36 ms·

Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

• david927 6y ago
  I think social media has made us such narcissists that we demand the beauty as an ideal and eschew the vulnerability of sex.
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    I wonder if the proliferation of easily accessible porn on the internet may also be a factor. People literally have access to porn 24/7 in their pocket if they have a phone.
    • throwawaysea 6y ago
      I don't think porn fulfills the same niche. Movies have room for greater story telling, character development, and a realism that the viewer can connect with or feel emotions from. My armchair take is that the erasure of sexuality is most tied to the fear of appealing to modern audiences who are easily outraged at anything that offends them. And so the movies all tend towards a boring beige, a formulaic re-skinning of the movies that came before them. The MCU is a great example of this.
• sudosteph 6y ago
  This topic reminds me of that "The Gang Hits the Slopes" episode of Always Sunny. That episode sort of hits on the idea that it's easy to think that movies back then were more "fun", but often it's just the same kind of pervy joke over and over. I could see how writers may have wanted to avoid having "horniness" as a motivator in scripts if it risked them getting lumped in with low-effort comedies.
• pbnjay 6y ago
  I think the US ratings' agencies have more to do with it than some sort of cultural shift (and these ratings are more likely driven by boomer sensibilities of "saving the kids"). European movies and TV are clearly less chaste but started from nearly the same places.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fullshark 6y ago
  It's because internet porn has compartmentalized horniness and segregated it from mainstream pop culture.
• chovybizzass 6y ago
  some of us are ugly and horny though maybe not as many
  • Avshalom 6y ago
    it's actually pretty much pro-ugly&horny if it's not loading for you.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Anyone who doesn't realize how many ugly+horny people are out there definitely did not participate in marching band in high school.
  • fao_ 6y ago
    It's media critique, it's not saying that everyone in the world is beautiful and unaroused, just that the way the world has changed has led to media showing beautiful people that aren't horny, and how that affects our view of the world (and vice versa)
• vermilingua 6y ago
  Hugged: https://web.archive.org/web/20210307172703/https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210307172703/https://bloodknif...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jluxenberg 6y ago
  Site is down now; here's a working link courtesy of the Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210215153656/https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210215153656/https://bloodknif...
• imwillofficial 6y ago
  This was a bizarre read. I came in with a negative view and left entertained. An interesting diversion for sure.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    Going one step further I looked up the author and intend to dive into more of her writing. It hasn't happened to be in quite a while.
• fao_ 6y ago
  I expected a reddit-style article, but this was actually some good media critique
• throwaway77767 6y ago
  > This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure. This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?
  • polishdude20 6y ago
    Become financially independent is probably the best you can do. That'll cover not affording to go out and having to live with parents or roommates.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      I don't think thats the core issue , sex is down even among school going teenagers
      • polishdude20 6y ago
        I think teenagers are observing what's going on in their old young adult counterparts.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    Live your life and turn off the bullshit. Otherwise, wait for it to burn out. Social media is a bubble, and the milk that helps create the metoo froth. We’ll sacrifice bad guys to the volcano gods for awhile, then the bubble will pop, the trend will fade and women (in the media) will be thirsting for men who aren’t wusses.
  • throway98752343 6y ago
• planet-and-halo 6y ago
  Currently reading The Master and His Emissary and can't help but feel this is a related problem. In short, more and more of life is being packaged into lifeless utilitarian abstractions, and less and less are we connected to spontaneous, intuitive, and humanistic facets of life.
• lr4444lr 6y ago
  Cute article, but may I.offer a simple alternative? Movie makers want to appeal to viewership in homes where there are children, and younger audiences in general. You can't show much nudity or direct sexual themes to minors. That of course doesn't explain why the house in Poltergeist was more normal looking, but that point isn't really bolstered by too much else.
  • astrea 6y ago
    And honestly, the sex scenes in (some) movies just felt contrived or forced.
  • da39a3ee 6y ago
    How does this explain the historical trends that are the subject of the article? Are you saying that fewer children were trying to watch TV in the 90s?
    • viraptor 6y ago
      It's a drift over time. Also 90s is just the beginning of tv ratings. TV-PG was founded in late 90s and not fully enforced / known at the beginning. The change happened over many years since the time we could get ratings only from box office numbers and the review feedback took months.
• EdwardDiego 6y ago
  I think this is why British crime dramas / police procedurals seem to feel more real (to me, raised in a post-colonial country) - very few people look like temporarily financially embarrassed models slumming it as detectives.
  • jinushaun 6y ago
    Yes! Although after binging watching 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter. Consequently, the plot lines got a lot more “conventional” (read: American).
    • herbstein 6y ago
      Completely off-topic: I'm actually doing something similar -- watching all of Midsomer Murders. I absolutely love the way John Nettles' Barnaby (haven't seen any with the new actor) is righteous and upstanding without becoming preachy. In particular S01E03 where his partner's homophobia is shut down. The fact that most of the horrible people are high-brow also has a nice feel to it -- very Columbo-esque.
