Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing...

Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt, Spaceballs (1987) Heck, most of the 1980's cartoons were designed to sell toys.

> I agree that more and more we are optimizing for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.

Social media did this. Before narcissism became en vogue, gym rats and party people existed and no one else really cared because they were not visible. Now they show up in your social media feed every day. They make you feel small and less complete. Maybe you should go to the gym and more clubs to keep up otherwise you aren't cool or interesting. Meanwhile its all senseless, shallow peacocking and hedonism.

I agree, this is the most likely explanation.

It's just like pop songs which are only ever about the one thing everyone on the planet understands. At some point companies decide to target the lowest common denominator in order broaden their audience and maximize profits. The results might still be good but the fact certain qualities were lost in the process cannot be denied.

And then, slowly over the course of the project, the targeted age rating kept decreasing because it was projected we would then sell more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality

I've been hearing this sentiment lately and don't understand it. What gives one person insight into the psychology of another without an intimate relationship? How can one know another is doing something for "the wrong reasons"? It feels like a lazy stereotyping heuristic.

Actually, I do think I might understand it. It could be introverts failing to achieve full theory of mind about extroverts. Which itself might be a lazy stereotyping heuristic, but at least it has the virtue of reacting to an expressed state of mind, and not an implied one.

As opposed to... what time in the past where this was not true?

Changing your "not sexually active" situation will take putting yourself out there a lot, lowering your standards (you can raise them later), being open to meeting all sorts and getting rejected a lot. You'll certainly gain entertaining stories, and you'll probably meet some new friends, possibly one or more lovers and one of them may become a romantic partner if that's what you're after. Please be good to the people you meet while you're doing this. And along the way you'll develop a tolerance to rejection, which is a somewhere between life hack and superpower.

All that that may be overwhelming though. The block you quoted is riddled with social anxieties. See if that's hold you back, and if so then get a professional to help you out.

Side note, now is a good time to prepare for this change, because the pandemic has put everyone into extended isolation all at once. So there's a lot of pent up desire for connection that will be getting released over the next year.

See also https://youtu.be/9mbp0DugfCA and https://youtu.be/ZOgvWIulxho for fun.

I'm rooting for you, fellow throwaway!

I do not want to participate in some mating ritual that involves two persons lying to each other in order to just relieve some sexual tension. In Romania I do not feel that generally girls are ok with no strings attached sex without this dishonest dance and even so, I couldn't probably get as attractive a girl as an escort. Maybe I could by investing a lot more time than I'm comfortable with just to satisfy a basic urge... but for 100$ I can have sex with girls of the same level of say Emma Stone that really know what they're doing.

So if I make even 25$/h that's 4h of work for 1 sex session, which will take place entirely when I feel the desire for it. To find a similar (looking) girl that will have sex "for free" will probably take more than 10x more time and even then the actual sex might not be as good. Even if it is as good it will happen when the stars align and we both want it at the same time.

The other excuses don't really resonate with me. Roommates? We were having plenty of sex in college, text your roommate to go away for a bit. Parents? Idk I just used my car or wait for them to go to sleep. 17 - to early 20s just do what you can. I don't get the broke thing, college bars are cheap, or we just went to parks or whatever.

We're at a point in time where our society places a lot of value in sex and romance, but it's now easy to largely forego these things and dump your time into other things you're passionate about. It seems that when these discussions about the relative celibacy of young people come up, people talk a lot about how it must be because young people are facing effectively insurmountable struggles, and mostly ignore that it's possible that it's easier to focus on things other than sex now. That possibility runs contrary to how most of us were brought up, and it's why you're asking what we should do to "improve" these trends. Have we considered that there might be nothing to fix, and that the trend doesn't need to be stopped?

Well, HIV/AIDS seems relatively under control compared to when I was a young man, and there’s a vaccine for HPV, so get on out there, young blood!

Aversion to anonymous or even just casual sex for my generation (X) was from diseases. That seems like less of an issue now, but maybe the education system doesn’t want to let up on the risks yet, kind of like cities keeping us doing the recycling motions even when they’re throwing it in landfills - the behaviors are deemed valuable or the institutions just haven’t caught up to reality.

Probably your biggest issue as a generation is the freely available custom porn and social media alienating people from each other - there’s a lack of need to hook up and a self-inflicted lack of opportunity. Also, sensitivities to workplace hookups are a much bigger deal than they were even 15 years ago.

Research on satisfaction differences between relationship types is illuminating

We’ll sacrifice bad guys to the volcano gods for awhile, then the bubble will pop, the trend will fade and women (in the media) will be thirsting for men who aren’t wusses.

