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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?
I agree with your points, and also with @2rafa about the course of the sexual revolution. But also:
-- If you're interested in the topic, I recommend the podcast You Must Remember This which did a long series on erotic films of the 80s and 90s, placing them in context and talking about the social movements around them. Karina Longworth always does a good job with the material, trigger warning for occasional performative woke acknowledgement if that kind of thing bothers you overly much. One of the things she highlights is the way that rating systems, censorship, the rise of home video, and pornography interacted to place different meanings on ratings. There was a time when X and NC-17 were legitimate ratings that indicated a real film intended for adults, both slowly succumbed to being viewed as porn. It used to be that a film (often a sexual thriller from overseas) marketed as NC17 would be a hit, all the adults would go see it. Now that is hard to imagine.
-- I theorize the rise of internet pornography has made viewing sexually arousing material outside of privately hunched over a laptop seem perverted, even homosexual, to a modern audience. Even as barely-pubescent teen I caught the tail end of the "finding a foreign movie my parent's didn't know had tits on video" cultural moment. I remember watching stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien with my buddies because there were naked girls in it, I don't think we understood anything about the movie. Once internet porn became practical with DSL, I don't think anyone did that, watching something became a purely private endeavor. Decades earlier, porn theatres existed, where men would congregate to watch porn. The idea of going to a theater to see a movie with a heavily arousing tilt strikes me as strange, if I went to the movies without my wife it might even feel kind of gay to be in a theater full of other dudes also getting aroused. Everyone is a goon-er now, but everyone hides it, that's for your home, not for the big screen, or even for watching with family.
-- Don't underestimate the degree to which one work can ruin an entire genre convention. Don Quixote killed the chivalrous romance. The Daniel Craig Bond Films were so dark and serious because Austin Powers was absolutely huge right before they were made, and everyone on set was conscious of the fact that they couldn't do a sex scene without the entire audience giggling and someone shouting "Do I make you horny baby? Yeah! Shag now or shag later?" at the screen. Today Austin Powers is almost forgotten, but in 2006 it was totally unavoidable if you were making a spy film. An effective parody can kill a genre. So can self-parody. Game of Thrones did the whole obligatory sex-scene thing to death, and then completely self-immolated in the final season. The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale. RE: Dune upthread; GRRM ripped Herbert off pretty directly in using scenes like "bring me a child prostitute to torture" as establishing bad guy credentials, but GRRM abused it and HBO beat it to death on camera, so while in the novel having Vlad torture-fuck-murder child slaves seemed edgy, in the film it would seem derivative (of the thing that was itself Derivative from the book). As with how the Bond films are still working in the shadow of Austin Powers long after we've forgotten Austin Powers, GoT has now been lame for five years, we forget just how bad the Finale was, and just how much prestige and power was lent to the show leading into the finale, how excited everyone was for what the Extended Universe would produce next, and what a complete fucking letdown the whole thing was. But in 2020 when the first Dune film came out, they had to avoid all association with GoT it was overplayed and toxic. That kind of influence can really carry, and can make a scene unshootable for decades at a time.
Hm, how does this square with the works like The Witcher (2019), Rings of Power (2022), or Willow (2022) seemingly (I'm speculating due to only having watched the 1st 2 seasons of The Witcher out of these - I don't recommend even S1 due to S2 retroactively making it a waste of time) trying to ape GoT's aesthetic and stylings in an apparent effort to replicate its success? The Witcher was in production before GoT's self-immolation (though GoT was pretty clearly in the process of pouring gasoline all over itself and looking for matches for multiple years already), but the other two were being produced after GoT was well established as just a pile of ashes. Also, the sexual content in GoT is more associated with when it used to be good, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that the sexual content was specifically the part of GoT that show runners would avoid while trying to ape other parts of it.
Rings of Power copied Game of Thrones because Bezos wanted his very own GoT hit show for the Amazon streaming service. I will lave with my kisses Melkor's scarred lame foot if I believe that Jeffy just wuvs Tolkien's writings so much his life-long dream as a superfan was to produce a show from them.
Nah, he wanted an epic success property based on fantasy novel series, and LOTR was the closest he could get. Since they couldn't literally remake the movies, they did the next best thing, and produced that mess. I'm waiting to hate-watch the second season if it ever gets delivered, because I want to see just how low they can go.
