blatant, in your face, over done and didn't seem to advance the story. As a practical FX lover, I thought that CGI was a cheap alternative. These days CGI and modern technology are used in conjunction with practical FX more than ever, so that each can contribute what it does well. At least, when the FX themselves are done well. And I don't remember too many recent examples that remind me of The Matrix 2, where the highway chase scene felt like it went on for hours and contributed nothing but boredom.
When we recognize that these elements are tools, and that the best result comes from choosing the best tool for the job / problem at hand, then anything and everything ought to be on the table.
Although I do see your point, Good practice in storytelling has always been show don't tell, this is because stories themselves can always be shortened drastically and a plot can be summarized to a sentence, this is why the importance of storytelling is not the story, but the experience the writer can impose on its audience.
A writers primary weapon and tool to manipulate its audience is engaging their empathy, being told "they loved each other" might make someone think about a loved one, but it wont work on the majority.
Basic Instinct is about an author/psychologist who writes books that foretell/confess murders.
Sex isn't the essence of the story, it's a choice of set dressing.
Sex scenes are usually bad. The sex scenes of prior movies are often distracting and dumb. Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s weren’t porn, and also they weren’t realistic. They were dramatizations of sexual encounters. They do not hold up.
Craig’s Bond character had a few AWFUL sex scenes and it just does not work for modern audiences. Not because audiences are prudes, but because they’re more savvy.
Slasher horror was built on this premise, although with more of a slant to punishing horny teens. Scream largely stopped it imo. Hell look at the recent Scream VI. Both female leads are clearly horny women. They don’t fuck on screen. They don’t go topless for no reason. And why would you want them to? It’s not shying away from anything. If anything it is WAY more grounded and honest than earlier stuff. The original Scream was super smart on this too.
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>The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.
The Sears catalog wasn't replaced by porn, it was replaced by insta/tiktok thirst traps.
imo there was a span of about twenty years of online erotica in between before the user-generated variant became ubiqutious on mainstream platforms.
but i agree that "thirst" or "desire erotica" is a different beast than explicit pornography
So when they go to the movies or pull up Netflix, almost all the new stuff being produced is drama. (Comedies haven't died out completely, but proportionally they're far, far less than they used to be.)
There's always someone willing to crybully, so why bother? And, counter to that, if there's always someone offended, why not be Sam Hyde? Offend everyone, fuckit.
But it's actually a well-known meme in the rest of the world that entertainment from the US has no problem depicting violence, but god beware you see the nipple of a woman...
Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
thou i cannot see how internet porn could go away w/o also taking free speech along with it.
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To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button.
(That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)
But that's not related to today's super specific and fluid sexual identities. People aren't sampling the gullt buffet of sexuality and making their precise choice of their perfect blend. They are making guesses, guessing more wildly now that they have more than 2 options to pick from, and now that it's not taboo to explore, so teens being teens, who are constantly searching for an identity, now can include sexuality in that search.
I can understand holding back on the PDA if you are making an evening TV shows watched together by families. But in PG-13 movies?
For example, look at Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls or Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.
That, and porn are very differently appealing, and almost surely have very different audiences.
> The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
> We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak
Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
Yes, but that's an artistic and commercial choice in and of itself. Why? One argument is the making of movies for export to China and India, with their censorship, encourages making a sort of internationally compliant pre-censored film.
But the argument doesn't hinge on graphicness; you don't have to be R-rated to imply sexual chemistry. It's one of the things that "pre-code" 1930s movies were good at - and of course got slapped down by American "voluntary" censors for. You don't have to _show_ anything to imply that two characters had sex offscreen, or even that they desire one another.
I would argue that something similar has happened to the Hays code slapdown. The 1980s movies were particularly "objectifying" in their treatment of sex. It was very much a time when female characters were often (not always!) only there for their bodies to be a reward for the male hero and the (male) audience.
(big exception for Sarah Connor in Terminator, of course)
So in the 21st century we've internalised that that was a bad, reductive way to handle sexual relations. But we've failed to _replace_ it with a new set of cinema conventions, or original characters, instead preferring to duck the issue entirely.
The MCU has a fair chunk of horny characters (horniest being overt sexual chemistry, not sex scenes). The horniest off the top of my head being Garfield’s Spider-Man (more Sony, but still), She Hulk, Captain America, most of the guardians of the galaxy, etc.