I don't really know how to change whole cultures though, other than to change the propaganda (messaging) or improve the support structures so people feel safe enough to experiment and have fun with life.

Why do we need to? The data shows that sex, drug use, etc., actually peaked with baby boomers. They were peak frivolity. It’s only because they created all the media for decades that we think those were good things. Millennials are a more sober and serious generation for a more sober and serious time. No need to regress.

(Pandemic lockdowns of course might get in the way, but I'm speaking generally when those restrictions aren't there)

This is technically true, but most men and women will probably be significantly less interested in making love to you if you're living in a filthy home.

Sufficient and necessary conditions and all...

I'm very pleased by this minimalist interior design. You can achieve interesting designs and keep it minimal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne5xD5XrzOc

I'm not saying they don't also do unnatural things to their bodies that set unrealistic standards and don't set a good example, but being "thin" is not one of them.

I wanted to read the article you linked to, but seems like they have a region lock for EU countries. Its been what, nearly three years since GDPR took effect?

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

VERY hard to make a sweeping generalization under "European" in this context. I'm from Scandinavia and I'm fine with it, but my SO that is from France, bordering to Germany, always tell me how horrified she (still) gets when she cross the border and end up in changing rooms. Heard similar story from Italians.

I'm curious what you think the reasons that nudity is not as big of a deal to Europeans are.

You might be in a bubble. Outside of a few US cities and outdoorsy areas, when I look around, almost nobody looks like they are going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-american-obesity-rate...

And physical fitness shows you have the time, money, and discipline to take care of yourself, and it can't easily be faked, so it serves as a pretty good signal of those traits. I'm not surprised leaders would want to differentiate themselves using it, especially when you're trying to stand out in a crowd of people who have time and money, since discipline is the rare trait.

It's also objectively healthy to lift weights for bone density and strength, among numerous other advantages, especially in our sedentary lifestyles. And the standard abdominal fat/beer belly is incredibly damaging to one's health, so if your goal is to stay healthy through your 60s to 80s, I welcome being "fit" as a fad.

I also think this applies to full time sex worker positions if there was an “and you’ve got to fuck your boss” contract clause.

Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?

Oh wait, it's not strange at all! Most people who work as programmmers do not want to serve coffee, and will naturally coordinate to avoid normalizing it, lest it become a recurring part of every job description. This happens even though work as a barista does not fit into the 'dangerous and therefore segregated' category. Indeed, there would be nothing unusual about a receptionist who also handles catering at events and serves coffee to management.

Or is serving coffee also "effectively partitioned" by "our culture"?

Gotta say that often questions like this are often as just taken as ways to win rhetorical points and not thought about seriously by those who ask them. But there's actually a good answer. Yes, sex work is extremely exploitative in the sense that you selling a "big piece" of yourself. Which doesn't mean it should be illegal but it should segregated. Why?

Other kinds of work exists that extremely exploitative - dangerous, physical exhausting, possibly-humiliating and damaging. Those should be segregated also and usually are. But let's an experiment:

    Receptionist + some danger deep diving
    Receptionist + some heavy underground construction
    Receptionist + some lion tamer work
    Dangerous heavy construction for part off your rent

We don't outlaw boxing or MMA. But we put regulations on it. We shut down illegal basement fights. And we hope people going into it aren't coerced and have recourse if something goes wrong. We accept that if an adult wants to get punched in the face for money that's something society can accommodate with reasonable expectations.

But there's no world where we would see a boss getting in the ring with his employees to fight for money as something acceptable.

Similarly, male students were going crazy about female teaching assistants who were admittedly very average looking, and didn't have much going for them otherwise either.

Thus, I've always interpreted that to be that "position of power" makes for an unreasonable judgement (of both brain and heart :), but you are free to make of that what you will.

Receptionism is “clean work”, consequently a receptionist cannot be forced to lower himself to dirty work. — this would apply to working with human waste or various medical work as much as prostitution, I would gander.

A receptionist can be required by contract to serve drinks, play the piano, and various other things that a receptionist does not ordinarily do, but weeding through garbage, performing sex acts, or changing diapers, — that is off limits.

Does it? You asked this on an online forum, not a national survey. I don't think our culture has a majority view on the nuance of prostitution. The most engagement I'd expect on this topic is from people who feel strongly that it shouldn't exist at all.

I'm in favour of fully legalised prostitution, but I don't want to be personally exposed to it in any capacity. I want the workplace to be about work. I don't want my money wasted arresting people for having sex.

I oppose receptionist that also has sex with the boss. Exploitation has nothing to do with that.

At least in my world view, having sex at workplace is unprofessional.

First of all, spending corporate or investor's money on paying sex workers is wrong.

