The problem is many filmmakers use romance/relationships/gender/identity as a filler that really doesn’t add to the story. This is compounded when it feels more like pandering to an audience.
Who wants to watch softcore nonsense involving people doing things that are not how sex actually works? Gen Z is first gen to come of age when porn is prolific. Mainstream film can’t compete with step siblings getting stuck on the interwebs.
I’ve also found that gen z aren’t as sex crazed as we were, I felt like I had a monkey on my back and had to screw everything. Gen z is more aware of the consequences, and they have other shit to keep them occupied, we were bored a lot.
As an elder millennial, porn has been prolific longer than you think. Late 90s and early 2000s LAN parties were half playing video games and half copying vast amounts of porn from each other.
Those were the Nerds, the weirdos that spent halft their free time on a computer and talking about how to get faster internet. For the “cool kids” i think a lot were the magazines or someone stealing a VCR from their dads private collection.
Every town and city I ever went in the early 2000s to had multiple crowded LAN centers. It was definitely mainstream, and definitely wasn’t just geeks. Pretending file sharing was not mainstream by 2000 is like pretending Star Wars is only for nerds.
Eeh, swede here but a majority of men in my generation (90s) were probably at dreamhack at one point or another during their teens. Not to mention homeparties. Girls is less obviously but many of those went too
I’m 36 and had internet porn since before I got puberty.
But yeah, I agree. I skip sex scenes now. I don’t feel like they add anything. Like you can just cut out all the nude backs and moaning and nothing of value would be lost. We get it, they had sex, move on.
Most of us had it, but most were on things like family computers trying to be covert about it. Capacitive touch screen phones changed everything for access. No one was getting imaginative with the snake game on a Nokia 3310 back in the day.
I don’t feel like it’s awkward or uncomfortable, but I do hate it when it’s completely unnecessary. I don’t even care if the sex is unrealistic as long as it’s necessary for the plot. Just Chekhov’s gun that shit.
Especially with many audiences. On your own or with a romantic partner it’s not nearly as bad, but watching a sex scene with pretty much anyone else feels so awkward, which pulls you out of the scene.
Amen , I am millenial and I too find it very uncomfortable. When I was young I was eagerly waiting for some hot scenes when porn was scarce but now anything remotely sexual iRRitates me.
Yup, especially as a gay, sex scenes in movies have always been “I’m fine with straight people existing, but I don’t want them rubbing my face in it” at best … and it’s rarely at best, with all the chemistry of a jar of nitrogen.
I’m not Gen Z and I hate the damn sex scenes. There was a minute there where netflix would just add one within 15 mins of every show or movie, even if they never showed another one again. It never added to the plot and seemed like it was just there to reel people in. But, it was obnoxious.
Glad they sort of stopped that, although I still find it happens now and again. Hopefully this puts the nail in the coffin.
It’s awkward seeing scenes like that unfold with other people like friends and family. Implying a scene and fading to black is more than enough. And I think many actors would be happier too not having to act out those scenes.
Hmm. I haven’t really thought about it much. Why do I, a porn enjoying man from smack in the middle of the Millennial generation, dislike so many Hollywood sex scenes?
I would be interested in gathering some data, take a large sample of movies and TV shows made during my lifetime, and rate them as to why they’re in a film. What purpose do they serve in the story, what do they tell us about the characters…why is this here?
The issue for me isn’t the sex, it’s that the scene is irrelevant to the plot. If the sex is relevant to the plot I don’t mind, but when it’s obviously just slotted in to show tits, that’s annoying because it breaks immersion for me. It makes me think about the agenda behind adding that scene instead of thinking about the story I’m watching.
Obvious product placement is kind of in the same category for me. Like Will Smith in I, Robot spending 5 minutes of the movie super excited about receiving some “vintage 2004 Converse All Stars”. Like, the movie is set in 2035, but you just had to find a way to plug this year’s model of some shoes. Sure, those shoes have looked the same since forever, but the 2004 ones were just something else, man!
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.
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.
Sounds good to me and I'm a couple letters behind Gen Z. Either the scenes don't do anything for me, in which case they're boring, or they do something for me, in which case...what do I do when it's over? Do I pause and go take care of it, or sit there all hot and bothered while somebody talks about business stuff or getting the bad guys or whatever? Either way it's annoying. And I'm no prude, it's just, if I want to see sex I'll just watch porn. But I'm not watching porn, I'm trying to watch a story. IDK. It's like if the mall decided every store needed a stripper pole.
I'm with Gen Z on this. Hell, I've have been complaining about this since I was a kid in the 80s. You do not need every damn relationship to be a romance. People can be friends and acquaintances and frienemies and enemies and everything in-between without there being romance or sex.
Or they can be in love without it being explored when it’s of no value to the story. Movies seldom ever include established couples just treating them normally.
Millennial here. I’ve always found random sex scenes obnoxious. It completely kills the pacing and pulls me out of the story. If you need sex for character development, you can much more easily allude to it and move on. The only time I can think of when it actually made sense for the story was in the movie Her and it was such a mild scene that didn’t have any visuals.
She gave consent in the book, although she was still only like 14 because George RR Martin is a creeper. So not really consent, but not quite like the show.
Unless you’re watching a romance movie there’s almost zero point to have a romance plotline.
Pretty tired of the horror movies and action movies that just randomly throw in some love triangle or romance plot to try and make the actual plot more exciting, even though most of the time it makes no sense.
I wish I could go tell this to that hack who wrote the “Iliad”. Like seriously you’re going to go and insert some stupid love shot into your kick arse war story? Oh and don’t even get me started on using the name Helen in a fantasy Greek setting, pffft.
I'm the gen that saw couples having sex butt-naked on the kitchen counter in a random movie at 3-4 in the afternoon. And all i remember now of that movie is that i don't like seeing guys butts.
Y’all need to go fuck some more. Films like La La Land are really missing something without a sex scene, the chemistry feels really fake and the relationship isn’t believable.
Sex is normal. Sex is good. Sex in films is necessary to convey intensity which a pan from bed shot can never achieve.
Great example: Terminator. Without this scene the whole franchise fails. The film doesn’t have the gravitas when John does die without it. And it’s a highly charged emotional reaction to the harrowing events they have both just been through.
sex isnt necessary for an intense relationship, and if your romantic pairing requires the characters literally porking onscreen to be believable or to read as having any chemistry you did a shit job writing it
99% of sex on film is casual sex and to claim that “casual sex” is normal and good is not straightforward to me.
For example most of the time with a macho male protagonist, they will show him using women for sex like disposable condoms. Another worrying trend on the rise is plot lines that basically glorify cheating.
I am not bothered by the sex or the nudity per se, but Hollywood loves to glorify characters with very problematic characters.
Porn is porn, I’ll watch that when I want in private. If I’m watching a movie/tv show, I’m watching it for the content, for the storyline or whatever, adding shitty softcore porn to it just dilutes it and makes it unwatchable around friends/family. One of my gripes with Game of Thrones (not high compared to everything else wrong with it) was all the shitty sex scenes they added, which required them to cut out even more content than before. With only ~10 hours per season, they didn’t have alot of time to dick around, but they spent alot of time… dickin’ around.
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