    • KineticLensman 6y ago
      > we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter Not always. (mild spoiler) The resident pathologist Dr Fleur Perkins who appears in series 20 is played by seventy year old Annette Badland, [0] who is much sterner than her predecessor (a much younger Manjinder Virk [1]). That said, Midsomer Murders does now have a different demographic than the earlier series, which typically involved older, white eccentrics living in quaint English villages, and caricatured a rural society that is now long gone. The cast is now more likely to include Black and Asian characters in various roles as good guys, villains, innocents, suspects and guilty parties. The current Mrs Barnaby is a 50-year old woman, also a stronger character than her predecessor, who was also in her 50s when she first appeared in the series. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Badland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Badland [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjinder_Virk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjinder_Virk
  • wj 6y ago
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > Bodybuilders experience this as they go on crash diets to quickly cut fat so that their muscles will show during competitions; though they look like physically perfect specimens of manhood, they don’t dream of women, but of cheeseburgers and fries. Many eating disorder patients lose their sex drive completely and even stop menstruating. I had to laugh at this. I went on a meal replacement drink (Aussielent) for a while for all meals, and I vividly remember for the first time in my life, I dreamt of eating a juicy hamburger. It was like some oasis in a desert, and that burger was all I thought about the next day
• brushfoot 6y ago
  There are interesting ideas here. Personally, I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. I think a more likely possibility is that movies started specializing. In the decades before the Internet, cinema was one place where the average person who didn't buy dirty magazines could glimpse more skin than in everyday life. Then the Internet came along. Suddenly pornography was in everyone's home. Soon it was in everyone's pocket. Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private. The one-size-fits-all portrayals in movies became gauche by comparison. And unnecessary. The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food, so it suddenly seemed old-fashioned for the cinema to keep peddling stale bread. Probably this also contributed to the me-too movement and the surrounding fallout over the sexualization of women in spaces where sexuality was now seen as being inappropriate. For example, the controversy over grid girls in racing. A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public.
  • mymythisisthis 6y ago
    Sadly I feel that Hollywood movies are made for 12 year old boys. Parents sent their kids to the movies (before the pandemic), it was a form of independence. One more granted to boys than to girls, unfortunately. Other demographics tend to spend their time/money elsewhere. Girls mature quicker and quickly moved on to other interests than hanging around the movie theatre part of the mall. In the 1980s parents still tagged along, so the movie couldn't be too comical...and, the kids wouldn't get the mature part anyway.
  • Avshalom 6y ago
    I dunno, everything being PG-13 feels like the opposite of specializing. They're trying to get everyone into the theater.
    • Robotbeat 6y ago
      ...including the puritans, which means violence is okay but sex is a dealbreaker.
      • 6y ago
• Robotbeat 6y ago
  Teen birth rate is currently less than a fifth what it was in its peak in the 1950s baby boom. (And has reduced about 20% relative to the figure here) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/why-is-the-... And the overall fertility rate in 2020 was 1.779 births per woman as of 2020 in the US. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...
  • dysrend 6y ago
    What's your point?
    • Robotbeat 6y ago
      I'm not sure, frankly, but I think there's a connection. A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate. When the pressures of urbanization and modern life mean few people choose to have children while the trends in the article and in many of these comments show that people are less likely to accidentally/serendipitously become pregnant as well combine to somewhat drastically reduce the birthrate.
      • retrac 6y ago
        Birth rates plummeted through the 1960s and 1970s across the Western world, while the gonorrhea rates skyrocketed, in a period specifically noted for its sexual forwardness.
        • Robotbeat 6y ago
          Birthrates plummeted in the 1960s but were still vastly higher than today. Birthrates peaked in the 1950s. Current birthrates are equal to the nadir of birthrates in 1980, but they appear to still be falling (but we shall see!).
      • mensetmanusman 6y ago
• lobstrosity420 6y ago
  I think the lack of sex in Hollywood can be traced at least in part to the Chinese market. There's a lot of money in it and studios are more than happy to comply with CCP guidelines to get a share of that pie.
  • kpmcc 6y ago
    Came here to say this. Big budget Hollywood movies have to be internationally viable nowadays and that means conforming to the least common denominator of the target audiences. The result is movies that are palatable to the US and China and are utterly vacuous garbage.
    • mymythisisthis 6y ago
      Adults also don't tend to go to movies, so movies are made for kids. I wonder if Hollywood executives sit around the conference table wondering if a kid that doesn't speak English, doesn't live in N. America, will get the movie.
  • Clewza313 6y ago
    And sadly the next/upcoming big market, India, isn't any better than China when it comes to censorship.
    • notsureaboutpg 6y ago
      I'm actually okay with this. I only watch movies with my family and I'm sick of having to pass up on actually interesting movies because they're excessively vulgar. If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me, I would.
      • aksss 6y ago
        Yeah, I actually prefer a minimal sex scene (conveying the idea that it happened) to the explicit and lengthy stuff in your average HBO mini-series. Even less tolerant of sexual violence and torture. When I think of how many fake rapes I’ve witnessed/mentally onboarded via cinema/tv it makes me throw up a bit.
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  > and they still haven’t forgiven Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the batsuit Haha. Brilliant article.
• dysrend 6y ago
  It's interesting, but pretty easily explained, right? Disney. What if you excise their canon from all the points made? I don't know the answer to that, honestly I don't watch movies. I'd be willing to bet their demographic capture strategy weighed children more highly than adults. That's easy memorabilia sales, tickets, dvd's, subscriptions, indoctrination, which will later yield nostalgia. And if you remove child-oriented or family films, the latter of which may even contain sexually suggestive content, from my recent movie/tv experiences there's still a lot of sex. I suppose if you weigh popularity there's an argument to be made. But does sex sell movies when you can watch an infinity of hardcore pornography with not only full blown nudity, but any variety of fantasy? The really strange part, which seemed to me to be largely overlooked, is the ratio of violence to sex. The US in particular seems possessed by an interesting duality. One being that depictions of extreme violence are fine, but full frontal nudity is somehow verboten. And then another interesting point, the magnitude of which I'm not wholly aware of, is that we're almost certainly the porn capitol. Not in production alone, but in consumption as well, but I'm speculating on the basis of anecdotes. What does it mean?
