Gen Z wants less sex in TV and movies
npr.org
npr.org
If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn, I'm sure as hell not going to opt for some scene in a regular movie. Then again, maybe it's for people that refuse to watch porn for one reason or another and this is as close as they get?
This is the true reason why violence is allowed on TV, whereas sex is always problematic and often censored. You can watch violence with just about anybody (kids, parents, etc.) and it doesn't feel awkward.
It's typically made very clear to everyone that violence is wrong, and what you are watching on a movie or series is fictional violence. In other words, you are watching something that no one would like to go through.
Sex is fundamentally different. As it is not only desirable in many senses, but it is also a basic human function, but at the same time it is something extremely intimate, not something you share with any random person.
That’s cultural - our reactions to violence are pretty fundamental, too, with roots deep in our brains. It’s natural to feel empathy for someone being hurt, to appreciate the implications of them being hurt or killed, etc. The difference is that our culture says that’s okay to show children, so most of us are at least partially desensitized during childhood.
Broadly speaking (many exceptions), Americans are fine with young teens watching a movie about a man using kung fu fantasy tactics to bloodlessly shoot his way through a building of bad guys, like John Wick, but don't necessarily feel the same way about something that depicts violence in a more brutal and arguably realistic way, like Saving Private Ryan. Is there a little puff of red CGI mist blood coming out of somebody's chest, or does the movie show one of the 'good guys' with half his skull blown away? These are both hardcore violence in a sense, but most people see a large qualitative difference between the two.
I think it basically comes down to how likely a movie is to give people nightmares, which of course is a function of desensitization. The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.
Incidentally, Saving Private Ryan has a lopsided depiction of violence. The deaths of Americans are shown to be gruesome and agonizing, while the deaths of Germans are mostly shown to be relatively quick and clean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FeyONCtfc I re-watched Saving Private Ryan after watching this video and found it to be very apparent, but it wasn't apparent to me the first time I watched it.
I generally agree with your point but this has changed over time. For example, showing someone getting shot in combat was generally acceptable before torture or maiming since we’re more likely to say that those are never justified. Someone who grew up in a culture with public executions and punishments might have a more situational view based on whether it was “deserved”.
To me, clearly there is a huge difference between tv and in person. I've never even seen a dead person (except in movies).
Usually this has a bad connotation, that's why I interpreted what you said the way I did.
I think you’re on the right track here. In the 90s, teenagers would watch objectively terrible TV and movies for the handful of scenes where someone hot was as close to naked as allowed. Sports Illustrated sold a ton of swimsuit issues to guys who didn’t want to be seen buying Playboy, etc.
Now that anyone looking for that can get unlimited quantities of any type of erotic material they can imagine online, anyone looking for entertainment is going to skip anything which isn’t very good - no more trying to make up for bad writing and concepts by tossing in a gratuitous shower scene or having your heroine inexplicably choosing to fight in a bikini.
The other thing which has been developing for a while, and really ramped up with #MeToo was the realization that a lot of the guys making decisions about what goes into movies were pretty sleazy. It’s not a new observation that there were some pretty screwed up decisions about sexualizing things like rape or other violence, but I think a lot of people decided to stop watching it even if it was in a popular film or show, not to mention some very influential Hollywood types having their careers reconsidered in light of harassment claims, and I’d bet some of that factors into the results of this survey, too.
Exactly. Like the OP said, if I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn. If it's important to the story to know that a couple slept together then you can show them going to bed, starting foreplay, and then fade out and cut back in to after the event. There's obvious ways to show the characters had sex together without actually showing the sex. We know they had sex - move the story along! You can still show a titillating butt shot or boob shot if you're trying to juice up your ratings and still not show the actual sex!
There’s another big misconception here: kink isn’t rape. 50 shades had some criticism but it was generally understood that boundaries were being pushed voluntarily. That’s not perfect - there are a million essays on that - but it’s very different from criminal violence.
