Different times. When I was growing up, a sex scene in a movie might be one of very few opportunities where you got to see a pair of boobs, unless you could get someone to buy you a porno magazine or VHS tape. These days, there are probably millions of options in this area, instantly accessible. And Hollywood-produced nude/sex scenes are all going to be fake and cringy in comparison.
I’d personally prefer that if they aren’t allowed to show it they not bother. All this does is make watching with family uncomfortable or possibly if your aware of the scene beforehand prevent watching it with family at all.
Assuming i’m not trying to watch it with family I prefer my content uncensored, like they can say fuck if they want to or fuck if they want or actually be seen nude after a shower instead being censored in some form.
Even when I am watching things with family i’d prefer they just not did things they’d have to censor than taint it with censorship.
Gen Z have an inability to engage with challenging adult material. They have been groomed by Marvel to just watch children’s material for their entire lives.
Sex is normal and healthy. Not every scene in everything serves to advance plot, scenes can flesh out character relationships and scenes can just be plain fun to watch.
We have an entire generation of people who are basing all of their knowledge of sex with porn. This leads them to believe that all intimacy is shameful and pornographic. It’s leading to a revival of puritanical conservative values in a generation who brands themselves as progressive despite having a habit of wanting everything they personally are challenged by to be censored. Whether that be views on social media, famous individuals they disagree with or even the art we consume.
Do yourself a favour and watch some high class cinema that has good sex scenes. Watch some David Lynch instead of Iron Man or Hunger Games.
I grew up during the time when sex scenes on HBO and Cinemax were the closest thing to porn on tv. I can’t think of a worse sex scene than The Specialist, with Sly Stallone. It was silly and unnecessary. I even found it weird as a teen. That says a lot. There were many scenes like this in many films.
You can include sex without dramatizing / showcasing it. I don’t blame young people for finding these old tropes to be a digression. See my other comment about sex in The Sopranos to confirm that I’m not anti-sex in media.
It’s far lamer to shoehorn in a long sex scene that doesn’t make sense. See sex in Sopranos, as I mentioned. It’s not overdone. It happens and we move on.
To me they just sound exactly like the conservatives in days gone past, outraged at the prospect of sexual content. Media is better when people let creatives do their thing and people stop worrying about every damn thing being done “correctly” I.e following their formula or prescription.
With the amount of choice we have now, why anybody chooses to watch things they don’t want to consume to then complain about it online is absolutely beyond me.
What a load of elitist bullshit. Being progressive does not mean one likes watching random people having sex, especially if it doesn’t fit the tone of the move/show and especially especially if it’s horribly directed, as they usually are.
It used to be the bible bashing conservatives who complained about sex and violence on television. Now it’s the young people who pride themselves on being progressives, when in reality they lose their shit when anybody says or does anything they don’t personally agree with in much the same way. They aren’t progressive, they’re extremely intolerant and want to push their opinions on everyone else. I can’t wait for culture to inevitably swing back round in backlash and for people to stop giving a fuck like in the 90s.
This is exactly the problem right here. We have a generation of people that think sex is just about getting themselves off and nothing deeper or more meaningful than that. Just a bodily function with one purpose, disposable and void of meaning.
Your comment is typical of a subset of progressives that have no acceptance for people who do not share the same values as them. Dare I say, that is not very progressive of you? What is wrong with having “puritanical conservative values” when it comes to relationships? Must one forcibly engage in orgies with strangers to be a “proper” progressive?
I just don’t think defining yourself in opposition to everything makes you a progressive. I’m clearly on the libertarian end of the axis here. I’m not the one advocating for art to only be done in a specific way that caters to my personal sensibilities and weirdness over sex.
Fuck that noise, I just don’t think we need smooching, sex and all that shit in every goddamn movie. Shit’s not needed, breaks the flow and is basically there only because everyone else does that. Fuck that noise. And no, these scenes do fuck all in most movies to fleshing out character, quite often they actually make it more shallow by being either uncharacteristic or feeling shoed in, dammit.
And if anything, from what I see around people are hella more open about sex. Thanks to overabundance of porn and all, sex became normalized. At least a lot more than when I was a child.
Being from a generation that was exposed to porn early doesn’t make you more open with sex. It makes you have a warped relationship with sex, to the point where you find smooching disgusting.
It’s really not in every goddamn movie for starters and when it is it’s extremely toned down: no penetration, no vulva, no boners.
The biggest movies of this year had basically no sex bar Oppenheimer. Barbie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avatar. Culture is already tame as hell and antiseptic compared to the past I literally don’t even understand where the criticism is coming from.