• milchek 6y ago
  This was a fun read, especially as someone who grew up with those 80s and 90s movies. That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet. Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers. Nowadays, that's basically the starting point; what we can we sell outside of the movie? how can we milk the franchise for as much as possible? And that's where a lot of the sex appeal is lost. Marvel movies can't be as raunchy as a result. Another topic that the author touched on was the way the ideal aesthetic has changed in not just our bodies but where we live or what we do in our spare time. I agree that more and more we are optimising for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason. Anyway, it's a complex and interesting topic and I'd love to read more about this perhaps from even further back (50s or 60s) if anyone has something similar to this post?
  • spc476 6y ago
    Having an R-rating didn't mean a lack of toys. "Alien" came out in 1979 to an R-rating. Yet a friend at the time (we were both 10) received a 12" (30cm) xenomorph action figure for Christmas.
    • sedatk 6y ago
      Similarly, Deadpool figures galore.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • dopidop 6y ago
      Correct. But a movie about incest, rape or pedophilia would probably not quality. « Oh you got a les cousins dangereux dolls honey. So cute »
• trhway 6y ago
  >Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. The violence like street fights is also down. The way of progress. Civilization naturally tames the primary instincts by directly dampening them (observed decrease of testosterone) while simultaneously providing ample channels for redirection and sublimation.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This is absurd, there are societues with more sex and less violence
• sircastor 6y ago
  I feel compelled to make the very-adjacent-to-the-article statement that "Starship Troopers" is not an adaptation of the novel, but at best a vacuum-forming of another script into the space of Starship Troopers. IIRC, the original script was called something like "Bug Hunt at Outpost 9" and someone at the studio said "Hey, we can get the rights to Starship Troopers and this thing will sell better."
• hirundo 6y ago
  Is this a side effect of normalizing porn, that sexuality is more effectively partitioned? I once had a debate in an online forum about legalizing prostitution, and most participants were supportive of it. Then I asked the same group, what about legalizing partial prostitution, like a receptionist that also has sex with the boss as part of the job description. The participants all immediately switched to revulsion at the idea and none would support it. So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? I don't think it is. But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more tolerable. The same pressure seems to be bifurcating entertainment.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    > But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more acceptable. Does it? You asked this on an online forum, not a national survey. I don't think our culture has a majority view on the nuance of prostitution. The most engagement I'd expect on this topic is from people who feel strongly that it shouldn't exist at all.
    • vixen99 6y ago
      On the other hand there are people who are all for it provided the prostitutes are not their own daughters.
  • Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    I think because prostitution is considered “dirty work”, must like many other dirty professions. Receptionism is “clean work”, consequently a receptionist cannot be forced to lower himself to dirty work. — this would apply to working with human waste or various medical work as much as prostitution, I would gander. A receptionist can be required by contract to serve drinks, play the piano, and various other things that a receptionist does not ordinarily do, but weeding through garbage, performing sex acts, or changing diapers, — that is off limits.
  • joe_the_user 6y ago
    So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? Gotta say that often questions like this are often as just taken as ways to win rhetorical points and not thought about seriously by those who ask them. But there's actually a good answer. Yes, sex work is extremely exploitative in the sense that you selling a "big piece" of yourself. Which doesn't mean it should be illegal but it should segregated. Why? Other kinds of work exists that extremely exploitative - dangerous, physical exhausting, possibly-humiliating and damaging. Those should be segregated also and usually are. But let's an experiment: Receptionist + some danger deep diving Receptionist + some heavy underground construction Receptionist + some lion tamer work Dangerous heavy construction for part off your rent The reason all those are a problem is because they take a lot out of a person and if you pair them with receptionist, you'll get someone who is paid as a receptionist but often doing these things. Which screws both ordinary receptionists and people paid more to do the highly exploitative labor.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content : John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always? None of those were major studio action blockbusters (Terminator, one might mistake for that because of the resulting franchise, but it was an indie film that hit it big; all the rest are out-of-genre.) So, if those are really your comparisons, the problem may be that you are comparing fundamentally different kinds of movies. The description of “even when they have sex no one is horny” seems to be pretty typical, over a long time window, of action blockbusters. Horniness is big in comedy, romance, and erotic subgenres of other genres, but it's not big in action (though non-blockbusters might include it because they tend to have more freedom to depart from genre rules.)
• WalterBright 6y ago
  I've been watching some pre-code (before 1934) movies lately. The frank enjoyment of being human in those movies is quite refreshing. One interesting thing about them is even the beautiful stars often have bad teeth :-) Dentistry in those days wasn't very good.
  • miserablegit 6y ago
    No need to go to 1934 for that, just look at David Bowie. His teeth were crooked until he got them fixed in his 50s (and supposedly ruined his vocal signature). Or even more recently, Hugh Grant's teeth were pretty bad in 4 Weddings... and Notting Hill.
  • jimbokun 6y ago
    Just happened to watch The Front page tonight which was made in 1931. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/ The innuendo is pretty strong and the characters are mostly terrible people and the plot pretty dark. But also very witty, fast paced, and funny. Some really interesting shots, too, with moving and panning cameras, or things happening in both foreground and background.
