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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 people haven’t brought up is the fact that the modern internet allows nude scenes to be stripped from their original context, slowed/brightened/zoomed-in, and widely distributed/collected for easy access.
In the 70s and 80s, a respectable actress could do an artistically-justified nude scene for some artsy, small-distribution film, and if people wanted to see that scene they would have to find a way to view or purchase that movie, and at least watch the whole movie up to that point. Now, if I want to see that scene, all I have to do is wait for some guy to get his hands on a digital copy, then post the scene to Reddit or to any of dozens of other places. A ten-second scene can be shared everywhere, with AI-upscaling and the ability to pause and rewind to make sure I see every detail as many times as I want to see it.
And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.
All while not only the actress makes no money whatsoever off of it, but the studio who’s paying her also makes nothing off of it either. There’s no upside anymore for anyone involved, unless the actress in question is just an exhibitionist and likes getting naked where people can see it. Certainly this does describe certain people who get into showbiz! However, most of the women with that personality type, combined with the kind of good looks required to make a living off of it, are probably better off just leaning into OnlyFans or a career as an influencer or something like that, since movie studios are no longer willing to pay them big bucks to get naked.
Was this actually normal?
Yeah. A lot of the big actresses of the 1970s did nude scenes. Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, you name it. But these weren't necessarily small indie movies -- the studios were making these movies. "Naturalism" was part of the New Hollywood ethos and the new cultural frankness about sex.
Maybe there was some sense during the late 1980s that nudity had become a mark of low-class, but in the 1990s it came back and there was growing talk about how actresses could be taken more seriously by doing nude scenes, and I think Gwyneth Paltrow's nudity-inclusive Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was used as a common example. It's hard to think of examples of big actresses from the past 20-30 years who have been shy on camera: Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Connelley, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry all had prominent nude scenes in or adjacent to Oscar-winning roles. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for a role involving explicit nudity, so it's not like it's ever fully gone away, there's just been a vocal movement against it.
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