What I was referring to was the way rape is portrayed as sexy in a way which doesn’t happen for other acts of violence in mainstream media. It’s become a lazy screenwriting trope complete with the soft lighting and prolonged focus on how attractive the victim’s body is in a way you’d never see for, say, a man getting stabbed even though both of them are having the worst days of their lives.
Family guy did some hilarious puking scenes back in the day by showing it as horrible as it really is. The Hollywood vomit-lite is just embarrassing at this point.
I'm no prude, and I have no problem with porn. But for the most part, I find the mandatory sex scene is a huge distraction from the plot. Why not hint at it, like they used to?
I re-watched Don't Look Back the other night; the sex scene in that movie is fine, because it really is part of the plot. But chucking in a long, sweaty sex scene just because you've cast a pretty actress is stupid. I treat it like an ad-break - I either fast-forward, or I go to make a cup of tea.
Then watch some european movies. Unlike Hollywood, the sex scenes have a meaning in the whole construct. ( Meaning of life by Monthy Python for example ;) )
An example of how suppressed it was a friend told me her first husband (1960's) was a sleazy truck driver that made extra cash on the side transporting 16mm porn movies. Same way other more sleazy truckers transported drugs.
Some stand up comics use something similar. It’s easier to make someone laugh because they’re uncomfortable than it is to make them laugh by being funny, so some comics will be obscene and get their laughs that way.
In the same vein, it’s easier to make a story feel serious by putting in a sex scene than it is to write an engaging plot.
The headline and intro led me to believe this is a dip -- e.g. that young people 5 or 10 or 20 years ago liked the amount of sex, but young people today don't.
But that's not what the survey shows. All it shows is that people aged 13-24 today want less of it.
It may very well be the case that this isn't anything specific to Gen Z at this age, and that this was equally the case of 13-24 year olds 20 and 30 years ago. TV and film has been pretty sexualized for a long time. There is zero evidence in this study to indicate anything new.
Hipsters were despised back in my day, even by hipsters themselves, but in the end I think we all had a lot more fun than Gen Z today. I wouldn't change any of it.
That's an understatement. Any time I start to go down the hate-spiral on some stupid shit I see a gen-zedder doing, I remember how neurotic and miserable they are, and feel sorry for them again.
It also helps to remember this is exactly how adults felt about the things we did in the 80s and 90s :P
I don't hate it, and when it's part of a plot of course it makes sense, but a number of the ones in Game of Thrones I recall were just pointlessly long, sometimes disturbing excuses to get the pearl clutchers riled up and get hate shares on social media. It's tiresome. If your art can't stand on it's own don't make it.
I highly recommend listening to You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth's movie history podcast. Specifically, the most recent two seasons have been about sex in movies in the 80s and 90s. She does a lot to ground changes in depictions of sex in movies in their political and cultural moment. The episodes vary in quality, but the best have been enlightening. I think she's sympathetic to the narrative that "Gen Z is prude" because she's a big fan of nuanced depictions of sex in movies, and sees a decline. And yet, listening to the podcast you can't help but see these trends as somewhat cyclical, which is why I'm not worried.
It's possible it's actually the opposite. They don't note the people surveyed as feeling morally repulsed, just that's it's somewhat awkward. It's possible that a wider acceptance and availability of porn means that less people feel the need for pseudo-porn in their mainstream movies. I'm not Gen-Z (far from it) but I also find these scenes feel out of place and gratuitous in movies unless they add to the story in some way. I can easily find something far more arousing if I want, so why am I forced to deal with some scene that doesn't really add much to the story most times?
If it's not scandalous, not edgy, not meaningful to the story, and not even erotic, why would I want to watch it?
This is like being shocked that people report wanting less shoehorned-in product placement on TV
Or less "shoehorned-in" political propaganda B.S. for that matter. There's entirely too much crap in TV and movies these days that has less than nothing to do with the story that's being told, and is only there to appease one or another political-minded group.