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Maybe it’s just me, but I roll my eyes at anything sexual in TV and movies. They’re usually completely unnecessary to the storyline, and almost feels like a quota (sex scene, check). Even The Simpsons throws in unnecessary sexual plots, and every time I see them, I can’t understand why they added it in.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dysrend 6y ago
    It's a critical element of the human experience. But I agree the hamfisted non-dynamic insertion of sex is tasteless. Of course sex isn't necessarily a rational behavior all things considered, so spontaneity and hamfisting is almost vaguely appropriate by that virtue.
  • magicalhippo 6y ago
    Yeah been feeling the same lately. That "obligatory" topless shower scene, man, just drop it. If I want to see tits I know where to go. Showing a couple bonding is fine, but it adds nothing knowing they did it doggy style. Nudity is fine if it adds something. But too much feels like a checkbox being ticked off. Most recently I recall being really pleased watching Greenland that they didn't have one of those typical scenes. I was so expecting it, and it was so refreshing that it wasn't included.
• WalterBright 6y ago
  I keep up with the diet and fitness regimen not because of the hollywood ideal body, which I gave up on decades ago, but because I'm entering the years when cognitive decline starts. Diet and fitness are crucial to staving that off.
• mrleinad 6y ago
  Reminded me of a line in American Beauty, when the two gay neighbours are jogging, and Lester joins them and asks them for tips to get in shape[1]: - Neighbour: "Do you want to just lose weight, or do you want to have increased strength and flexibility as well?" - Lester: "I want to look good naked" [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTg7F59WfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTg7F59WfE
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  Tiny point: "It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction." I'm 6' and I've weighted 135-145 pounds for my entire adult life and I'm 50+. Being a guy, I never restricted my calorie intake. I'd expect there are women with a similar metabolism. Which isn't to say that a lot of skinny celebrities aren't dieting like mad to get this look. But probably some percentage aren't and the rest hate them. Human physiology is weird. Also, and, despite my mythical natural skinny, no one has put me in movies, darn it.
  • m463 6y ago
    I think she's talking about 6' 205 pro baseball player physique. The kind of person that looks "normal" in a movie but if you met them IRL they are extremely fit with very little fat and perfect definition. (I'm not putting you down)
    • joe_the_user 6y ago
      She means the average weight, all-muscle physique for men and she means more or less my physique for women. My only serious argument is that some women no doubt have the barely-underweight-for-size physique without dieting.
  • Balgair 6y ago
    > no one has put me in movies, no one has put me in movies, yet. Julia Child didn't become Julia Child until she was ~60.
  • goblin89 6y ago
    I’m not a celebrity, but I can’t sustainably gain weight. I don’t eat much (or at all) less compared to others who have larger bodies. I know this isn’t limited to male population, too. My sister has a similar body type and never had to restrict her caloric intake for this[0] (I just asked to be sure). It would appear that the article briefly engaged in overgeneralization and propagation of the “you can’t be skinny unless you under-eat” myth. [0] I’m sure it’s somewhat less of a problem for her than for me, as the weight gain issue applies to muscle mass as well and that stereotypically matters more for males. As a downside that affects us both, though, we sometimes experience an issue where inadvertently not eating enough—and this would still be more than a person on a diet might eat—can result in very unpleasant states with shakes and headache (probably low blood sugar or something like that).
• dqpb 6y ago
  It’s so strange and depressing that American society glorifies violence and villainizes sex.
  • mymythisisthis 6y ago
    I find that films from the 1950s had more realistic violence. People remembered the war. Even with a small revolver, when someone got shot, they fell down. A few decades latter you get to something like Rambo, with bullets flying, but none hit him.
• koolhaas 6y ago
  Was really glad to see 9/11 mentioned in the article in relation to the American male body entering its militaristic phase. It validates an armchair theory I've had related to the correlation between media coverage / dramatization of Special Forces operations in the early to mid 00's and the general trend of American dudes getting very ripped and growing beards. At some point around 2005-2008, I just started noticing every guy around me was lifting weights like they were going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan, and if you could grow a decent beard, you did. And then the ripped look was kinda table stakes. Everyone had to mirror that alpha male SEAL physique and eventually people forgot why, and it became a self reinforcing cycle for the next 10-15 years. The article makes a great point about the softer bodies of sex symbols in the 80s and 90s. That's rare to see now. It is definitely still a thing of course, just look at start up people. Everyone in a leadership position is bulging out of their clothes.
  • dannyw 6y ago
    At least it's healthy and linked with great health outcomes, so maybe it's a good thing :)
    • aksss 6y ago
      We’ll know if it’s more than a fad if we ever elect someone to President with facial hair again. Hasn’t been a thing since Teddy Roosevelt, right? Hitler and Stalin absolutely murdered the mustache brand (along with millions of people).
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > And then the ripped look was kinda table stakes. Everyone had to mirror that alpha male SEAL physique and eventually people forgot why, and it became a self reinforcing cycle for the next 10-15 years. You might be in a bubble. Outside of a few US cities and outdoorsy areas, when I look around, almost nobody looks like they are going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-american-obesity-rates-2013-10 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-american-obesity-rate... And physical fitness shows you have the time, money, and discipline to take care of yourself, and it can't easily be faked, so it serves as a pretty good signal of those traits. I'm not surprised leaders would want to differentiate themselves using it, especially when you're trying to stand out in a crowd of people who have time and money, since discipline is the rare trait. It's also objectively healthy to lift weights for bone density and strength, among numerous other advantages, especially in our sedentary lifestyles. And the standard abdominal fat/beer belly is incredibly damaging to one's health, so if your goal is to stay healthy through your 60s to 80s, I welcome being "fit" as a fad.
