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Inspired by a few Reddit threads: why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?
I don’t have any raw data to back up the claim that there is less sex and nudity these days, but that’s my sentiment and it’s shared by many others. The best concrete example I can think of is Game of Thrones. The early seasons were (in)famous for the amount of gratuitous nudity; Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking the “guy has sex while another guy getting a blow job watches him through a peephole while another guy watches him through a peephole” scene. Yet, the final two seasons, when it became this massive international phenomenon that everyone on earth watched, had (IIRC) no nudity at all and very little sex.
The second best concrete example I can think of is Marvel movies. There have been 30ish of them and (IIRC) there are no sex scenes at all, and maybe even no make out scenes (I think there’s one in the first Captain America). Sure, they’re PG-13, but so is 007, and they still have sex scenes.
Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity. For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy through a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex. Or if there was any romance, it would inevitably result in a sex scene, even a clothes-on PG-13 sex scene. These seem to be nearly dead in the modern day.
So why do modern movies have so little sex and nudity? My guesses:
Internet porn has lowered the value of movie sex and nudity. In the 1980s, getting porn was expensive and annoying, so getting to see boobs in an action movie was a legitimate draw. These days, everyone has infinite internet porn, so who cares? (Counterpoint – celebrity nudity still has a special appeal over porn nudity, ie. the Fappening, or people going to see No Hard Feelings to see Jennifer Lawrence naked)
MeToo, combined with the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in Coddling of the American Mind, have made (young) people very squeamish about sex. We are in a new low-tier puritan age where men are terrified of being accused of sexual assault and women are terrified of being sexually assaulted, so sex is now a much heavier subject and gratuitous nudity has lost its appeal
here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent. People are either kinky a f or extremely shy around sex. Tv shows either show no nudity or they’re Euphoria with tons of sex and nudity. Movies are either porn or puritan.
lockbusters are now designed to appeal to overseas audiences more than ever, particularly to China. Non-Western audiences (particularly China) are more sexually conservative than Western audiences, so film studios are reducing sex and nudity. In some cases (like China), literal censors might intervene against a movie if there is too much sexuality. Any other ideas?
One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.
In the book, this gay, incestuous, obese pederast is introduced as a hand emerging from the shadows before settling on a literal globe. Making him an ethereal meaty kingpin was really cutting out a lot of his character, but I think it gets the point across.
In general, the book was pretty weird about sexuality. Paul’s relationship with Chani is offscreened to a hilarious degree. The gender essentialism of the Bene Gesserit. Everything about Alia. Weird shit for movies.
The books are totally asexual other than the gay incestuous obese pederast. No other character ever has sex for fun.
Going from memory, it seems like the fun may only be on one side. In the 1st book, Feyd-Rautha thinks he's having sex for fun, but he was being seduced and brainwashed by Margot Fenring. In the 3rd, Alia has sex for fun, but spoilers mean that it's not actually a contradiction. In the 3rd and 4th, various Duncans do have sex for fun, but they're mostly being used for one reason or another. I don't know if you count books 5 and 6, but at that point sex is a weapon, to such an extent that they've made me wonder about Frank Herbert's kinks, much more so than any other author I've read.
Yeah, discussing those spoilers: Alia having sex for fun is literally an indication of possession by a demon, Duncan in book 3 isn't really capable of doing anything for fun, FR getting manipulated into providing his seed for a Bene Gesserit plan to preserve his line after his death is some Gen. Jack Ripper "they want my vital fluids" shit. Sex is never fun, it's only ever a scheme or a duty.
And frankly, "read the first 5,000 pages and then you'll get to the part where people act normal" is damning with faint praise. The counterargument proves the accusation.
I wasn't trying to present a full counter-argument, but rather an expansion and slightly more detailed look at what you wrote a one-liner about. :-) I think the books do imply a fair amount of sex for fun, but it's all off-page and barely even talked about. Only the sketchy stuff is ever mentioned at any length, let alone depicted or made important to the plot.
For example, and again I'm going off memory here so forgive any lapses, I'm fairly sure that it's implied that Leto and Jessica have a good, healthy, fulfilling sex life, but we don't see it, and I don't recall anything more than a few mentions of how each feels about the other, very occasionally in relation to bedrooms or intimate moments. But when Jessica is talking with Thufir, she points out that it would be very easy for her to manipulate Leto, and her strong implication is that it would be during or after sex. That's what gets the focus.
And I think there was a mention that Feyd-Rautha had been spending "too much time" in the pleasure slave quarters, so as part of a punishment for something unrelated, the Baron had him kill them all with his bare hands. Any modern feminist would call F-R's sex "rape" due to the slavery involved, but I'll go out on a limb and say it was almost certainly more ethical than anything the Baron does, and more honest and less harmful than F-R's getting brainwashed by having a control word implanted in his head. But we only hear about it in the context of F-R having to kill them all.
So, once again, we have:
A Bene Gesserit indicating that she can use sex to manipulate Leto
A villain utilizing unwilling prostitutes.
You can make the "off screen" argument, but that still goes to the message of the book! The author chooses what to put in the book and what to leave out. Herbert chose to include, canonically, to remind us often that they shit in the stillsuits.
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I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.
Yes, I would like to have gotten more of that 60s weirdness. As for the race, I don't really mind. I think you can justify just about any casting in the context of a post racial interstellar society. Except maybe Zendaya and her weird baby-face. Not that I don't get the appeal of dudes that look like they're 25 going on 15, but it does make it hard to take them seriously.
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I would have also cast more Middle Eastern actors, but at least this argues that actually Fremen are Chechens.