Even if the boss is the sole owner of the company i.e. spending their own money, boss fucking a receptionist causes unhealthy atmosphere in the company. The company gonna have hard time attracting female candidates on other positions. Employees who have families gonna have interesting conversations with their SOs.

I think the answer to it might be in assigning some unscientific statistics to the world.

Starting here: perhaps 5% of people are psychologically capable of sex work. The reason behind legalizing (or decriminalizing) sex work is to maximize the liberty of, and reduce the harm to, this 5%.

Concurrently we must account for the 95%.

If we were to normalize sex work in the context other professions, then the volume of jobs requiring sex would quickly outpace the number of people who would choose that profession in lieu of economic necessity, and so you will have people be sexually exploited. Perhaps the free market will solve this in the long term but in the mean time you’ll have many a hurt persons.

So basically the whole thing is a compromise based on what we believe about the economic incentives and workforce, aiming to please multiple outlooks.

Although the “contractor” point another poster made is maybe more compelling.

Puritans, who believed that sex was sinful and suffering was noble.

The likelihood of something happening in real life. Most people will live their whole life without getting into a violent situation, which keeps it a fictional one, but almost all will be confronted with a sexual one. Violence in media will not beget violence in real life, generally speaking (if it did, given how much violence there is in video games and movies, we'd have a Problem), but sex in media will normalize it. Or that's the theory anyway.

Another one: Sex is always happy, a happy relationship, people looking pleased with themselves after the saxophone-music-pan-out smoking a cigarette (to invoke the 80's trope). Violence is almost always bad, the hero in agony, the bad guy coming to a gruesome end (falling off Nakatomi Plaza, into helicopter blades or a jet turbine, getting roundhouse kicked into defeat, etc), etc. It's a punishment, whereas sex in a film is depicted as a reward. Generally speaking.

I'm trying to think of a movie where so graphically murdering a real human with a real weapon wouldn't get a frown and an R from the MPAA like nudity would.

Kind of ironically, though, one way to dodge harsher ratings for violence is to kill non-humans (like aliens) with made up weapons (like phasers) and show no gore while doing it. Everyone has viscera, after all (I assume, maybe some aliens in the Star Trek universe don't); is seeing it such a big deal?

Most movies and shows have become so violent that I don't even look for new stuff anymore.

There are a lot of new movies and shows out there (including new Star Trek shows), especially considering how there are so many platforms distributing new content. I'd venture to say most of them are at the violence level of Star Trek or below. It's totally fine if you want to rewatch the same stuff because you know you like it, but to write off decades of new media like you have, without even seeing it, is kinda lazy.

No one wants to watch people getting it on with their eleven-year-old. An adult rating makes an easy warning.

But yes, European media in general is less focused on physical æsthetic perfection than I find U.S.A, Japanese, Korean, and Indian media to be; I often find a similar result in German, Swedish and Dutch television series that characters seem to look considerably more average.

These were also the only thing my parents watched, so it was a relief when I got to watch normal people TV and saw someone in their 20s.

If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing.

I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.

Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...

This is a disturbing thing if true. It seems a key feature of an oppressive society.

That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.

In the 1980s parents still tagged along, so the movie couldn't be too comical...and, the kids wouldn't get the mature part anyway.

Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

An observation I've shared before: Some former hippie who was older than me once told me "All the TV stations went off the air at 9pm. There was nothing to do after that if you were still awake other than sex and drugs."

Now we have the internet. You can go down the rabbit hole on YouTube videos, intellectual articles or whatever floats your boat, sexually or otherwise, any time of the day or night if you have an internet connection and even homeless people can manage to get online at least part of the time via the library, a cell phone, etc.

Maybe sex was something of a time filler and it's no longer needed as desperately because we have plenty of other things to do. We also attach less to sex/marriage. At one time, whether or not you married had a huge impact on access to money, medical benefits, etc and that's changing.

Similarly: We have an "autism epidemic" in a world that has gotten a lot noisier and busier than it used to be. We know the world has changed radically and yet we keep looking for ways to blame the individual for behaving differently rather than wondering about how those widespread environmental changes are impacting people and what role they play in widespread trends from vastly huge upticks in certain diagnoses to vastly less sex.

If you want a 3 bdrm condo most cities don't adequately zone for them, and so the limited stock is obscenely over-priced. The same follows for townhouses and row homes.

My own municipality is, allegedly, progressive and far-left; but even it has locked in a huge chunk of the town as single unit homes in a "heritage conservation area", and insists on building bachelor and 2 bdrm suites when it densifies.

So what's the point? You can rent your parents' basement suite for cheaper than the mortgage on what would be a lateral shift in housing status.

