Where Have All the Sex Scenes Gone?
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Link: https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
Discussion (674 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
Not too sad, though, because I feel like the exact opposite has happened with TV, where the rise of streaming services has ushered in a "Cambrian Explosion" of sorts with all types of varied topics and interesting content.
I am worried that soon they will also optimize the hell out of them - platforms like Netflix have all the data: what scene makes you pause and re-watch, what makes you stop watching, God only knows what else they are measuring.
It leaves me wondering to what extent those metrics overlap with the artistic side (whatever that is, but in this context I mean trying to express something genuine, not to please the audience).
In the 2020/2021 season, the nominations included The Father about a man suffering dementia (from his perspective) and Sound of Metal about a drummer going deaf.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/93rd_Academy_Awards
For 2019, we had the best picture nominations include Ford v Ferrari, Little Women, and 1917:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/92nd_Academy_Awards
Previous to that, Bohemian Rhapsody:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/91st_Academy_Awards
Going back one more year, Dunkirk and Lady Bird:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/90th_Academy_Awards
Lastly for this discussion, Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge, Hidden Figures, and La La Land:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/89th_Academy_Awards
I think these are good counter-examples to your claim that only two types of movies being made.
Can we even call it TV anymore? It's all streamed to our laptops our tablets
You might argue that on Netflix every second movie have a lot of sex scenes. Yes, must mostly with partial or implied nudity (think of all of these scenes with sex with bra on, waking up clothed, or L-shaped sheets).
At the same time there is no issue with explicit blood, gore, cut-off limbs, etc.
First of all, it's rather interesting that you equate sex to taking a shit.
But also, what have you been watching to conclude that they don't show people eating on-screen? It's rather common, especially in film, to have characters eating real food. the primary reason it's not as frequent as in real life is because having actors eat food is actually a complicated thing to with multiple takes while maintaining continuity.
I don't think I've said that you said that either? My point was that they mostly show things that are relevant, and that since most movies focus on the extraordinary, regular sex is shown less and extraordinary sex is shown more.
> First of all, it's rather interesting that you equate sex to taking a shit.
Is it? I don't really see how.
> But also, what have you been watching to conclude that they don't show people eating on-screen? It's rather common, especially in film, to have characters eating real food. the primary reason it's not as frequent as in real life is because having actors eat food is actually a complicated thing to with multiple takes while maintaining continuity.
Again, food scenes are show when they are relevant. If you see a movie that happens on three days, you won't see people eat 9 times. You may see them eating once in the morning to show that the father doesn't have much time for his family, or something like that, but you won't see everything. The "ordinary stuff" is a small part of what happens in movies, because most movies aren't made to show it, they are made to show extreme things.
Guys don’t think about going to the toilet every few minutes for the majority of adulthood.
People’s hormonal drives don’t push them into social near-life decisions for other sorts of stuff besides sex.
Films like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo show maltreatment and restorative sex both. I’ve heard that porn tends to unregular, but I haven’t made time for that research, the porn I’ve seen would be worth aspiring to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNnRLD17Uh8
Perfectly safe for enslaved workers, btw.! :-)
But they do! (And I agree with the general sentiment.)
Most times the "right" to kill comes from things that you can't possibly know, and you are the hero for doing so. And having a gun is a symbol of rightful power, like having money.
And is not just the good boys killing, the bad boys more efficient doing so are shown surrounded by desirable things, power, money, women, charisma.
I just remembered accidentally seeing the US version of the movie "Kingsman: The Secret Service". I was surprised that one scene was cut out - naked ass of a young woman. The scene of brutal massacre where dozens of people are killed and maimed was left there. I still do not get how this came to be. People usually talk about puritanism and such but this does not seem to explain it - why should any culture consider it desirable to watch brutality but not nudity or something sexual?
I think that there is a case for people to be moral. The moralizers who are ok with bloody torture and not sex as part of the human condition discredit the concept of moral teaching.
I don't think that's true. At least, not the "sexiness and tawdriness" that was shown in most of the "old" movies. The article seem to argue that movies were better when they showed sex on screen, but I don't think that's true either. I think what happened is that we shifted from one warped perception of sex to another. Considering how culture and history tend to work, that's probably a cyclical movement and we may get more sex on the screen at some point in the next ~50 years.
