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Related article: "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny: Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it." Link: https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/ Discussion (674 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
This article is just a bunch of anecdata. Has the proportion of theatrical releases containing sex scenes indeed declined in recent years? What about streaming releases? Neither of these questions is quantitatively answered. The “evidence” that sex scenes have become taboo because they embody the “male gaze” and are therefore problematic comes from some un-cited hypothetical tweet. Assuming this tweet is even real, i…
Increasingly in Hollywood, the creative assets for movies are being produced before the scripts are even written. So e.g. for a movie that they know will have a fight scene, they just go in and capture a bunch of different sequences with different outcomes. Anyway it could be kind of weird to have the same done with sex scenes.
That’s fascinating. Can you share some more information about this process, where filming happens before the script is done? 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 said, HBO shows have lots of sex so I suspect the premise of the article is generally false.
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.
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.
It seems odd that this article did not touch on the role of actors in the situation. There have been a few female actors who have come out to say they felt pressured to act in nude / sex scenes against their will. Because of this actors now have tend to have more opportunity to refuse to do sex scenes if they don't want to. This surely must play a role as well.
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.
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.
The overseas market, specifically China, probably plays a much bigger role in self-censoring cinema than most people are comfortable admitting. Nobody wants good cinema, movies that dig into and challenge the human condition. They want money. In the last 20-30 years, we have seen the strip-mall-ization of the movie theater. Every city has at least one, they all look the same, and drop in at any time and you'll see th…
I believe it's still done for so-called in-flight entertainment.