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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way, and I'm in my mid-40's. I always end up wondering why am I watching this stylized sexual encounter (which doesn't match almost anyone's experience almost any time) and often with people I don't really want to watch it with (teenage and adult children). If some light foreplay shows something about the characters, that's fine, or if something actually happened during the act that was important, that's also fine, but otherwise it's just gratuitous and annoying.

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?

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> 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.

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.

> Now that anyone looking for that can get unlimited quantities of any type of erotic material they can imagine online

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!

Or, maybe you do show it because there’s a scene where they’re also talking through something important and that’s a normal human interaction which is in character, but that’d be like 5% of what we see now. There is a certain percentage of people who don’t want to ever see sex in movies but I think that’s a lot smaller than the group of people who like it where it fits naturally into a well-written story but are turned off when it feels like a contractual obligation.

If it fits naturally into a well-written story, then sure. If it's just an obligatory sex scene then no. I know a good love scene when I see one! :)

It wasn't guys who made fifty shades of grey the only modern franchise to compete in sales numbers with Harry Potter, so I don't buy the idea that men were those who sexualized things like rape and violence.

Slow down, I wasn’t saying all guys but referring specifically to a handful of people like Weinstein. There’s always been back and forth about sex in movies but a lot of people reconsidered how much certain things bothered them after learning that actresses were only doing them under duress or that the same guys making decisions about what was included and dismissing criticism as prudery were also harassers or rapists.

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.

> and often with people I don't really want to watch it with (teenage and adult children)

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.

You can watch it with anyone who has been desensitized. That’s a cultural choice: we train our kids to be weird about sex but okay with hardcore violence.

Are you sure it is a cultural choice? Do you know of any cultures where it is reversed?

The religious community I grew up in treated them both the same, to the point that kids would be teased in school for reacting to movie violence because they were reacting appropriately to an image of someone being killed or mutilated.

Nothing to do with being disensitized. Most people can handle very violent movies while they would be extremely disturbed to see the same events in real life.

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.

> 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.

There's violence, and then there's violence.

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.

> The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.

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”.

Define "desensitized". I watched plenty of movies that are violent, the only ones that get me are the ones about torture (makes me angry). However if I see some blood or my wife cuts with a knife, I have to lay down a few minutes to avoid fainting.

To me, clearly there is a huge difference between tv and in person. I've never even seen a dead person (except in movies).

That’s basically what I’m referring to. Take a small child and show them the same violent movie scene, and they’ll scream and perhaps have nightmares. Over time we learn that some things are not real and most of us get over that but my point was that this is learned, not innate.

So they are desensitized to the TV, I see what you mean now.

Usually this has a bad connotation, that's why I interpreted what you said the way I did.

Yeah, I was just trying to be pretty literal: you no longer get a charged reaction from it.

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