I'm not trolling or trying to be argumentative here, I'm genuinely trying to think of series with unnecessary sex scene every 6-8 minutes.
If only you had named SexLife ...
People act like the only point of narrative work is to tell a story and advance a plot, forgetting that some of the greatest novels, plays, and movies of all time have creaky plots and barely-there stories, and plenty of "unnecessary" stuff.
So what? The new question with the approved honest accurate words, not like that original agenda'd deceptive one, still stands.
I think the difference is that "What constitutes necessary in art?" is pretty much a closed debate, as it's related to the nature of art, while for entertainment it's a bit different, as it's often (at least in that case it is) made for mass consumption. Since it's made for mass consumption, you can more easily argue about their moral responsibilities than with "art".
> The new question with the approved honest accurate words, not like that original agenda'd deceptive one, still stands.
It does, and I don't have a good answer to it.
> Why bother showing men and women connecting emotionally and sexually when you can rake in billions by having Steve Rogers and Tony Stark punch aliens—or, occasionally, each other?
I don't understand sentences like these. That's like saying "why bother eating oranges when you can eat an apple?" It frames the comparison in a way that suggest erotic movies are more bothersome to produce, which doesn't make sense. Superhero movies are more successful due to many reasons: big budget, proven formulaic plots, fan base, etc. but definitely not because they are less bothersome to produce.
Very probably.
TFA does not include the string 'TV' or 'television', but has 16 occurrences of 'movie', so perhaps you're arguing against a point that's not being asserted.
> I don't understand sentences like these.
And that's okay.
As TFA points out, China (and elsewhere) are significant markets with specific and (to western culture) peculiar requirements in terms of being culturally palatable.
The question is cogent, concise, and valid -- if you're a movie maker (motivated by money/fame/whatever) why would you try to contend with complex and difficult material if you could instead, as they author asks, more easily rake in billions by having two asexual fictional character punch aliens.
> Superhero movies are more successful due to many reasons: big budget, proven formulaic plots, fan base, etc. but definitely not because they are less bothersome to produce.
It's not so much bothersomeness that's the key criteria, but I'd suggest that big budgets don't guarantee a film's success anymore than a proven formulae (there's only 7 after all) or a large fan base (plenty of fan bases are both enormous and enormously unsatisfied).
Read some of the literature on why Marvel has been so popular in the China market for some context here -- for example this piece (but there's an abundance) : https://variety.com/2019/film/news/avengers-endgame-marvel-u...
I guess my confusion is stemmed from the fact that I don't think sex scenes are inherently more complex and difficult than alien punching. Perhaps more difficult to sell due to ratings, but that's a given.
I'm not endorsing the way Marvel is making movies; I think it's quite formulaic and intellectually lazy. But on the other hand, sex can easily be just as formulaic and lazy. My opinion is that Marvel didn't include sex in their movies simply because PG-13 has a bigger market and makes more money. If sex would sell better, they'll put sex in there with very little effort, and it wouldn't make those movies any less formulaic.
Of course, I'm anything but a movie expert; sex might really be more difficult to contend with, but the author hardly provided any explanation to support this claim, and thus I remain unpersuaded.
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And as a Chinese person, I'd suggest that Marvel is successful in China, because as formulaic as it is, it simply produces far better movie than current mainstream Chinese movies in almost every aspect. Chinese film making (mainstream) has been pacing backwards for at least the last decade.
As intimated though, the challenge is keeping China happy - there's been a constant series of articles about this phenomenon.
Beyond the acceptance of ultra-violence along with a distaste for sexuality, consider all the political hand-wringing that led Disney to the Iron Man 3 fracas. [0] Or informed their decisions around promoting any films with a non-white protagonist. [1] But really, any web search on 'how are the chinese market cuts of marvel films different' will get you a slew of results.
Aside - about 15 years ago, while in Hong Kong, I picked up a bootleg DVD of Love Actually (a highly popular, but arguably shite, film). Turned out that the local cut of that film excised every appearance of Martin Freeman & Joanna Page.
[0] https://screenrant.com/iron-man-3-china-version-different-sc...
[1] https://qz.com/quartzy/1231764/the-story-behind-the-racist-r...