• scythe 6y ago
  There's something I expected the author to say that never came: in order to have sex, first you must choose how to have sex. If a movie has a sex scene, it expresses an opinion about sex: how to have sex, why to have sex, when to have sex, and what kind of person would have sex like that. But opinions are dangerous: people might get mad at you if you have an opinion, but nobody can get mad at you if you don't.
• stolenmerch 6y ago
  I wonder if the rise of the Chinese movie market and U.S. studios catering to it has any bearing. Obviously they can and do create a foreign edit, but it might be possible the economic incentives to just create a "cleaner" movie to begin with is a factor here.
• drummer 6y ago
  I feel like this article pretended like the excellent love, romance and sex scenes in the first Deadpool movie weren't there.
• DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  Interesting essay. As a fan of cinema, I've noticed that there is a clinical deadness lately when it comes to representing real people. I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling. Over the last decade or two, I stopped watching broadcast commercial TV in the U.S. I began to realize that the choice of dramas and advertisers told me a lot more about what the creators thought of their audience and not so much about life and human relations. Cinema has gone to that same place. Now, a common refrain about a classic movie from the past is "They could never make something like that today", and people who say that aren't referring to easy problems with material like racism. It's not the content. The quality has drastically changed. I used to leave a good movie wondering about my own life and the choices I might make. For a really good flick, I could dwell on the issues involved for weeks. Now I leave saying "Wow! Wasn't that really cool?!?" and I've forgotten anything important or meaningful by the time I've gotten to the (metaphorical) parking lot. There are little flashes. Occasionally big name stars and producers will create a one-of drama that really says something about the human condition. Those movies are getting fewer and the time between them grows. Streaming TV promised a new Golden Age for long-format serial drama. But the glorious days of a thousand Sopranos are not materializing. Instead it's looking a lot like reversion to the mean. There is a dead, empty, data-driven blandness to modern entertainment. Not pleasant to end up here when we started off with such promise.
  • Robotbeat 6y ago
    Can you give examples of really good films of the past/recent past?
    • hunter-gatherer 6y ago
      Not OP, but I just recently watched Dances with Wolves a week or so ago and had almost an identical thought to what OP posted. I have some modern favorites of course, but it seems like I enjoy my modern favorites because it is a "mental tease". They don't really illicit emotional connections though. However, it is totally possible I'm just watching the wrong movies. Some modern favorites are the new Blade Runner, Ex Machina.... there is a big list. There are of course exceptions. I also recently watched 1917 and I thought that was one of the best films I'd ever seen. In addition to being an action film it definitely felt emotional.
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• golemiprague 6y ago
  If anything it is exactly the opposite, when people fought proper modern wars the body shape didn't matter, it was all about use of weapons, aerobics and carrying some weight on your back, but how the body looks didn't matter in world war one or two. It is is the feminising of males and feminism in general which transformed healthy sexuality to be a sin, unless it is gay sex. Who are the most into body aesthetics and shaping their body? gay men, not real war fighters. It is pretty obvious that Hollywood represent current gay culture where sexuality is still allowed but there is no place for hetro sexuality in the new world we live in.
• croes 6y ago
  Her take on the Starship troopers shower scene seems to be an american point of view. Nudity in an unisex shower isn't about flirting and sex for a european. Paul Verhoeven was naked too while filming it, because the actors felt uncomfortable at first.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    Europe is a very diverse continent, I kind of doubt we can generalize whether the modal European would associate a unisex shower scene with flirting and sexiness.
    • tauist 6y ago
      I find that statement about Europeans hilarious. I am in Italy and here within a few kilometers you can find families who see total nudity at home as perfectly normal and families in which the daughter must not walk around the house in her pajamas because her brother could see her.
  • slibhb 6y ago
    Robocop also has a scene with male and female cops in a locker room together. I always thought those scenes were meant to shock American audiences and therefore make it clear that the cultures we're seeing are futuristic (if only slightly).
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    I'm not american (Nor european) but I would still be extremely uncomfortable in an all-male shower let alone a unisex shower. I'm curious what you think the reasons that nudity is not as big of a deal to Europeans are.
    • minxomat 6y ago
      I mean for one, a nude shower is the standard at pretty much all pools. Gender-separated most of the time, but still. From elementary school swimming lessons (which to be fair happen before pools open to the general public), to attending them as an adult, you drop all clothes when you enter and shower in one big room. Sure there might be partial walls for the extra shy, but most just don't care. Same goes for gym showers. Maybe not the commercial ones, but def sport clubs or similar. As a European (German), not sure what would be uncomfortable about that. The enormous gaps in US toilet stalls are far more terrifying ;-)
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• Causality1 6y ago
  To me the desexualization of mainstream movies is a wonderful trend. If I want to be sexually stimulated I'll watch porn. The "sex" in older movies has no payoff. Its like if they stopped Avengers to spend ten minutes showing Tony Stark filling out insurance forms for damage to Stark Tower. Sure it's in the story but why the hell would I want to look at it?
