33
votes
Data show that the amount of sexual content in top films has sharply declined since 2000
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- Title
- Is there more or less sex on screen?
- Published
- May 1 2024
- Word count
- 279 words
This makes a lot of sense. I have noticed that unnecessary sex scenes are less frequent than in the past. I don't particularly want to be turned on when I watch a movie, so sex scenes that don't move the plot forward are annoying.
There’s other considerations besides plot. Characters for one, but also mood and tone. The idea that everything needs to be in service of the plot would basically cancel out a lot of essential art house films.
This is true, but it also depends on the movie.
Pacific Rim was great in part because they didn't waste precious screentime shoving a romance plotline in for no damn reason.
John wick and Inception were the first two I noticed where they did not SHOVE a romance in where it didn’t need to be.
Wick straight up lampshades it and inception has one cute scene that I expected them to over do, and then doesn’t.
It helps keep the plot tight and on the relevant selling points. If I’m there for an action movie I really don’t need some sub plot romance because hot actor a and b must make out on screen so there’s more tension later when blah blah blah.
Blow up more cars, run up the sfx budget, and give me some WOMMMM sounds
In addition, and call me old fashioned, but you know what? Sometimes I like a little bit of unnecessary sex in my entertainment. Sometimes it's done poorly, of course, but I'm a human and I enjoy being titillated.
And before someone says "there's porn for that", remember that variety is the spice of life. If your only source of protein in your entire diet were hamburgers, you'd probably be looking for other options pretty quick.
If movies were actually titillating I could see the argument, but women are usually objects of men's desire in movies. And the male gaze really kills the vibe, at least for me.
Glamour: What's up with the movie orgasm double standard
And the MPAA historically and consistently seems to rate movies with women experiencing orgasm and queer people doing pretty much anything as more explicit and thus more likely to be cut.
It's titillating for me the way the brothel scenes in GoT were, which is to say not at all. But people who are being served by it aren't usually noticing that disparity. It's the difference between how Wonder Woman was shot in her own movie vs Justice League's framing of her conversation with Bruce Wayne by focusing on her ass cheek in tight pants while she talks, but naked.
This is interesting, but why aren't we seeing the same for violence? That's honestly my only issue here. It is odd that a 7 year old is more likely to have seen a movie where people are shot, blown up, or beaten than they are to see a topless woman. Why is that where we drew the line, what does that say about our culture, could it be adding to the mental health crisis we keep hearing about for our youth?
I'm not saying sex scenes are okay for kids, but unsexualized nudity should not be more maligned than violence.
We didn't decide as a society. It was decided by a small group of people who deemed themselves worthy to decide for everyone.
Dont think it was a 'small' group. A LOT of censorship of Hollywood came about because of the Hays Code.
Some of it has loosened up, but there is still a lot of the same ideas in place today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
Legislators are a small group of people. I don't think the will of the people was any better represented then than today. Worse, for sure, given that was squarely in the time period of Jim Crow laws.
Also, a bunch of regressive dead people decided it for a much larger, more evolved population now. Hell, I'm not even sure if that's before or after my great grandparents came here.
The Hays Code was trash then, and so are the MPAA policies that came after.
I agree. It feels like violence has only become more permissible in media in recent years. The recent Fallout series features violence that is not only excessive, but is exaggerated and incredibly gorey - the main character literally decapitates someone. Why is this more acceptable than showing a completely consensual sexual relationship, or even just an unsexualized naked human body? Those things are normal and natural - murder and violence are not.
In Fallout's case, that violence is a reflection of the source material.
Why do we shy away from nudity? Christians. There's a long history of church-mandated censorship (think fig leaves) and those puritanical ideals have largely stayed in place over the centuries, at least for the mainstream. The US managed to be even more churchy and oppressive than the rest of the anglosphere, real professional pearl-clutchers here.
(Violence, and to a lesser extent murder, are definitely "normal and natural" though. We are far from unique in the animal kingdom in that regard.)
It’s kind of confusing, though. Violence and murder are things that the human species may eventually be able to mostly elevate itself above, and there’s good reasons to work towards that goal, but there’s relatively little attempt to do so by religious sects. By contrast, sexuality is an inexorable part of being human and imperative to perpetuation, and yet that is what many religions have placed an outsized focus on controlling and minimizing.
I won't go into the rabbit hole I found regarding this, but this seems to be the case when it comes to those things and religion:
"Our god wants us to fight and kill those who are our enemies! Violence and murder is actually ok! But doing anything sexual, while crucial for keeping the human race around, actually takes us away from being close to our god, so that's really a necessary evil."
