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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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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:

  1. 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)

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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.

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.

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.

it's that she's actually ugly

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?)

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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Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly

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.

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.

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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