Top Gun is the emblematic stupid sexual chemistry for no reason film of the 90s for me. It’s dumb. It’s forced. It’s behind the scenes shameful.
The gist of this post is that this is mostly gone from MCU-like movies, and this makes sense because little kids want explosions and references instead of human connection. I tend to agree although there are still movies today that don't fall into this category.
Another hint from extremely fandom-orientated movies like this: just as kpop bands aren't allowed to have boyfriends/girlfriends, maybe the relationships are taken away from the characters to allow the fans to develop the more intense parasocial relationship with the character/actor without any onscreen partner "getting in the way"?
The whole scene hits way, way different as an adult than when I first saw it as a kid. And nobody even gets undressed.
i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_fil...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters
If you want something adult and horny, there's plenty for you on HBO and so forth. Euphoria, Game of Thrones, The Idol...
It's just interesting because even 2000's superhero movies did this. Society changes quickly when a trillion dollar corporation azures a studio I guess.
It's comparing mainstream action movies with mainstream action movies. The fact that those mainstream action movies used to be r-rated and are not anymore is the whole point of the article.
> > The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
In todays gender fluid world, holding back on details, creating more innuendo enables viewers to project their own thoughts into those plot voids when watching tv or film, and obviously it allows more plot twists in future story lines.
Look at the furore thats generated over the TV SciFi character Dr Who kissing companions.
Another way to look at previous tv and films, is, were they more conformist and thus dictatorial to the viewer and society in general?
> Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
So are you saying that terminator is filling in as a father figure in psychological terms?
I think people watch films for the entertainment value as well, not thinking too hard to what is going on, partly because there is alot of detail to take in, its a bit like reading a text book through one sitting, you dont take everything in, but what is taken in and then gossiped about face to face or online, becomes interesting because its meta data for what people think is important.
I watched parts of Silence of the Lambs again the other night, and the FBi Starling portrayal of Buffalo Bill, is arguably academic conformism. This time, I was left wondering how much his childhood messed him up, in particular authority figures, which I dont think gets too much focus in the popular press or law enforcement circles.
The scene with the senator using the persons name broadcast to the hostage takers, to "humanise" the victim, instead of making "it" an object, I think hides the objectification of academia, the law and the state on the populous.
tl;dr authority figures influence the cognitive process, reducing the ability of people to think for themselves, which might not be a good thing.
The article argues that modern movies don't do that. It's not more subtle, it's not present.
In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health.
I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
I guess it's all relative :-)
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1: In my opinion, accept your body and its flaws, but obesity is not to be celebrated. It is a metabolic disease.
This really can't be overstated. Dipping your feet into "attractive privilege" is frankly a life-changing experience.
Everybody treats you differently. It's easier to socialize. I frankly think that the reason as to why some women say they just like wearing makeup is that they are feeling this difference and mistake it for just feeling good.
I know a lot of guys who believe that their life could have been completely different if they were a little taller or had a bit more hair. Perhaps it's not popular to point out, but I think they're absolutely right. Physiognomy is important and moving from average to somewhat-attractive will change every aspect of one's life.
To people having trouble visualising this: that's 195kg or thirty stone, to 145kg or 23st. That's .. really quite a lot.
> I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself
The problem is there's no real relation between how heavy someone is and how much pressure they apply to themselves. If you feel better at 300lb than 400lb, won't you feel better at 200lb? How about 150lb? 100lb? There's a lot of really quite light people who engage in disordered eating because they feel the drive to be lighter and lighter to be more attractive.
Gaining and maintaining some muscle is clearly beneficial (and is actually much easier to do for a significant fraction of the population) but somehow this "lightness" paradigm is so pervasive... And anorexia even doesn't look good imo.
What's troubling is the resulting distortion field. I would love to unpack the brain of someone with disordered eating to hear their thoughts for myself. But also the guy at the gym that's devouring supplements, taking selfies, and wearing a skimpy gym tank to stare at and show off muscles. What's going on in that guy's head?
That said, it is a real and meaningful accomplishment to lose 100 pounds. To that guy, do what you need to do to feel healthy, happy, and confident.