Considering that choice, a sex scene is more bother because of the two reasons the author offers – commercial and cultural.
I love real cinema. For all intents and purposes it's gone now. We need a new art form to take its place.
A big part of the problem with any commercial art form is the plethora of folks who love to be reductionist in one way or another. Leads in TV shows from the 1950s forward wanted to know and control how many lines they spoke. John Wayne famously gave the advice to another actor that if you're leaving a scene, first move in the opposite direction and then leave the way you're supposed to. Gives you a bit more screen time. (Apologies that I cannot source that offhand)
Once everything becomes reductionist, it's then much easier to argue about some oversimplified version of the art than the contents of the art itself. Were there enough tall people in that film? Did that essay have the right amount of third-grade level adjectives? Is the playwright using a meter for the supporting roles? If so, what is it?
We can go on and on about such things because they are easier to measure, require almost no understanding of the art form itself, and lead to all sorts of debates. Sometimes I think the number one rule of modern media is "I don't care what you're arguing about, just argue about something!"
If we placed the story first, and only created anything in an art form to support and enhance that story, we'd get all sorts of interesting and self-challenging art, depending on which artist is telling the story. Whatever trivial reductionist thing you'd like to experience, there'd be art that let you experience it. But if we try to create and tell stories through art by way of committee and marketing research, it's just going to be more and more bland populist pablum.
The saddest part of all of this is not that businesses are acting in their best interests. The saddest part is what it says about the average consumer. I love modern theater even though it's a completely new art, but I try very hard not to do the "reverse math" and figure out just what the creators think of me. Otherwise I'd get pretty pissed.
It has always been primarily a business targeting the lowest possible common denominator of the largest possible audience. And as the developed world expanded, that denominator shrank. Hence everything Marvel now.
There is a tension between art and commercial art. Beethoven should have never written that battle symphony.
When done well, I think you can get both. Start with the story and then weave in the commercial aspects. Or start with the story and only choose to finance movies that have both art and commercial value. What you can't do is start with the commercial side and then try to hammer in a good story. There have been a few masters that managed to pull that off, but it's rare. Add in committee-management instead of having an artist's eye and it becomes total crap.
It's in nobody's interest to only have arthouse flicks that nobody watches. Happily it's not an either-or decision. Good drama will draw in the commercial part than can then be exploited. Everybody's happy. What I'm seeing now is that majority of films start with a locked-in fanbase and then try to do their best at creating an n+1 episode. That's how they're getting around the quality problem: they make it moot. They know the locked-in fanbase is coming no matter what they produce, and if it's a real stinker? Well hell, all of the press and arguing about how bad it is will just drive up interest for n+2. Not only is that not trying to mix a good story in with a commercial line, that's putting the story quality pretty far down the list. It's noticeable.
ADD: I'd say that in the heyday of arthouse flicks, say 65-80, you had the peak of movies that covered both bases well. Nobody's doing another Midnight Cowboy.
I believe it's still done for so-called in-flight entertainment.
So when I said the problem was China, I didn't mean the Chinese market, I meant that a huge amount of money currently being spent financing film entertainment comes from groups like this. They kill these kinds of things before they ever get financed.
Most folks don't talk about the money side of movies. It's nothing like talking about which star is in rehab or where the MCU is heading with its reboot. But at the end of the day, that's the thing driving content creation.
Because its more cost effective to consider the whole market when making the movie to start with.
> I believe it's still done for so-called in-flight entertainment
In-flight entertainment isn't way down the list of money drivers. “Chinese first-run sales” is a lot higher. So the power of the latter on how movies are initially crafted is big, while the former is negligible.
Having sex scenes in cinema does not make good cinema at all just because of it.
One would be The Limits of Control from 2009
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135092/
another I Origins from 2014
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2884206/
I'm sure there are more, but can't remember right now, or don't care that much.
FWIW I found it a hugely entertaining, and spectacularly well written piece.
As to your concern about the un-cited hypothetical tweet, a) on my reading of the article it was very much NOT ascribing much evidence to this phenomenon, and b) your favourite search engine will quickly reveal your answers if you ask for 'Laura Mulvey male gaze'.