In the books the fremen are a variety of planetary slave populations mixed together. Some have red or sandy blond hair. Some have brown skin. Their religion is zensunni. If I recall correctly in the book Stilgar thinks they are the people who escaped bondage under Pharoah.
They're a blend of all sorts of stuff and I don't suppose map to any real life ethnicity. Other than being obvious stand ins for Arab oil states.
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Oscar Isaac (Leto) was probably the most "Middle Eastern" looking cast member, but he's Guatemalan
And he's playing a character named Leto Atreides, which is practically the equivalent of tattooing "I AM GREEK" on his forehead.
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IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).
I'm not watching the films until using generative AI someone fixes that. Fremen not being a single race after spending thousands of years isolated on a planet with no caste system of their own is ludicrous.
Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision.
I want just register my opinion that I disagree with this.
She has a very broad and unpleasant nose.
I have no problem whatsoever with her nose.
And definitely not on " she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision." level.
(and add to that the tube sticking out of her nose overshadowing any potential problems - maybe you had problems with tube?)
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I would really like to know where on the scale of 1 to 10 does "ugly" begin for you.
She's a 3 in my book. 1 would be someone with say, acid burns or other unfortunate injury. You know, where you start gently suggesting that maybe it's a good idea to wear a mask as much as possible.
Can you put a finger on why? What are the features 4/10s and above have that she lacks? Presumably there'd be at least 7 things wrong with her, and only 2 things that make her better than a burn victim.
Normally I'd agree with the other replier and shrug, but it appears that my cultural opponents, broadly, want more and higher standard conventional beauty in fiction. So I'm going to challenge them on the conventions and the standards.
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Not to argue about taste, but I think she looks particularly bad in that movie and much better in interviews/photos. I didn't know who Zendaya was before right wing twitter started making la goblina memes about her, but looking her up I think a lot of it is that stillsuits aren't flattering.
True. She looks almost passable in some of her more glamorous photos. But you know, 4.5 at best.
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They are a planetary population spread across most of Arrakis. In real life our planetary population has not blended into one race.
we haven't had 4000 years of easy global travel. Merely 100 years, in most parts of the planet not even that.
The fremen don't have easy global travel. They walk at night mostly to get around in the books. Sometimes ride a worm if their path happens to allow it (not blocked by rocky regions, conveniently starting and stopping in worm territory, etc.)
There's a bit in a Dune book about how they basically don't have pack animals or mechanized transport. So getting around on Dune as a fremen is walking to your destination.
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To be fair, the book feels like it takes place across an area no larger than maybe Arizona at the outside. There's no indication of cultural variation.
In fairness, I think even the book's appendices and such almost tacitly imply that it might as well be Arizona's population stretched over an entire planet.
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I think it’s a reasonable decision because the word jihad has extremely strong connotations post-9/11. The West’s relationship to the Middle East is different now, the whole story would be swamped in the mind of the average viewer with the 2001-onward events in the region, “wHaT ARe ThEy tRyiNg tO SaY aBoUt IslAm???” type thinkpieces etc. (Not that Herbert wasn’t saying anything about Islam, but the context was very different.)
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Not just weird but gay. I imagine that in part explains the absence
A gay pedophile, and feyd-rautha was a heterosexual rapist- heavily implying the baron to be a pedophile and feyd-rautha committing rape would have had the weirdo sexual pervert effect without being politically incorrect.
It's hard to say, given how the boundaries of "politically correct" has changed in recent years. In the recent The Little Mermaid CGI/live action remake by Disney, they edited lines from Ursula's villain song where she was manipulating the heroine Ariel into giving up her voice in exchange for legs by telling her how men like women who stay quiet and meek, since the notion that women ought to be quiet and meek is offensive. So it seems that certain views are so offensive that even villains being presented as being villainous ought not express them. Pedophilia and rape could fall in that camp.
That said, not having seen Part 2, I'd guess that wasn't a meaningful factor, if at all, in the decision. Having listened to the Dune audiobook a couple years ago after having read it a couple decades ago, I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative. In a film with limited time, it seems reasonable to cut it, or perhaps modify it to a less distracting form.
Yeah, the main contribution to the book of that is emphazing that you should not think that the Harkonnen are moral equivalents to the Atreides. The aesthetic choices in the movie already do that job well enough.
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Ursula's not just a villain - she was (allegedly) inspired by a drag queen, she has a special relationship as an unabashedly proud and powerful fat woman, and on and on. You can't just have her say actually bad things, because the people who care way too much about the movie she's in (aka the target audience of the movie) can't and don't see her as evil, and are ideologically committed to reclaiming her.
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And the baron specifically wanted to rape 15-year-old Paul, and even had a drugged up slave boy who looked similar to Paul. They definitely toned down how truly terrible the Harkonnens were in the movies (both 80's and new).
Villeneuve's interpretation of Harkonnens as quasi-alien type of evil with Gigeresque aesthetics was one of the best interpretative choices vis-a-vis the other interpretions and even the book that he made.
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I've noticed that in almost all modern media. They never let someone be "just a monster" there is always some kind of attempt to humanize them. I think that is why people loved to hate Joffrey so much, and why GOT was so popular, it had true bad people in it. It is rare to see a truly evil person on the screen that isn't some kind of tragic lost cause.
While, as said below, the Harkonnens aren't humanized in any way (if anything their evil becomes of a more inhuman variety), it's always been a funny argument that GoT did not feature "good and evil but just shades of gray". Ramsay Bolton is absolutely evil to the core, Jon Snow a classic good hero character.
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I wouldn't say that's true of any of the Harkonnens in the recent Dune movies, even if some of their monstrous qualities have been omitted they're not replaced by anything redeeming.
Haven't seen part 2. Glad to hear it.
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