Isn't it a lot more likely to be increased access to birth control? Which people take for very good reasons, but it disrupts your hormones a lot more than plastic does. That's the point of taking it.

(I'm not putting you down)

It would appear that the article briefly engaged in overgeneralization and propagation of the “you can’t be skinny unless you under-eat” myth.

[0] I’m sure it’s somewhat less of a problem for her than for me, as the weight gain issue applies to muscle mass as well and that stereotypically matters more for males. As a downside that affects us both, though, we sometimes experience an issue where inadvertently not eating enough—and this would still be more than a person on a diet might eat—can result in very unpleasant states with shakes and headache (probably low blood sugar or something like that).

I don't think you're contradicting the article. You're simply "naturally" eating a low enough amount of calories to keep the same weight, relative to how many calories you expend in exercise/regular life.

At the end of the day, if you were eating more than maintenance calories for your metabolism, over time, you'd be gaining weight.

no one has put me in movies, yet.

Julia Child didn't become Julia Child until she was ~60.

What's being a guy got to do with it?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/

The innuendo is pretty strong and the characters are mostly terrible people and the plot pretty dark.

But also very witty, fast paced, and funny. Some really interesting shots, too, with moving and panning cameras, or things happening in both foreground and background.

It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.

I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).

> I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.

Last year I got ahold of The Munsters, the black-and-white TV show from the 1960s, and noticed something odd one day when I watched an episode back-to-back with a modern unrelated show: What you describe with people also applies to props. In the Munsters' dinner scenes, the whole set - including the food - was significantly more interactive than anything modern I've seen possibly ever. It made the modern shows rather suddenly feel much more fake than I was used to.

Showing a couple bonding is fine, but it adds nothing knowing they did it doggy style.

Nudity is fine if it adds something. But too much feels like a checkbox being ticked off.

Most recently I recall being really pleased watching Greenland that they didn't have one of those typical scenes. I was so expecting it, and it was so refreshing that it wasn't included.

“Just remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is OK, as long as you don't say any naughty words!”

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/08/10/the-time-south-park-...

I see this point a lot and I think it is a good one but I have some theories on it too.

I think that violence (at least to a point) is part of our natural play instincts, think cops and robbers as a kid. We aren’t disturbed when young children mimic violence, we even see it in nature fairly ubiquitously. Animals play fight with each other. When we see violence in a movie we see it as play, not as reality.

As for why Americans are hung up on sex I’m not sure, but I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality.

The boys has had great success but still has orders of mangnitude less cultural impact than the MCU for instance. It's actually making, to some extent, the same point the article is making: super hero movies are bland and childish.

I didn't even know what Orville is, sounds interesting.

I'd say the _slice of current cinematic culture_ selected by the article is broad and impactful, and represents fairly well an important part of the whole. It's not the whole story, and you're right in pointing that out, but I don't agree that that invalidates the article.

Take lockes and keys on netflix. The original comics is very violent. The murdered rape the kids mother, and when he escapes jail, he pays his ride by sucking dicks. He has horrible scars because the big brother trashed him with a brick in a blood frenzy that is visually rehashed as a memory regularly in the first tome. Bode sister hurt herself and his little bro while hidding because she is holding so hard.

None of that made it into the tv show despite the fact it makes the story better: the characters make more sense, their reactions are congruent with their tragedy.

In another vein, I've also seen the claim made that Heathers couldn't be made today because of school shootings, yet it was made into a Broadway musical within the past decade.

It's min/maxing, optimizing for the biggest revenue, and it's paying massive dividends. Film projects produce record breaking amounts of revenue. If a blockbuster film passes the Chinese censors (and/or is made with Chinese cooperation), it will produce hundreds of millions more in revenue.

But that's the blockbusters. At the same time, the movie industry is booming with independent and original films. Joker is one example, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it's not 'sexy', there's no overblown action scenes, it's not targeting a PG-13 audience (it's an R rated film), and yet it still broke all records, earning over a billion in revenue with at a 55-70 million budget.

I mean, it was filmed in Scotland to begin with...

It is not just out of backward thinking that every single human society has seen it fit to strictly control sex. The last half century, where your attitude largely reigned in Western Europe and almost the same extent in America, is an extreme aberration and it is ending rapidly before our eyes.

Hopefully it's implied, but it should be whenever all involved "damn well please."

If you really have such strong opinions about this, can I tempt you to read what "body positivity" is actually about? And why "objectively beautiful"... is pretty subjective?

It's in other aspects of Marvel too. I actually really enjoyed it with Thor Ragnarok when they seemed to stop pretending it's not a stupid comedy with cartoon violence flavouring. Previous ones were "No, no, we're totally serious. Ignore that half the characters are here for comedy value."