Soooo, instead of your reaction I just backed off and decided to regard any and all statements in such media content as, call it, "conjectures that some people want to pass out guessing that maybe some other people will agree".
That is, we get a lot of conjectures! I can like getting some of the conjectures since commonly they are not ones I would think of -- so, maybe there is some value there, e.g., not that the conjectures make any real sense but, say, just that they are maybe (another conjecture!) that some people would entertain in which case we might get some insight into some people! See, if strain enough, bend over backwards and twist self out of shape, discard nearly all sense of rationalism and critical thinking, can find a glimmer of value!!
Then the article mentioned Anya Taylor-Joy: Never heard of her, so did a fast Google search and got caught up. Yup, of the several pictures of her one of them to my eyes did have "almost-alien beauty"; that picture, if only from some lighting, seemed to have the part of her nose between her eyes unusually wide.
Besides, have to give a little value for the rough, guesstimate conjecture:
"(Congrats: You're caught up on the last 30 years or so of the theatrical exhibition business.)"
Maybe some such thing is true, maybe!
Net: It's easy to read such media criticism -- just set aside all rationality directly on the content and look, instead, at the content as maybe some insight into what some people might believe! That is, we should have some good insight into what nonsense some people might believe, that is, we might be learning about the people, not the nonsense! It's not difficult; you can do it, too!
As such, actors and especially actresses are of course averse to it. Not only because they grew up in our society, but because it often leads to the fetishization of their image. Do you want to be recognized for the acting you worked hard to learn, or for the 2 minutes of almost-explicit sex with a random person, being watched on-stage by several middle-aged men? One of this options celebrates your talents and hardwork, while the other puts you on the spot in an uncomfortable position with potential negative repercussions for your career.
A few things stand out:
- DVD sales and rentals are no longer a thing. In the top days of rental videos, and straight to video movies, Sex was a key way to compensate for otherwise mediocre production; that and outrageous action. Preferably both. Also DVD sales were the bulk of movie revenue. So even the stuff that was shown in the cinema was actually optimized for that. With all that gone, it's just a lot less attractive and necessary to spend money on spicing up movies a little as that used to be mostly about beefing up rental and dvd sales.
- A lot of that stuff has now moved to streaming. There are now award winning movies that go straight to Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. And of course streaming services still provide access to plenty of on screen sex. Sex sells and when half your audience is male and the other half has their own needs on this front, basically you get specialized material for both groups. Netflix uses a data driven approach to figuring out what to serve. Apparently, sex sells ... monthly subscriptions.
- We've had the whole me-too movement and a large amount of scandals around abuse of actresses in the movie industry in recent years. So, naturally the cost and risk of on screen sex has gone up a quite a bit. There are ways around this of course.
Ug! Sex and love. that stuff is just too dangerous to let into the public imagination.
I'm not religious and do not care at all about how other's live their lives. But I see value in a monogamous relationship, and see attitudes toward casual sex as a decent indicator in helping me select a partner with the same values. This is not a moral judgement by any means. This is also not saying a monogamous relationship is better or worse.
Once you get a series of BDSM-themed books and a movie that are socially accepted in regular discourse, a sex scene in a movie is just less risqué.
Even the 50 Shades sex scenes in the movies were bizarrely tame and Puritan. Like if a pre-teen imagined what sex was like but had never really actually done the deed.
It's okay to watch a human being realistically murder another one YET a penis appearing on screen or a penis entering a vagina/rectum is somehow a mind-blowing event we can only handle in small and censored amounts.
Mostly new life come out of sex while mostly death comes out of violence.
Is it? Most movies are unrealistic with their plots. I wouldn't call most action movies "a human being realistically murder another one", they are stories, not real, so the violence is okay because it's not real.
> Mostly new life come out of sex while mostly death comes out of violence.
I think that's an oversimplification. You can use violence to protect people.
> You can use violence to protect people.
You can also avoid a fight by de-escalating or just walk-away which is the best option in real life but is barely portraited in movies.
We are in our 40s, it takes a lot to get in mood for sex. We don't watch porn or actually look for ways to get in the mood. We plan to have sex after date nights but those are rare with young kids in the house.