Old slasher movies were calculated to include nipples (usually shortly before something scary happens) and new horror movies are calculated to be inoffensive.
I still prefer horror to be a bit gratuitous though. Psychological horror doesn't really need it, but if there's gore it does seem somewhat incomplete without a little sex thrown in.
After multiple layers of press releases, I think the underlying study (which is more of an infographic) is https://www.scholarsandstorytellers.com/css-teens-and-screen...
I tend to lean towards this whenever I see an [insert generation] [insert social trend] article.
I think it’s great to have open communication but at a certain point it seems like perverted old men getting off to making young actors and actresses obsess over sex and tell other other young people that is the behavior to follow.
Assuming adults are watching in general for the purpose of being titillated by teen sexuality or, worse, that its producers have the ulterior motive of "grooming" teens en masse is cynical as shit.
Part of bad writing is the mis-use or over-use of sex - if the cause of the trend is an increase in bad writing, then it doesn't mean we intrinsically dislike sex scenes now more than before.
Not Encino Man though, that film never existed.
She has literally said that making American adaptations would make it much more sex focused, and ruin the premise of these shows.
It is funny how some of them have a great first season, then they get lots of money following their success, after which they try to emulate Holywood and make pretty bad season 2 (it is "too American" as my wife says - you know the whole plot after first 5 minutes, and there definitely have to be certain obligatory copy/pasted plot themes, like previously mentioned sex scenes etc).
Of course, it's not just Holywood and American dramas that have bad elements. I find many Japanese dramas focus to much on the "internal conflict" in their characters. But overall both Japanese and Korean productions are light years ahead. I don't remember last time I saw a good American drama.
It's like that everywhere to varying degrees. Early on, a bunch of weird Korean films dropped on Netflix (2009ish), and then disappeared for a while. They started trickling back a few years later.
A few years ago, a glut of Korean and Japanese dramas started dropping as their global popularity increased. You are still going to find more Korean and Japanese stuff if you're viewing Netflix in (say) the Philippines, but there's a lot everywhere. A lot of it has to do with licensing, and where they can get licenses to stream.
As an experiment - try streaming Netflix connected to VPN endpoints in different countries. Sometimes you get the same stuff with different names! Example is a Japanese show called in the US, "Atelier". In Japan, it shows up as "Underwear" (lol).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The PG-13 rating was created in response to violence in PG movies (somebody getting their heart ripped out in Temple of Doom), not nudity.
But really this is why guns are only for killing people and why you'd empty the magazine if you do it. You can't rely on crippling someone by shooting their leg like in a video game (or sometimes in the movies).
I don't see "good chance" on my scientific calculator, or wolfram alpha, or any of my math textbooks. Care to enlighten me on its definition?
I have seen hundreds of videos (in the seedy corners of the net) of people being shot, and I can't recall a single one where the victim kept approaching after being fired upon.
No, I don't know how to quantify it, but if you'd like to continue to disagree with me I think you'll have to do the research on it, since you seem to be very engaged with the problem, and I have other things to do.
For example:
>Very few adolescents prefer aspirational content. The majority favor original content over IP-based content. Also, the majority prefer binge releases over weekly releases.
A quick search of the top Youtubers shows that Gen Z in fact loves aspirational content, they just don't like the image that comes into their head when they hear the term.
A quick scan of the box office shows that they also love IP-based content, unless all the viewers of Spiderman, Barbie, Mario, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast X, and The Little Mermaid were over 25 (Hell, even Oppenheimer was technically IP-based).
I believe the binge watching thing though.
I think that says a lot more about what the industry is pushing than it does about what people want to watch.
Elemental and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken immediately come to mind.
Yes, a much more popular IP-based movie.
I understand it's frustrating to accept that the viewing public prefers IP over original movies, but it's just true. Studio movies as audiences expect them (and increasingly TV) are just too big and expensive to be the medium in which we workshop new ideas. You'll often get new ideas from blank-check directors, animation, or indie films, but that's it.