  • viraptor 6y ago
    It's a fake desexualization though. They're not showing anyone doing taxes, but they're also not showing extremely good accountants around the place or joke about the huge tax returns. That bare chest, preferably wet after the shower though, spotted by a woman across the room - obligatory. It's in other aspects of Marvel too. I actually really enjoyed it with Thor Ragnarok when they seemed to stop pretending it's not a stupid comedy with cartoon violence flavouring. Previous ones were "No, no, we're totally serious. Ignore that half the characters are here for comedy value."
    • Causality1 6y ago
      The key difference is ignorability. If you're not attracted to men you may not even notice that the camera lingers on his chest or she looks down before looking at his face. It also doesn't go on for minutes at a time. Maybe a woman is showing more cleavage that is normal, but the camera doesn't spend five straight minutes panning up and down her body. What exactly does five minutes of looking at grasping hands and contorted expressions contribute to the experience of a film, besides a convenient time to take a bathroom break?
• ericmcer 6y ago
  I thought this was in response to metrics demonstrating PG movies are more profitable than PG-13 and R. Studios were doing backflips to make sure their big movies could secure a PG or PG-13 rating... which means no sex scenes.
• KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  I feel like this article/author wanted to connect a lot of things when the reality of the situation is far more simple. People and young people have having less sex and less of everything because of poorer circumstances combined with an inability/reflectance to compromise. Applied to housing this means that it is economically harder to afford a house so people stay home in their parents mcmansions. It's hard to afford/own a home because people don't want to buy a starter home so no one builds them. Finally it becomes very profitable if you have the cash to flip old houses thus quickly exhausting the supply of cheaper housing. Speaking of living in places that could be called mcmansions, they are not bad to live in. While you could say a family as a unit is better off with a smaller 70s tri level, the mcmansions has more space so each individual feels like they get what they want. The main rooms remain clean and uncluttered while the messy lives of children are confined to bedrooms. The interior is vast enough to support guests and extended family, etc. For movies, the consolidation of production means that having many movies is just competing with yourself. Producing a single film for 90% of the demographics is cheaper and makes more money. A decent percentage of America is quite religious and won't take there 3 12 year olds to anything containing sex. Thus most movies now don't contain it. Anything with sex becomes too taboo to view with the family which just reinforces this effect. The current wave of social justice also makes sex an untouchable topic both for movies and in real life.
  • dleslie 6y ago
    No one builds starter homes because municipalities don't zone for them. If you want a 3 bdrm condo most cities don't adequately zone for them, and so the limited stock is obscenely over-priced. The same follows for townhouses and row homes. My own municipality is, allegedly, progressive and far-left; but even it has locked in a huge chunk of the town as single unit homes in a "heritage conservation area", and insists on building bachelor and 2 bdrm suites when it densifies. So what's the point? You can rent your parents' basement suite for cheaper than the mortgage on what would be a lateral shift in housing status.
    • jimbokun 6y ago
      "heritage conservation area" Now there’s a euphemism for locking in white privilege if I ever saw one.
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• kyledrake 6y ago
  Wanted to add this RE the shower scene in Starship Troopers: "Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."
  • jjcon 6y ago
    > A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets. I see this point a lot and I think it is a good one but I have some theories on it too. I think that violence (at least to a point) is part of our natural play instincts, think cops and robbers as a kid. We aren’t disturbed when young children mimic violence, we even see it in nature fairly ubiquitously. Animals play fight with each other. When we see violence in a movie we see it as play, not as reality. As for why Americans are hung up on sex I’m not sure, but I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality.
    • monoideism 6y ago
      > I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality. Then again, America is fairly violent as a country.
      • umanwizard 6y ago
        Relative to where? Looking up some statistics on violent crime rate by country, it doesn’t seem like the US is particularly an outlier.
        • JabavuAdams 6y ago
          Any other first-world nation? EDIT> It doesn't make sense to lump murder in with generic violent crime. The US is an outlier among developed countries for murder. This is much worse than having comparable levels of generic violent crime.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  I'm confused by the two different patreon links on the page.
• yalogin 6y ago
  Very interesting observation and I like the way the author put it. Everything now is seen as an investment to achieve a personal satisfaction goal. Very true indeed. However the rationale we got here is to be debated. I like the theory the author puts forward but I don’t think we can narrow it down to one theory. Something that takes decades to evolve usually has multiple driving factors.
• jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Hollywood movies are made for an international audience and don't just reflect American culture anymore. Europe has always been more sexually permissive than the US, but other places are often more sexually restrictive than both. I think that's why Hollywood movies have become more prudish. It's also why the characters and dialogue are flat. Nuance is hard to translate; explosions are not.
• holografix 6y ago
  > When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up? - Yes he did, I reckon that’s why this is such an underrated movie. American audiences largely didn’t pick up on the sarcasm. > No one looks at each other. No one flirts. A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war. - Not quite true. Rico and Flores do end up shagging
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• burlesona 6y ago
  > maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones My money’s on this one.
• betwixthewires 6y ago
  I really like this article, it has made me question a worldview I had 20 minutes ago. I love things that do that. Make me think, make me change my mind, make me learn.
  • lucasyvas 6y ago
    I feel the same way - it kind of screwed up my brain up a bit. Most of the results of this seem obvious when you look around, but seeing this articulated so simply was a major surprise.
• pretendscholar 6y ago
  No discussion of endocrine disruption? Endrocrine distruption could explain a loss in libido. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/02/27/falling-sperm-counts-threaten-humanity-chemicals-blame-book-says/6842950002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/02/27/falling-sperm...