RoP doesn't have any sex scenes (just some coy hinted-at through the transparent clothing demi-nudity), thank all the Valar. Except for the Sauron/Galadriel romance, which eff you, eff the Nazgul-beast you rode in on, and eff those two idiot showrunners for that. If they'd even tried a sex scene out of that, I think my soul would have left my body like the wrathful form of Arien.
Rings of Power was doomed to be bad. They wanted to do a prequel, but didn't have the rights to The Silmarillion. So they could use aspects that were implied by other works but had to change details to avoid infringement.
Naturally most showrunners wanted to avoid that whole mess.
Thanks be to Eru Iluvatar they didn't get their claws on the Silmarillion. I'm seeing a lot of rumours about season two, some of which I can't believe, but just imagine if they had done so. Given that they thought they needed to invent a whole stupid-ass* origin story for mithril, they'd have decided to polish up the original. Make it sexy. Make it diverse. What was it Southpark said? Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame?
*Unbelievably stupid, dumb, ridiculous, nonsensical, crappy origin story. Mithril does not need an origin story, except if you decide to write it as magic power metal that is the life force of the Elves because it rips off the concept of yin and yang. Oh, which also requires you to invent a fourth Silmaril - look, I can't even be bothered to finish explaining this, the urge to kill is rising once more in me. No wonder Gil-galad is hard drinking in this version, I'd be hitting the booze too if I had to deliver these lines.
If you want to know why an Elf and a Balrog were fighting over a tree, it's that fourth Silmaril. And it has to be a new, fourth, Silmaril because we damn well know where the three Silmarils ended up, and none of them were in a tree. AAAH, MURDER! MURDERRRRRR! I CRAVE THE BLOOD OF THE SHOWRUNNERS!!!!!
The Silmarillion is my favorite book of all time (though I haven't read it in years now). I'm just kind of baffled now at what you just told me, I knew Rings of Power was bad but not that bad. Why did they have to bring the Silmarils into them at all? Their target audience obviously wasn't Tolkien nerds so what were they hoping to gain by bringing them up at all? The median Rings of Power fan has no idea what the two trees were, or who Feanor and Morgoth were. Meanwhile the median Silmarillion enjoyer avoids the entire series like the plague.
I have to keep one eye on the mods as I try to answer that, because a full and frank appraisal of the two Onlie Begetters will get me into trouble 😁
The selling point originally was that Jeff is a mega huge super-duper Tolkien fan, loves the books even more than he loves banging the hot chick next door, and it was his life's dream to bring a version of the legendarium to the TV screen.
The truth is that Bezos wanted to sell a ton of new Prime subscriptions via the screening service, sign up to see the must-watch shows of the year and now you have your subscription why not stick around and do some shopping?, and to do that he needed a big tentpole show. So he wanted his own Game of Thrones but unhappily they were already making House of the Dragon elsewhere. Where to next for fantasy doorstopper hits? Hey, there's that Tolkien guy and his books that got turned into movies that made a ton of money, Amazon sells massive amounts of merch from all of those. Problem solved!
Problem not solved, as they didn't have the rights to anything except the Lord of the Rings plus the Appendices, and if they tried remaking the movies, the rights holders there would come down on them like a ton of bricks. I think they wanted the Silmarillion but couldn't get the rights. They were hampered by only being able to use the material they had the rights to, so they couldn't make the changes or bring in characters mentioned in other works, so we only get very fleeting glimpses of Valinor and so forth. Instead, they took the book - and more so, the movie - characters and moved them back in time to the Second Age, then merrily pushed on with rewriting Tolkien.
They couldn't have Hobbits, for instance, so they gave us Harfoots instead. No these aren't Hobbits, don't be silly, they're the ancestors of Hobbits! and so on for their changes. Thus, they fell between two stools: they based early marketing on "gonna be so faithful to the writings, gonna tell the story of the Second Age" for the lore nerds, but they also had to do the DEI stuff, with rationales about 'writing the novel Tolkien never wrote' and 'representing the modern world'. After all, this was going to launch the streaming service globally, so they needed non-white characters for overseas audiences. They had to fix Tolkien's diversity problem.
That also meant they had a ready-made excuse when the show was downvoted to Utumno: it was being review-bombed by trolls and toxic white supremacist racist haters of strong women and non-white persons! It wasn't because of trampling on the lore or some really bad story decisions, no it was all racism, sexism, homophobia and whatever Waldreg is cooking up in that barn masquerading as a pub in Tirharad.