Now, keep in mind, looking back at some of the greatest movies of all time, good movies were always IP-based, it was just less noticeable:
Godfather (book)
Gone With the Wind (book)
Lawrence of Arabia (book)
Wizard of OZ (book)
The Graduate (book)
West Side Story (Musical)
2001 (An expansion of an existing Arthur Clark Story)
I could go on, but you get the point.
In addition, the number of blatant rape scenes are just so depressing.
Source: https://www.scholarsandstorytellers.com/css-teens-and-screen...
Or otherwise good novels with a solitary graphic sex scene, where the author’s talents are clearly not in writing smut. Sometimes just hinting at it is enough and doesn’t jar you out of the story.
Agreed. A good example of this is the sex scene in To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Paolini. The whole scene is maybe one or two sentences.
(And, yes, plenty of the films released with an NC-17 MPAA rating and not through porn channels with no MPAA rating have full frontal male nudity.)
Definitely not less than was allowed in movies in the 1980s; especially on a same-rating basis, where the standards have generally gotten narrower, not looser.
Older generations had a hard time getting porn, so sex sold in stories, but with porn and erotica wildly available, a good, interesting story is much more compelling.
is literally just gratuitous clickbait.
May have been titillating before PornHub existed, but now it's just a hassle to watch.
Go watch "Barbarella" and "Flesh Gordon" and tell me there's a less cringe, more worthy depiction of sex in a video form made since then.
It always been morality play crap. the fevered imaginings of what personal intimacy should be, sourced from celibates, perverts, and anybody besides normal people with normal doubts.
I also believe sex scenes could be really great at showing subtle personality traits or relationship between characters, a good example of "show, don't tell". But it's awfully under-exploited and often ends up as a cheap filler...
While I don't think it was material for children given some of the topics it dealt with, it was definitely different from typical Hollywood stuff.
I don't know if this is still the case with Dr. Who, and I could be mistaken, but I greatly appreciated that.
One particular example, I think of the many faults of the hobbit series, one of the worst was the shoehorned in love triangle. It's bad writing.
But I also know a bunch of older folks who are insistent that it was an amazing romance. I’m not clear when and how this perspective changed.
I can’t think of a single cinematic romance that I really cared about (although I’m sure there are a few examples?). But I also hate the annoying hypervirgins you get in stuff like anime where it’s just kind of annoying that characters can’t just release their palpable and constant sexual tension and start acting like someone who is normal and confident.
At the end of the, I feel like anyone in film whose whole character thing is trying to figure out love ends up being a really annoying and unrealistic character.
You should really see Hot Shots. It has one of the best sex scenes i have ever seen.
Representation is great but now we're over-representing and alienating the audience.
Plus it feels so hacky.
And I watched them. Maybe you didn't?
Edit: Heck, "I Love Lucy" aired in the early 1950s and the show's entire plot was about an interracial marriage. And that show only started two years after commercial TV in most homes was even a thing. It was the very first sitcom to be a #1 rated show.
The "bad times" scenario you're depicting is largely a fiction. What was that Jennifer Lawrence quote? “I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,”
What dude didn't want to kick ass like Ripley in aliens.
As the age old saying goes...
She protec, she attack,.but most important of all she uses large mechanised exoskeleton to fight aliens.
Is that clear? She's a professional actress; if she were reading a line written by some PR hack that she didn't really believe was true, how can you be sure you could tell?
Maybe she believed it, or maybe she was told to say this sort of thing to promote the movie. Since she's a professional actress, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She probably wasn't totally ignorant of her own industry.
My own experiences in a mixed family looks a lot closer to how the topic was discussed back then then it's portrayed on TV now.
Now it's just a thing that happens and doesn't stand out as rare or controversial or serious/groundbreaking, (to most) which again is an improvement.
