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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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