I have a standing wager with my friends that there has never been a filmed or written sex scene that needed to be included in the media. Talk about it, allude to it, show the ramifications of it, but there has never been one that needed to be there. Sex scenes are there to sell TnA, not to move the plot forward.
For an example of a close call. In A History of Violence, Viggo rapes his wife. This is about as close as you could come to a needed scene because it shows a wild character development, but if you were to cut the scene out entirely, you’d still get all of the character development that he gets from the scene, anyway, rendering it useless.
This seems unlikely considering the massive number of popular teen romance shows happening, such as Heartstopper. It's just that any sex scenes need to have actual depth behind them when they happen, not just random sex out of nowhere.
Yeah I wouldn’t even agree with the depth, it’s not like all the braindead yet-another-american-high-school-dramas with no substance ever went anywhere, no plot, no nothing, just the same regurgitated melodrama and idiocy dressed for yet another generation. Even shows that would be actually great apparently need to have some bullshit drama and gratuitous sex in it for absolutely no reason at all.
I’d be a sucker for meaningful queer sex and romance that actually looks and feels as it does in real life. I just rarely even really relate to the on-screen happenings for most.
Or, hell, even some good and sensual BDSM type play would be probably very welcome. I don’t know if I’ve seen any of that yet.
There’s some BDSM dom/sub kinda stuff in Billions. At least in the first few season, tapered off in the later seasons because of story developments. But it even had a place in the story since the character was a public figure and didn’t want it to be public knowledge.
Maybe now Guillermo DelToro can make “In The Mountains Of Madness”, his dream oroject which kept getting rejected because “there is no love interest in the story”. FUCK HOLLYWOOD.
Meanwhile, younger generations are getting all kinds of ass without any psychotic inhibitions so a sex scene just looks stupid to them, and has nothing to do with the story.
The fact that, in this country, this is pretty much the one small part of the incarceration process that has been pried back from the claws of vampiric companies psychologically abusing inmates for profit is…beyond depressing.
Its real simple. It gives them identity and something to go after in a society that offers them nothing. So they get into woodworking, hunting, fighting, only eat meat for a while or some shit.
Males are expendable, the way that all people in capitalism are expendable. But to quote Babe from animal farm: Some are more expendable than others. Males have lower impulse control and have a biological more likely to engage in high risk/ high reward. Most white males are facing the same dilemmas and contradictions around the shittiness and meaninglessness of their existence as everyone else; every one else just doesn’t have a direct pipeline to radicalism engineered for them. For years YT has been trying to steer me down the white nationalist rabbit hole, in-spite of how unappologetically leftist the programing I consume is. I’m a bit older and I’ve been around and politically aware since I was a teen and made the impulsive decision to enlist, then months later we were invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.
This same issue plagues young men from all nationalities and walks of life, not just young white men in the US. We have to collectively find a way to give meaning to peoples lives or that innate search for meaning will be taken advantage of.
As someone on the far older end of gen Z or the far younger end of millenial, depending on where you draw the line:
I hate sex scenes. I have some personal issues however that may affect my judgment. Trauma and such. Don’t wanna see sex unless I was fully mentally prepared for it, which I just can’t be if it’s shoved into some random movie, regardless of if you warn me in advance.
It might seem odd, but I wonder if the almost unavoidable overexposure to porn from a very young age elicits a similar response in a lot of younger people. The fact that for a lot of your life, sex is a forbidden thing you have to sneak around to indulge in, and which the one form you have exposure to, porn, carries the risk of addiction. It seems like it’d leave an impression on your mind that it’s a scary thing you have to hide, which I could see eliciting some kind of trauma response when suddenly it’s everywhere and you’re still stuck feeling like you have to hide it.
Gen x, i think, here. Sex alone does nothing for me. Nudity does nothing. I’m attracted more to people, subtlety, long, slow seductions.
Most sex I see in tv, movies, is ridiculous. Like, 2 people have been flirting for weeks. One day, chance meeting, they kiss. RIGHT THEN, right after the first kiss, they immediately start taking their clothes off.
Seriously, who does that?
Some of the best sex can be if you have your clothes on.
Also, too many fantasy TV shows have characters who can’t touch other people cuz demon in them, physically touching someone means they’ll lose control, whatever. So they go around miserable, horny, unrequited love and all that. Which to me shows failure of imagination. Sex can be imaginative, creative, so much variety, possibility. Phone sex, mutual self masturbation, why not work those options into the plot?
But no, in movies and TV, its almost always: kiss, clothes come right off, completely naked, always in a bed, orgasm in 5 minutes. Real life is way more complex than that.
I’m just sick of hollywood shoehorning a romance into every story. Not every story needs a romance, and most of the romances in movies are cliche and unnecessary.
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