I know very few people of mixed background where that isn't a source of family strife somewhere. I am not arguing that anyone should be against it but a) most people don't want their children to suffer, b) mixed children are still unfortunately almost guaranteed to encounter strife in their lives from their background, and c) those mixed children deserve the conversation in public rather than have their lives portrayed on TV as if they should be perfect when they aren't.
Maybe under makeup and the right lighting. Many pictures show not.
I don't know what words people used then. And the public accepted it more than executives feared. But they didn't see him as white like her.
[1] https://theplotthickens.tcm.com/content/uploads/2021/11/TPT0...
It's not hard for people to begin noticing how unrealistic many stories end up becoming. It's shoddy writing and story-telling and the artificial nature takes you out of the world that's been created.
> A Milestone: All Of The Walking Dead's Relationships Are Now Interracial Or LGBT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/11/14/a-milesto...
That was a large part of the appeal of the genre. You're talking about a movie released a decade and a half after fans had been ogling Emma Peel.
A sex scene may be a welcome addition if you are watching it with a date or partner, and less welcome if you watch it yourself or with family.
Love interests in plots that revolve entirely around sex are mostly annoying in general. Most times, they feel like a crutch to lean on when there's really nothing there.
(my beefs: they never ever EEEEEEVER show the cleanup afterwards, and nobody is gonna do it in a supply closet, and even if they somehow did, the chances of always finding the _perfect_ spot to do it in are low, while the chances of you getting fired on the spot are unbelievably high)
I don't know what the full study says, just what is in this article. It bothers me a little bit that the headline is that Gen Z wants less sex, but the supporting evidence just says they want more platonic and asexual relationships on screen. The two are not mutual exclusive.
Whenever my wife and I start watching a new show, if it's riddled with sex scenes beyond the first couple of episodes, we stop watching and find something else. In 99.9% of cases, the sex scenes are useless filler, signaling lack of creativity. I don't particularly mind if they build up characters towards the beginning of a sex scene, but once they initiate it, maybe show the first few seconds then please move on. I don't need to see 2+ minutes of people fucking or having wild orgies.
I'm gonna be 70 before we get free love again :(
I wish more people would be willing to challenge this part of themselves. It really opens up entirely new possibilities for sex and love. Plus, the emotional development that it forces on you is a huge green flag for dating in general.
Maybe I am too satisfied with my partner. The thought of being single, having to date again, and handle people and their insecurities once more is tiresome to day the least.
Between my immediate family and changes in how the general population has begun to view excessive sex/cursing/violence/etc. I’ve never really experienced a current era of, well, excessiveness.
I love 70s movies for that reason. Utterly unrestrained. It’s not inherently better or worse. But I’ve never experienced a less-prude era while alive.
To be clear. I don’t think wanting less sex is inherently prude though. Sometimes it’s a cheap way to “improve” writing without actually paying for talent.
I am NOT saying that R-rated movies should be more pornographic or more like pornography. I agree that sex can be a cheap filler for more substantial writing. But humans can be very sexual creatures and the double standard we impose on ourselves in the name of traditional, "family" values, needs to die.
I mean how the fuck did these families get made in the first place? It certainly wasn't from some stork.
This is especially true given declining birth rates across the first world...
Those type of scenes don't further the plot, but rather push out the engagement of the film from a viewers perspective.
They weren't using rubbers man, having kids itself is an act of resistance. In Zion.
I don't think you really vibed with the Matrix if you just thought it was some kung-fu, cypherpunk fever dream. It's about the war between humans and machines, and in that context, the sex scene was necesssary.
You can put romance, drama, and even sex in your TV show but please just get somewhere with it. If I start getting CW flash/arrow vibes I am turning it off. I can just read abandoned web serials for that if it's what I want.
Now it seems like they are doing everything they can to show of as much nudity as possible, even when it makes no sense and starts to break my suspension of disbelief.
Exactly. It is disgusting.
We got sick of it and simply use VidAngel to filter it out, some of the best tech that's come out to solve this issue. Fully configurable with filtering of both audio and closed captions.