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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?
If that is so, then all I can say is thank God. I don't recall any sex scenes that I found either interesting, erotic, or anything more than "will they get this over with so we can move on with the plot?" Maybe the one in "Don't Look Now", which did add to the depth of the characters and their relationship. Most of them are just "We need to bump the ratings up because the teen demographic won't watch unless they think there's a chance they'll get to see tits'n'ass".
But I don't care for romance in general, so I realise I'm in a very tiny minority.
EDIT: I wonder if easy and plentiful access to online porn is part of it? When your best chance of seeing female nudity was the blockbuster movie playing this summer, of course that appealed to the teen audience. But if they can get even more explicit stuff at home, as it were, then there's no reason to go to a movie just for the chance of some boobs being flashed. So movies can either go hardcore, which means restricted to a limited audience, or drop the PG-13 stuff and rely instead on the action scenes and CGI for appeal. That also means they can broaden their appeal to a 'family audience' and those who don't want to see Leading Lady's giant spandex-wrapped bosoms shoved in their faces in glorious Technicolor because they're not into ladies, thanks all the same. Leading Man's bountiful chest may be a different matter but even that seems to have gone.
I agree that most sex scenes don't add anything to the movie and tend to be boring, unless you're watching an actual Erotic Thriller like Fatal Attraction. This is most obvious in anything that was made for HBO, where a lot of shows seemingly felt the need to show nudity just to remind you that you couldn't get this stuff on regular TV (Boardwalk Empire being a good example). I watched A Few Good Men the other night and never got the impression that the movie would have been better if we saw Demi Moore's tits. I feel the same way about gratuitous swearing. The best regular TV drama of all time is the original Law & Order (and by regular TV I mean a show that was on an actual TV channel weekly from September to May each year and put out 20–25 episodes a season), and that show had little profanity and no sex. The economics of the film industry are partly to blame; movies tend to get pigeonholed based on their MPAA rating, and the easiest way to bump things up to an R is to add gratuitous profanity and nudity.
I think that was a deliberate strategy by HBO to mark them out as different from the conventional TV stations - "we're like the movies, you can see stuff here that you won't see on mainstream TV".
Not to mention that sex and nudity is always a popular tactic to bring in the punters.
This. If you want to attract an audience, sex is always going to sell. If you are already a big thing, then you come under a lot more scrutiny. (During the last season, there were Guardian editorials calling out GoT for killing black characters.)
Of course, the story of tumblr runs roughly parallel with regard to sex.
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There was also Rome, but I'd unironically argue that the sex scenes were relevant to the plot.
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