The short version is, a lot of religious folk- specifically Christians- tend to follow the teachings of someone who I will say was a charlatan. They call themselves Christians, but they should really be called Paulists.
There’s some interesting history around the spread of Christianity among the Romans. Apparently, Christianity’s emphasis on serving the poor and its promotion of being poor as somehow virtuous (holy people taking vows of poverty, living in the wilderness) was new and weird.
If you think sexual harassment is bad now, imagine how it was In a hierarchical, patriarchal, slave based society, built on conquest, with no birth control and high infant mortality. Maybe putting some limits on how powerless women were treated was an improvement?
Also, monotheism really was different from polytheism. The concept of legal religious tolerance didn’t exist, but polytheism sort of has it built in. It was expected that each city has its own gods and religion was geographically based. The Romans had state religion, but they didn’t care what else the locals believed as long as they did the sacrifices to the Roman gods, too.
When the Romans adopted Christianity, a popular religion of the poor and powerless, as the state religion, in a rather bizarre plot twist, it resulted in some weird effects, both on the Roman empire and on the Christian religion. There were bitter, often violent disputes between religious authorities in each city over obscure points of doctrine. Instead of caring what each city did, their public sacrifices, they now cared what you believed. There was an attempt to make religion uniform and universal within the empire, where before there was diversity. Outside of religion, Romans homogenized other things too, like (eventually) the concept of any free person in the empire being a Roman citizen, so this sort of fits.
Also, public charity became important - that didn’t happen before in quite the same way. Before that, rich Romans might build a temple as a way of showing off their wealth and gaining political influence.
This is all horrible by modern standards - that’s what history is, a bunch of horrible things happening all the time. But there are degrees of horribleness. Things could get better or worse.
Modern concepts might have roots in this? Consider the modern idea of treating all people equally, universal human rights, and so on, as an abstract generalization of a universal religion for all people. The concept reappeared even though Christianity itself had fragmented long ago.
We will be able to biohack away the need for sex long before violence.
It's not just the "long history" of censorship. This specific media censorship dates back to the 1980s and in particular the rise of Christian media influence and letter writing campaigns/boycotts in the 1990s.
This article in the LA Times (archive.is alternative link here) has a thorough history on the subject -- written at the end of 1990.
...
We need to be mindful that while the average person has a distant relationship to the media mainstream audiences consume, there are other people who are outspoken and proactive about what you consume because of their beliefs. Someone once said the opposite of action isn't inaction, and that's true here.
Thanks for the elaboration, it's nice to know specifics. There's only so much research and typing I can do on the can.
No sweat. We've all been there. ;D Also I'd been thinking about this earlier and was wondering what that group was (CLeaR). So thanks!
These were really annoying when I was growing up, when we watched movies as a family we'd have to skip through 10 minutes of a sex scene and then exposition. There isn't particularly much in these scenes which work for the movie plot, it's just there for whatever reason.
Maybe I read too much into it, but the wording made it sound like those actors were making sweeping anti-intimacy-coordinator statements. I looked up what they said, and of course it's a little softer.
Jennifer:
So, this was about her personal decision not to have one because she thought it would make her feel less comfortable (fair) and she feels experienced enough to handle it without one (also fair). But it's not her saying they're [all] unnecessary. I also find it funny that she praises Jon for being a gentleman for asking if she's OK, then doesn't like the idea of having another person asking her if she's OK haha.
Sean:
...
It sounds like he is speaking hypothetically here, not from experience....and maybe would inhibit him / make his job more difficult as an actor but weighted against the safety of scene partners that's insignificant. And while he ended on a cringeworthy phrase he did at least concede that it would be helpful for at least some actresses.
Lena responded to Sean's statement:
I think it's contextual. Someone who can communicate properly and be professional is flattering.
Someone's who literal job is to speak for you and ask if you are okay is less a fellow peer and more of a nanny. Which can feel belittling instead of respectful.
I agree, I just found it amusing how she used the same phrasing for both things.
The years surrounding 2000 (esp backwards a few years into the late 90s) were also peak raunchy comedy. American Pie and Austin Powers come immediately to mind.
Like, I think people just got burned out. Oh also LOTR, Star Wars 1/2/3, and Harry Potter hit the scenes. Sex was on the way out, fantasy in.
More than comedies, that was the golden age of the so-called "exploitation film". There were so many films with unnecessary sexual elements to them.
I read "hit the scenes" too fast and thought you were saying that LOTR the prequel trilogy, and Harry Potter had sex scenes. I thought we must have watched very different movies.
And I might point out that youngsters have an internet full of porn now.
They don't need to watch the opening shot from Under Siege a hundred times because today, boobs are everywhere.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.ph/EIlUn