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Comment by seo-speedwagon | Hacker News Reader

I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny.

BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different

- movies: less horny

- television: slightly more horny?

- books: roughly unchanged

- music: roughly unchanged

- video games: much, much hornier

So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.

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Agreed. And another large part of "media", which didn't exist in the 80s: social media. I think that much of social media has become more blatantly sexual. In the earlier days of Instagram people would post pictures of themselves in scant clothing or somewhat "compromising" positions but always under pretense of something else. It would be accompanied by text in the form of a "thought provoking" quote and/or refer to something in the background of the image. The poster would be trying to say "this is not a picture of my bottom in a small bikini at the beach, it is a picture of the beautiful sunset and I just happen to be in it in a small bikini". People would poke fun at others for posting "thirst traps". Today it is done blatantly and people often refer to their own posts as "thirst traps".

But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.

Instagram and tiktok exist in the shadow of Onlyfans (+), and quite a lot of those posts are disguised content marketing that goes exactly up to the boundary of what you can do without getting banned from the platform.

(+) or perhaps the other way round; onlyfans exists in the penumbra of other social media, detectable only in veiled references and indirect links, but unable to be mentioned directly.

>video games: much, much hornier

It really depends on your scope of game. Big budget AAA games more or less abandoned sexualization. CDPR seems to be the only company that bothers with genetalia or sex at all. Compare this to the 90's/00's AAA games and it's not even the same genre.

For adult specific games, no, but yes. In the context of Japan, there's surprisingly little change in VN's. In fact it got a less loss sexual as certain VN realized they didn't need sex scenes to sell a game. But Japanese VN's are still very similar as a whole.

For the english market, it went from "small adult game shareware" in the 90's to absolutely exploding due to PC platforms allowing for independent publishing. AAA level entities (outside of Japanese VN's) never touched that market, but smaller developers always had a steam stream, and Steam allowing 18+ titles opened the floodgates.

Then there's the mobile scene. It's more or less not a factor for western branches (indie nor AAA. AAA is obvious, but the Indie market simply targets Steam), but Japan is starting a second coming with the market. It's mostly a difference in market; Google/Apple don't allow 18+ titles, so Nutaku is your best bet in the west. Meanwhile, DMM is a humongous entity in Japan has always had an entire separate 18+ wing of titles for media. Mobile games are no different, and Asia in general has a huge attach rate with mobile games.

Is wmusic roughly unchanged?

It was scandalous when Madonna sang about sex, and masturbation in 1986, not as much when Christina Aguilera did it in 1999. And today you have people like Troye Sivan singing about taking poppers and the biggest drama is that the music video only has skinny and athletic young people.

In my opinion music, specially pop music, got horny as (the proverbial) f…

It might depend whether the GP equates horny undertones and horny overtones.

Popular music has always been horny as hell, but used to have more lyrical fig leafs. When Elvis sings about parking where it's nice and dark, it's not to play connect 4 (especially given it didn't exist yet).

It’s that, yeah. But also it was pretty overt too, people just forget because they’re oldies now

- “Hot for Teacher” Van Halen, 1983

- “Love in an Elevator” Aerosmith, 1989

- “Cherry Pie” Warrant, 1990

- “Shook Me All Night Long” AC/DC, 1980

- “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” Meatloaf, 1978

- “I’ll Make Love to You” Boys II Men, 1994

- “Baby Got Back” Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992

- “Black Dog” Led Zeppelin 1971

- “Brown Sugar”, The Rolling Stones, 1971. Off the album “Sticky Fingers” no less

Those are just the ones off the top of my head. But yeah IMO music hasn’t really changed much. People have and continue to love singing and listening to songs about bonin’.

you listed mostly just rock music - IMHO rock music was always more horny than different genre. But these days pop music or even k-pop is more horny if not for the lyrics then for artist how they dress, how they look. Today music is not what you hear in the radio but video (youtube) is the integral part of music

It goes back to blues, and obviously much further back. Probably back to when people first started making music.

"I Didn't Like It the First Time", Ida Lee, 1947 (aka the Spinach Song ;) )

"One Hour Mama", Ida Cox, 1939

"It's Tight Like That", Clara Smith, 1929

And the most explicit of all these, "Shave 'Em Dry", Lucille Bogan, 1935, which makes some modern music look prude in comparison. (originally Ma Rainey in 1924)

HBO certainly traded on some raunchy TV: Californication, Sopranos etc. GoT had raunch and nudity, but overall that trend feels like it peaked and is trailing off too.

It occurs to me that those shows are pre-Netflix. Netflix and the other video streaming platforms could be pushing for more family friendly content in general, and discouraging anything remotely like "porn" on their platform..

GoT is a great example of the evolution of raunch; explicit nudity and sex scenes were HBO's bread and butter for a while, especially obvious in S1 (even episode 1) of GoT.

But as it got successful - and the actors set boundaries - they realized the show didn't actually need it.

If sex scenes and nudity were a crutch to hide bad writing, I'm all for getting rid of it. Of course, you can have both.

The first few seasons also were more closely following the books which are very sexually graphic.

Maybe the movie audiences, particularly the blockbuster theater-going audiences, are skewing older and more conservative/old-fashioned now. So the sexuality there tends to be a lot more repressed (while at the same time needing to be optimized around those highly defined abs, in order to maximize profits).

And the thirsty kids are all playing video games.

I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off.

Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.

The Matrix scene just wasn't necessary, and went on too long. And was intercut with a raunchy-music-video dancing scene. It was a bit odd all round, especially in the generally clinical, straight to the point world of the Matrix movies.

> They're taking their kids to go see movies

That's actually just about what I was thinking though, not really the opposite.

I guess I should have said that it isn't the horny teenagers going to movies on date nights by themselves these days. It is more Mom, Dad and the kids.

I can remember the "zion rave scene" in Reloaded, but I didn't remember they were getting it on at all. Must have just blanked that entirely out of my memory.

I think a lot of other folks elsewhere throughout comments are right when they say more overt sex, rather than anodyne “sexiness”, just doesn’t have much of a place anymore in (western, at least) movies now. Everyone has a device in their pocket that can instantly deliver you whatever kind of sex you care to see.

I read the article and found it trite. The author doesn't seem to be a deep or "dangerous" thinker, as claimed in the by-line.

The US film industry produces circuses on a screen. It has rarely produced sociologically-honest works that merit attention.

It's all Barnum and Bernays.

Missing from the list: manga and anime, which were a very niche genre in 80s USA, and are very horny indeed.

Anime is weird and honestly got less horny when comparing to the 80's. Even the hentai market in particular has been shriveling for a while; the days of full adaptations of eroge like Bible black are long over. But it can still be comparatively more sexual compared to most other medium, especially western medium.

Manga has always been a steady stream, and never really stopped. Maybe the largest publishers have toned it down, but the manga market has always been a wide medium with dozens of different publishers. And The doujin market has only grew over the decades.

It's the censorship of the distributors. Video games are distributed directly, for the most part, and don't have to deal with religious censorship pressure like Hollywood.

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