The fun (in a grim way) part afterwards was when the same media outlets which had been pouring praise on the show and selling the line that it was all Italian Fascists hating on it, then turned around and went "yeah, it was a bit shit". The one guy I respect on this is Eric Kain, who started out as "give it a chance, it looks good" but after a couple of episodes went "yeah, it's crap" and did entertaining reviews.
Now, to be fair, there was an element of the Italian Fascist sort amongst the criticism, and those who didn't accept that as a different medium television has to make a ton of changes to books, but it certainly was not the whole of it, nor even the majority. But say one word about anything less than awesome, and you're a far-right woman and minority hater, was the reaction.
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There's so much "it gets worse." On the one hand, they slip in references to at least medium-deep lore with no show-internal explanation, so only fairly invested Tolkien fans will even recognize that a point was being made, but on the other hand, you've got major lore-breaking points shoved in your face right and left that are obvious to more casual fans. (Was that a bit of casual flirting between Galadriel and Elrond? Did I just throw up a bit in my mouth?)
Like introducing a fourth Silmaril to support the 'origin' of mithril through philosophical dualism that is completely anathema to Tolkien and his works...and never once mentioning Feanor. Or the famous motto of the Numenoreans, "The sea is always right." Or the infamous teleporting armies problem straight out of GoT S8. Or the greatest smith of the Second Age having to be handheld through the concept of "this is an alloy," and the importance of (fuck me) and I quote "coaxing" metals together instead of "forcing" them.
They actually have disguised-Sauron describe his little "alloy" tip to Celebrimbor as "a gift." That only lands if you know that Sauron is supposed to be disguised as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, BUT HE ISN'T! Who is that for?! The only thing I'm left with is that the Easter eggs hidden in the show are intended as calculated insults to fans of Tolkien's actual work. No presumption of charity can or should stand against the mountain of contrary evidence.
@FarNearEverywhere is welcome to her claim on the blood of the showrunners, but I would at least like to watch.
That's what had me banging my head off the desk; they throw in little snippets of lore that only the book nerds will get (the set-up for 'is this the Oath of the Feanorians?' in the trailers, the items in the King's tower in Númenor that have you going 'That's Dramborleg!!!!', the Bough of Return on the ships) so they've plainly done the reading, and they're trying to coax us in like laying a trail of breadcrumbs.
And then the cage comes down!
And we get Elrond "I'm nobody important, just the King's speechwriter, which is why I'm not even invited to the banquet" - what? This is the guy who has the blood of a Maia in his veins, the descendant of both the Mortal and Elvish noble houses, someone who if he wanted to cut up rough could lob in a claim for the High Kingship! Then to make up for this, they give all the best bits to him from what Celebrimbor should be doing (so no Celebrimbor and Narvi, now it's Elrond and Durin Jr.) so the greatest smith of the current generation has nothing better to do than wander around in a granny bathrobe and need to be taught about "alloys" by a scruffy Mortal.
Gil-galad at least looks like an Elf, this younger generation with their rebellious short haircuts, but his main purpose is to be pompous and anti-Dwarven.
It takes Galadriel five episodes to remember she has a husband. Maybe. If he's not dead. She has no idea, she was too busy wandering the world for centuries looking for Sauron and couldn't take six months out of that to see if her husband was alive or dead or off fathering kids in that Southland village (who is Theo's dad? we know Mom has an eye for the Elf boys, her and Arondir, the most unsexy, lacking in chemistry, bloodless 'forbidden love' grand romance you could hope to see). Against that, mangling the lore and character of Finrod is a smaller matter.
If I believe the rumours about the second season, they did give in to the loud complaints about WHERE THE ANGBAND IS ANNATAR??? and now we're going to get not one but two Saurons. One as Halbrand still mooning around, one as Annatar (of course they had to cast a British Indian actor for that part, but I don't care so long as he can act, unlike Arondir's guy. He's a RADA grad so maybe?). Possibly three if the wilder rumours are right and he turns up in a third version as pretending to be Celeborn ("honey I'm home, did you miss me?" "remind me again, who are you?").
I wonder if we will ever get to see the second season? They ploughed ahead at the end of season one with "Well it doesn't matter if you hated it, we're already filming the second season, so yah boo to you toxic trolls", but even with that, they may decide to just write it off, use it as a tax loss, and not go ahead with something that isn't looking like it will improve on the first season reception and might indeed sink the streaming service if they make it the flagship show.
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