All I can remember from my youth was people pounding on me that being fat was basically evil. You see the same sentiment here from time to time so it still exists.
Anecdotally, one of the most charismatic and outgoing people I know is notably overweight. Maybe it's an ingrained compensation mechanism but nevertheless...
That comes with age :)
This sounds more like red-state FOX News fantasy than reality. Like when my uncle says, “Portland is a war zone” despite me living here and him living 3,000 miles away.
Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality.
BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film)
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling
I definitely think SSRIs are a big problem, but the sex problem in general is also not just a US thing. I live in Germany and it is really bad here too. To have sex, first of all you need to meet new people, and it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people.
What makes you think that?
bummer
worthwile alternative: get hooked up with someone you already know
Not quite -- https://obesity.procon.org/global-obesity-levels/. Kuwait seems to be the only 'big' place that's ahead of the US, but your characterization is inaccurate -- there are many middle-eastern countries right around the US's percentage.
Closer to pop culture: the drama around conflicting interpretations of the song "It's getting cold outside".
I was only commenting on the setup, not the movie itself. I didn't know what it was and when the horror started I stopped watching it. The other poster who considered it a recommendation was wrong.
And in fact it may be possible to interpret the horror as punishment for licentiousness, which is a common horror trope and undermines my point.
Disney used to make classic animated pictures decades ago; Disney today is not the same.
The article isn’t bad, it just describes a trend without ever doing the basic role of a reporter: follow the money.
This was my initial impression. No sex on TV? It's a meme that HBO's most popular shows are full of it. Normal People is another recent example of a TV show that did not exactly shy away from intimate moments.
"Follow the money" is right, and the author seems to think that movies in the 80s were full of sex scenes for some reason other than a guy in a suit making a decision that a sex scene would increase revenue. Nowadays porn is on-demand and free so it probably doesn't add as much value to a Hollywood blockbuster.
Maybe I'm just a prude but I find most sex scenes to be awkward and shoe-horned in anyway. Why do we need a sex scene in a movie about a crime-fighting superhero anyway? Maybe characters in modern movies are having sex, just... off camera?
I watch small budget films all the time and there's sexuality oozing most of the time, specially in European movies. If I have any complaints about those movies it's actually in the other direction: it seems that every time a character looks at another who is their love interest, they immediately hook up and kiss passionately, start taking off clothes after barely a few seconds, and suddenly find themselves having intercourse :D - not that I don't like watching it!! But I don't know, at least for me, it took a whole lot more effort than that to get to that point (and now, being a married man for many years, sex is very, very rare which is why I write in the past tense, hehe).
"It seems today that all you see, Is violence in movies and sex on TV"
So this pattern was being noted at least as far back as 1999.
I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture.
“[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy
If you are ok with being a hypocrite, you can push a strong narrative in the US while challenging literally nothing in China/Saudi Arabia.
So we will likely see raunchy non-English movies made in Europe and which will have world wide audience. A current example is the Swedish 'Young Royals' which has been dubbed and subtitled in surprising many languages.
So cinemas end up with boring violence and Netflix ends up with everything else.
BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different
- movies: less horny
- television: slightly more horny?
- books: roughly unchanged
- music: roughly unchanged
- video games: much, much hornier
So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.
But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.
(+) or perhaps the other way round; onlyfans exists in the penumbra of other social media, detectable only in veiled references and indirect links, but unable to be mentioned directly.
It really depends on your scope of game. Big budget AAA games more or less abandoned sexualization. CDPR seems to be the only company that bothers with genetalia or sex at all. Compare this to the 90's/00's AAA games and it's not even the same genre.
For adult specific games, no, but yes. In the context of Japan, there's surprisingly little change in VN's. In fact it got a less loss sexual as certain VN realized they didn't need sex scenes to sell a game. But Japanese VN's are still very similar as a whole.
For the english market, it went from "small adult game shareware" in the 90's to absolutely exploding due to PC platforms allowing for independent publishing. AAA level entities (outside of Japanese VN's) never touched that market, but smaller developers always had a steam stream, and Steam allowing 18+ titles opened the floodgates.
