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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?
There actually was a tame (prelude to) sex scene in Marvel's The Eternals. It was a little controversial, but less so than the married gay couple later in the movie. It's the exception that proves the rule, however. I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie, but the culture pretty quickly moved away from scenes in which PG-13 heroes are seen with the most human of character flaws.
It's arguable that we're now entering the backlash period to this recent chasteness. Oppenheimer famously involves a gratuitous sex/nude scene, which doesn't seem to have hurt its critical or popular standing. Poor Things is balls-out sex and nudity. In the last two months, we've had new theatrical releases of the cunnilingus-and-dildo-filled Drive Away Dolls and now Love Lies Bleeding. As those last three suggest, it's likely that there's more appetite in Hollywood right now for sex content that de-emphasizes straight male sexuality -- a subject of criticism in Poor Things -- or that specifically focuses on queer eroticism, as those two new releases do.
Then again, we have the buoyant rise of Sidney Sweeney and the huge success of Anyone But You, which looks like a standard cis sex-com with old-fashioned eye candy for guys and girls. So there's an appetite for that kind of material; it's just whether or not Hollywood has the stomach to look past the scolds on Bluesky or whatever. Maybe the changes Musk has made to Twitter has scattered that kind of hive-mind prudishiness that started some of these movements?
The post-sex scene in Iron Man was preceded by a more graphic (though still PG-13) pre-sex scene, even. I don't think they were even aiming the MCU at kids until they realized what a cash cow it was going to be; otherwise they'd have toned down the bloody opening scene a bit, or at least given it more of the cartoonish flavor that later MCU battles are full of.
The sex stuff in Guardians was much more clever; kids old enough to understand why he forgot that lady was on board his ship are old enough to watch it, and if there are any kids old enough to understand the "under a black light this place looks like a Jackson Pollack painting" joke then they're old enough to shudder at it.
Of course, with Eternals they were more clever still: if nobody can muster up interest in the movie for long enough to get to the adult elements, then they don't have to worry about exposing kids to adult elements. I'm not even kidding here; I tried to watch that movie and I tuned out before making it that far. I had to hit up YouTube just now to see the (not even prelude-to! thrusting! the only non-R-rated thing here is the camera angle!) sex scene.
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