  • astrange 6y ago
    So give people zinc and maca supplements. Isn't it a lot more likely to be increased access to birth control? Which people take for very good reasons, but it disrupts your hormones a lot more than plastic does. That's the point of taking it.
    • pretendscholar 6y ago
      Which would only explain women right? Male sperm counts are down dramatically over the last 20 years.
      • astrange 6y ago
        But is their libido lower? It doesn't seem like lower sperm count necessarily even lowers the birth rate when you only need one to get there. (does it? I've never looked this up.)
• nimbius 6y ago
  >Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it. The simple truth for the reasoning behind this is the same as why the average TV show is written at the fifth grade Kincaid reading level. In late-stage American capitalism delivering a product with consistent and maximized returns has become a critical priority. Sex in cinema isnt used to tantalize moviegoers to buy the ticket anymore as its now a foregone conclusion you will consume the product. Marketing knows precicely how many of you will watch. The challenge is to maximize consumption. the average Bollywood flick is hypercapitalism. Each piece taylor crafted to appeal to an entire family, their demographic spans 60 years in age. Theres romance, dancing, action, mystery, and comedy all rolled into every single production because its guaranteed to cast the widest net. creating a one-size-fits-all product with set limits in 2021 is only running into concerns or difficulties when actors themselves break their eternal character with audiences as a role model and post something online thats in poor taste that outs them as a human being.
• rayiner 6y ago
  Considering how often actresses complain about how sex scenes are unpleasant, and the whole Harvey Weinstein thing, I’d say this is a positive development.
• fisherjeff 6y ago
  Wow, did not see the McMansion Hell tie-in coming but my god it’s perfect. I will always be amazed when someone is able to bring such superficially (heh) unrelated topics together so cogently.
• conception 6y ago
  Watched Top Gun last night and was floored by this. Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis certainly were heartthrobs of the day, and not unattractive by any normal measure, but it was shocking how... “normal” they looked compared to today’s casts. Cruise with a unibrow and those teeth? Never. It’s tremendously sad how this frog in boiling water came to be.
• throway98752343 6y ago
  > [Julia] was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. > Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. 1984, George Orwell, 1949
  • aksss 6y ago
    That guy knew what was up. Does all of this just flow out of the technology that turns high population societies into behaving like low population communities? The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Is that the dynamic that Orwell was able to see?
    • pjc50 6y ago
      > The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Remember that Orwell was writing quite close parodies of Stalinism, based on his encounters with actual Stalinists while fighting for the socialist side in the Spanish civil war. In Animal Farm, Snowball is Trotsky, and so on. So he undoubtedly had something specific in mind when inventing the "anti-sex league", although I'm not quite sure what. But lack of privacy, moralizing, and remote unaccountable central authority? He means Stalinism. Remember also that it's a front, in which Julia participates cynically for her own safety: ( https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 ) > " ‘Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.’" > In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. And later on Orwell tells us directly what the Anti-Sex league was intended to achieve: > She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: > ‘When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ > That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately. (The red sash business reminds me of the "silver ring thing"; US evangelist Christians replicating similar systems of control and moralizing among their young people)
• throwawaygulf 6y ago
  I wonder how much of it has to do with leftists and SJWs who would scream if sexual attraction between objectively beautiful people was shown on the big screen. Body positivity, "Whiteness", and other deranged ideas are just not worth Hollywood fighting against.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    It looks like you're misunderstanding those ideas. And it seems maybe the point of the article as well, since in a way it argues that both sexuality and body positivity (less perfection, more attraction) was better in older movies. If you really have such strong opinions about this, can I tempt you to read what "body positivity" is actually about? And why "objectively beautiful"... is pretty subjective?
• hardwaregeek 6y ago
  Pedro Almodovar made a similar point about how Marvel movies lack sex. And yeah, if you compare an Almodovar movie to a Marvel movie, it's astonishing how the Marvel is so bland and sexless in comparison. I'm not sure if this argument extends to the vast cultural critique that the author makes about weight. Americans are overweight and should probably care more about diet than they do currently. Worrying about fitness isn't some sign that we're preparing to defend ourselves. That said, I've held the theory that diet and weight obsession is extremely class driven. The obsession with thinness is very much an upper class ideal. Good food, personal trainers, sports are all expensive. It's no surprise that Hollywood reflects the rich.
  • gonzo41 6y ago
    Look at a Ruben painting. The rich used to be fat. Mostly because everyone else was thin and poor. No we live in a calorie wonderland. To be thin is to be virtuous
• 88840-8855 6y ago
  Thanks for the article, I like many parts of it. On the other note, yet slightly related. I still wonder so much why men are still expected to build muscles to look good - at least in the developed Western world. How come females are expected to be skinny, which is slightly changing now with the body-positive movements, but men are still not considered to be attractive when they are skinny. Developed Asian economies see skinny guys are handsome. Why is it not here yet? Will we completely skip this step and jump to a male body positive look immediately? For me it does not make sense why skinny guys are not considered attractive, because being skinny (and sufficiently) sporty has significant benefits while the ripped bodies we are being sold in social media and movies require huge effort which can be very harmful to the body.
