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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?
-5. The line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior during nudity and sex scenes has become fraught, both for MeToo and non-MeToo reasons, and directors and actors are increasingly aware of it. I'd highlight the first two episodes of Stargate SG-1, here, from the mid-90s: the original version had some female nudity and near-nudity pushed onto the showrunners by Showtime, and it got cut and respliced back in 200_8_, partly because it didn't help the actual scene itself, and also because the actress was pretty heavily pressured into it. Most more recent stuff isn't as obviously controversial, but there's reason to be cautious.
-6. Women (are seen to) drive ticket sales, and they are perceived (not without reason!) as not particularly interested in the sort of sort sex scenes or nudity that populated major movie focuses of the 90s and early 00s. The Magic Mike series features full-frontal male nudity for one scene, in the first movie, it involves a penis pump, and even as someone who appreciates hirsuite dudes, it's probably one of the three least sexy parts in the show (and given the competition involves an overdose, that says something). Contrast the workshop scene from XXL -- I'd hope even a straight guy would appreciate a workshop that looks like that, but from an androphillic perspective there's... a lot to enjoy, and from a feminine one the scene's combination of controlled strength and vulnerability is not exactly a subtle shot to the ovaries. Or see the Brendan Fraser George of the Jungle, which is commonly highlighted as an awakening for himbo fans, and wouldn't have benefited from a lot of from doing anything more.
-7. Movies are increasingly seen as playing a different social role; men in particular are far less likely to just go out alone or with a small number of close-in-age male friends, where this wasn't as awkward as, say, if it pops up during a date night or when going with the family.
-8. Horny-but-not-just-porn level works are widely available, but interests have bifurbicated heavily, and as a result people have driven to other formats that aren't as mainstream touchstones in the way movies were. The paid version of Rick Griffin's Skinchange (cw: some violence, donald duck-style nudity) has full frontal nudity-with-bits from page five onwards, with only a few exceptions when the protagonists are in disguise, it's a decent if not particularly genre-busting scifi thriller, and it's even straight-themed and not actually focused on sex or even arousal... but it's a very specific sort of thing to appreciate, and not even all bi furries are going to be able to suspend disbelief re: 'wouldn't that pinch?'. See Oglaf for something that often features fully-penetrative sex, but isn't really sexy. Or Feretta's Tale of Tails, but it's a decently well-written fantasy comic in an original universe that's somewhat given that it does have sex and nudity play a heavy role but also has long sequences without, and not everyone wants a side of sausage (or for a different sort of dislike, pregnancy) in their F/F work. I could turn every playable character in FFXIV into a naked hrothgar dripping from both ends, but that's not really to everyone's tastes, even beyond the ethics of the matter: even fairly tame matters like caking up just my own character, shared to only people in a Mare linkshell, gets into a lot of complicated stuff when others involved may not be androphillic at all.
-9. To the extent that sexual stuff is shared among social groups, it plays a more performative role. Almost every FFXIV FC (read: guild) I've joined has an adult content section in the Discord, but it would be wildly inappropriate to throw a few dozen beefcake pictures at once into any of them, even where full penetration shots might show up on occasion. Posting in these forums is supposed to say something about you and why you drop them. Afterdark twitter will show a lot of stuff (nice 3d-printed gun /and/ dick!), but there's a lot going on there as to what is and isn't the persona each account wants to present. That's always been around to some extent -- trust me, I know what it's like to chuckle nervously and talk about boobs -- but I think the extent is drastically broader.
Do we actually know how accurate this perception is?
I always heard teenage boys were the biggest driver of movie theater ticket sales. The juggernauts of MCU and fast and the furious franchise would certainly point in that direction.
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