Over last few years, most of sex happened when we were watching a "real" movie with a good sex scene/s. I understand why superhero movie should not have sex scenes but we need more adult movies with a good stories. There is demand for it. My wife's book club even recommends steamy movies to watch with your partner, unfortunately, some of those are really cheesy like 365 Days.
That said, HBO shows have lots of sex so I suspect the premise of the article is generally false.
Money.
Can you share any links?
It seems to be that there might be a parallel with software dev practices, ie waterfall model (write script, shoot script, edit film) and a more lean/agile model (writing, shooting and editing in whatever order it takes to build up the film)
https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/8SE7gM0xRkGI2taSIFBJhw/rensa-g...
That sounds very unlikely and I'd need a better citation. And pre-visualization doesn't really mean what they seem to be using it to mean here.
Edit: It seems like this is you trying to promote your Hollywood startup, rather than an accurate assessment of how things are currently done in Hollywood.
Not my startup, I don't have any connection to them other than via my co-founder. I do run FWD:Everyone though.
Now obviously you're not going to be able to user Spider-Man pre-vis if you're making something like Schindler's List, but exploring and facilitating different licensing models seems absolutely worth doing.
I'd love to see some other references if have any.
It's a bold claim (from the linked article) to say that:
> Black Widow was fully created with motion capture ("pre-visualization") before a script was even written
I didn't write it, that's my co-founder.
And plus there is a full article about it here if you just Google it: https://www.insider.com/marvel-plans-movies-action-scenes-ye...
"While previs used to be used for just one or two tricky action scenes, Marvel has embraced the approach of visualizing entire movies, including quieter beats and dialogue scenes."
"The first visualizations of a Marvel film will often begin before the script's fully finished."
"Occasionally, rough previs might be underway even before the cinematographer or director has signed on to the project, a practice that can be controversial in Hollywood. Director Lucrecia Martel said she turned down the offer to direct the upcoming "Black Widow" movie after Marvel told her not to worry about the action sequences."
"Before a script is fully finished" is a long way from "before a script was even written".
Script rewrites happen throughout the whole process, even well into post-production sometimes (with re-shoots etc)..
That's not at all the same thing as "before a script is written".
We would get excited if a movie had like a nip slip in early puberty. After like 2004 almost everybody had decent internet and access to porn. Only exciting thing was maybe a leaked celeb sex tape.
I cannot imaging gen x or z even getting excited about a nip slip or boobs in a movie.
American Millenials and Gen Z are having less sex than the generations before them.
They've also grown up with frequent mass school shootings and the "tactical", "everyday carry", amateur-soldier, military worship culture that really got rolling after 9/11.
No wonder sex scenes squick them out -- it's a world that's distant, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable for them.
Violence, though? Pile it on. Now you're speaking their language.
It might depend on the country. I find them way more liberals than my generation. I mean, maybe there is more backroom in nightclub now than 10 years ago (or less?), but i've witnessed more public sex people in 2017-2019 than i ever did before. We might need data on this. Also, i have the impression that my generation restarted the "menage a trois" that i thought disapeared in the late 70s, but that might be because i became close to a LGBTQ+ community in my mid-20s that was way less impressed by sex than i was.
I am a zoomer and none of the people around my age I know are anti-sex. If anything, we are all for (safe) sex without the constraints of social pressure/puritan morality.
Never go full Scunthorpe etc.
> What did we think would happen when we spent decades screaming about The Male Gaze and how film's treatment of women inherently objectifies them
This is not true, the affinity of latest generations for postmodern asexuality is a preference, not catechism
The fact is there are are MORE sex scenes now than there ever were in the 80s and 90s, it's just that they've migrated more to streaming TV series that are too sophisticated for right-wingers to be viewing them en masse.
Not to mention, of course, that there's also about 100x the availability of porn now, and Washington Free Beacon readers are no doubt consuming a lot of that, just like almost all of us are.
So really, this piece doesn't pass the laugh test, just like most right-wing social commentary.
A quick overview didn’t turn it up, but I recall a recent study that showed that people who self-identified as “right wing”, when asked to describe the beliefs of the “left wing”, were significantly more accurate than their “left wing” peers asked to describe “right wing” beliefs.
Your comment strikes me as exactly this sort of fallacy. It seems that you have built up a caricature that you believe to be true.