Then there's the mobile scene. It's more or less not a factor for western branches (indie nor AAA. AAA is obvious, but the Indie market simply targets Steam), but Japan is starting a second coming with the market. It's mostly a difference in market; Google/Apple don't allow 18+ titles, so Nutaku is your best bet in the west. Meanwhile, DMM is a humongous entity in Japan has always had an entire separate 18+ wing of titles for media. Mobile games are no different, and Asia in general has a huge attach rate with mobile games.
It was scandalous when Madonna sang about sex, and masturbation in 1986, not as much when Christina Aguilera did it in 1999. And today you have people like Troye Sivan singing about taking poppers and the biggest drama is that the music video only has skinny and athletic young people.
In my opinion music, specially pop music, got horny as (the proverbial) f…
Popular music has always been horny as hell, but used to have more lyrical fig leafs. When Elvis sings about parking where it's nice and dark, it's not to play connect 4 (especially given it didn't exist yet).
But as it got successful - and the actors set boundaries - they realized the show didn't actually need it.
If sex scenes and nudity were a crutch to hide bad writing, I'm all for getting rid of it. Of course, you can have both.
And the thirsty kids are all playing video games.
Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
The US film industry produces circuses on a screen. It has rarely produced sociologically-honest works that merit attention.
It's all Barnum and Bernays.
Manga has always been a steady stream, and never really stopped. Maybe the largest publishers have toned it down, but the manga market has always been a wide medium with dozens of different publishers. And The doujin market has only grew over the decades.
I have always find them boring and it is not because of the lead couple bodies. First, they tend to feel out of place. When an epic battle is coming up, I want to see an epic battle, not a couple fucking. And then the fucking is often done in the least exciting way possible, as if the producers main goal was to minimize the number of erections in the audience. You don't want your movie to be mistaken as porn do you?
So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. The alternative of making really good sex scenes would push the movies into 18+ territory, and I understand the reluctance. And looking and actors with great bodies and sexy outfits is enjoyable as it is, no need for a half assed sex scene that reveals nothing more.
My opinion is that, just like with "foul language" and violence, we are speaking of artistic devices. These are tools. Does it aid the story or detract?
I was a child of the 80s, so I remember the 90s very well. I remember people complaining about "gratuitous" sex scenes.
But how do you tell the story of Basic Instinct or Cape Fear without the sex scenes? You know, the ones where the murderer kills during sex.
In forbidden love stories, a well placed sex scene can represent crossing the Rubicon. The point at which the characters decide to break taboos and expectations and proceed with their relationship, despite the inevitable consequences that are to follow.
I never read or saw 50 Shades of Grey, and I know it's probably a bad example due to it's reception, but from what I understand of that story it could not work without sex scenes.
As with everything, use the right tool for the job. If a sex scene is a good way to drive home an important beat in a story, then I say go for it. Just like if a well placed "f-bomb" in a stand-up comedian's joke can drive impact.
One last example / analogy: during the early 00s I began to develop an extreme distaste for CGI and action sequences in movies. Just like with the "gratuitous" sex scene, it was blatant, in your face, over done and didn't seem to advance the story. As a practical FX lover, I thought that CGI was a cheap alternative. These days CGI and modern technology are used in conjunction with practical FX more than ever, so that each can contribute what it does well. At least, when the FX themselves are done well. And I don't remember too many recent examples that remind me of The Matrix 2, where the highway chase scene felt like it went on for hours and contributed nothing but boredom.
When we recognize that these elements are tools, and that the best result comes from choosing the best tool for the job / problem at hand, then anything and everything ought to be on the table.
A writers primary weapon and tool to manipulate its audience is engaging their empathy, being told "they loved each other" might make someone think about a loved one, but it wont work on the majority.
Sex scenes are usually bad. The sex scenes of prior movies are often distracting and dumb. Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s weren’t porn, and also they weren’t realistic. They were dramatizations of sexual encounters. They do not hold up.
Craig’s Bond character had a few AWFUL sex scenes and it just does not work for modern audiences. Not because audiences are prudes, but because they’re more savvy.
Slasher horror was built on this premise, although with more of a slant to punishing horny teens. Scream largely stopped it imo. Hell look at the recent Scream VI. Both female leads are clearly horny women. They don’t fuck on screen. They don’t go topless for no reason. And why would you want them to? It’s not shying away from anything. If anything it is WAY more grounded and honest than earlier stuff. The original Scream was super smart on this too.
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