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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a manufactured moral panic. I don't think we're entering a new age of prudery. Even if the survey is reflective of a broader change, taste in media ebbs and flows.

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.

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> I don't think we're entering a new age of prudery.

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?

Exactly. Sex on TV used to be edgy and scandalous, but now it's just banal.

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

I would pretty much remove any sex that doesn’t drive the story in some way and keep it short. You are correct that sex doesn’t hit like it used to hit. I would argue the same for violence and special effects. We’ve seen it all and we’ve seen a lot of it. What we haven’t seen a lot of in some time is good story telling that doesn’t rely on gimmicks.

> "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.

The good side of this is that I can go fetch another drink while they get busy.

It's not necessarily easy to draw an objective line between gratuitous and not. Particularly in the case of slasher horror movies; the nudity felt gratuitous, a cheap way to sell tickets that would make up for other production flaws. But such gratuitous nudity became a defining characteristic of that genre, and so in that sense it wasn't actually gratuitous. Modern horror movies seem to be more sexless now, and IMHO feel incomplete because of it. When it becomes apparent that a movie thinks no amount of explicit gore is too much but a nipple would go too far, it breaks my immersion by making me aware that the film was, in some sense, calculated to be inoffensive.

Horror at least had an excuse. Sex was basically used to prime people for excitement. It's a cheap trick to hijack our physiology and increase tension so movies didn't have to work as hard to be actually frightening.

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.

I don’t think people mind the sex because of moral. What is bothering me is that I feel they use sex as a filler. To me it is one of the indicators that the story is probably lacking. Sort of like with the old Deathstalker movies where sex was used to try to distract you from how bad the movie was. People get that they are being distracted and react against it.

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