• prirun 6y ago
  I have never understood why nudity and consensual sex - basically harmless activities - are deeply frowned on by the ratings groups, yet stabbing someone in the throat and having their blood gush out everywhere is fine and dandy. Everyone knows that men have dicks. Why is seeing one such a big deal? Or a butt for that matter: everybody has one! It's no wonder our society is screwed up when it comes to our bodies. We learn shame for them at a very early age. Most movies and shows have become so violent that I don't even look for new stuff anymore. If I want to waste some time at the TV I just go watch a Star Trek rerun rather than spending 45 minutes trying to find something to watch, then finding out it's gory and turning it off.
  • hoseja 6y ago
    Sex and associated shame are used for social control by most major religions. Violence, on the other hand, is used for competition with other societies so it's "good" when people are inoculated against it. It's not about human wellbeing. It's about human resource efficiency.
  • prox 6y ago
    There is even the effect imo that it creates a gap in development. You never learn the different modes of nudity and that it can be more than sexual. Because what is implied as well, is that a nude body surely MUST mean sex. Which is a gross simplification. The amount of folks who equate nudity with porn is staggering (and unhealthy, as the article reasons as well)
  • willyt 6y ago
    Try some European stuff? These are all excellent and non-violent: - Normal People - Call my agent (Dix pour cent) - Fleabag
    • ch_sm 6y ago
      Fleabag was fantastic, highly recommended.
    • TomSwirly 6y ago
      Fleabag was brilliant but the first season was a very difficult watch towards the end. I would recommend it to anyone but don't think it's just a laugh.
• injidup 6y ago
  Seriously? Selective sampling and click bait. Two recent programs come to mind and I'm sure this list is not exhaustive. "The boys" and "Orville". Both chock full of "heroes" who in-between being heroes are preoccupied with banging each other, getting drunk, eating or failing themselves. The last episode of "The Boys" ends with Homelander jerking off while perched on a ledge over the city and raging at the unfairness of life. It's certainly a comment on the blandness of the Marvel universe and Orville is a superior and cutting rip off of Star Trek which has become bland and inoffensive in it's latest incarnations. Orville cuts pretty close to the limit for whatever rating it has. The two "gay" aliens and the holodeck porn episode come to mind. It was done fairly well. Stressed out officer on a star ship gets a holodeck porn addiction and is no longer able to relate to or face his life partners demands for attention. It's not heroic and not glorious but relatively human. Orville's officers like to fuck. They order booze from the matter synthesizers and they get depressed and do stupid things. Of course it is still "star trek" and there are always happy endings and everybody learns a lesson at the end. It doesn't drift too far from the genre. However the article takes a selective slice of current cinematic culture and tries to pretend there are no other options out there whilst at the same time looking back at 80's and 90's cinema as if it was the age of body positive cinema.
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  • _blu 6y ago
    who's being selective? neither of your examples are mainstream. and isn't the Boys based on an old comic series? And it's certainly made to be a comment on the sexless trope we see in todays superheroes
    • injidup 6y ago
      Mainstream? "The boys" is one of the most popular series on Amazon prime. It is certainly not a basement cult series known only to a few nerds. Yes it is based on an old comic. But so what. Most "stories" are recycled or "based on". Shakespeare did this as well.
• hertzrat 6y ago
  Modern male action heroes take a lot of steroids. It’s not a trend anyone should encourage, where the price of entry to be a lead on one of those movies is to risk sacrificing your health in such a dramatic way
• airhead969 6y ago
  Fuck all that mass-media social programming propaganda. Murder and violence are "okay," while sex and sexuality are "bad." I'll walk around naked, look at women, and hookup whenever I damn well please. Sex is awesome, bodies are beautiful, and no shame is necessary for either. Films that cannot be made in modern America: - Laura, les ombres de l'été (1979) - Lolita (either) - Pretty Baby (1978) - Caligula (1979) - Rocky Horror Picture Show - Monty Python and The Holy Grail - Nymphomaniac I or II Partially, there is great sanitization of Western films to be accepted by foreign censors.
  • wooolfgang 6y ago
    oh boy, I remember teenage me watching Malena for the first time. such an awakening!
  • pmarreck 6y ago
    Porky’s!
  • leveleer323 6y ago
    I agree with the gist of the post expect walking around naked. I don't know if its a right thing to be naked around children. I am too biased to be brought up growing with clothes on, haven't thought or heard the argument of the other side.
    • matt-attack 6y ago
      I can assure you that kids raised around parents who are naked constantly is perfectly normal and healthy. I was raised in the 70s and my parents were constantly naked. We all sat in the backyard hot tub naked. Not a thought was given to it. I now do the same to my kids. The key is to do it from day one, so there is never that first memory of “when did you first see your parents naked”. There is no first because it’s been always. There is no shock because it’s perfectly normal.
      • ttt0 6y ago
        > Not a thought was given to it. Because you don't look at your family in a sexual way. Similarly in Renaissance, for example, we had some nudity going on in art, but it was done in a tasteful and non-sexual fashion. That's different from outright pornography or erotica, which is what children should not be exposed to.
• deepGem 6y ago
  "Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess." Finally, it's not just me. I can't stand these sterile looking homes and kitchen especially. For the same reason, I am not a huge fan of sterile looking restaurant tables either. The author evokes the emotions behind such feelings better than I can, but it reminds of a famous Joan Rivers joke on the Johny Carson show. "Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum, "My God, the floor's immaculate! Lie down, you hot bitch."
  • xg15 6y ago
    > "Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum, "My God, the floor's immaculate! Lie down, you hot bitch." This is technically true, but most men and women will probably be significantly less interested in making love to you if you're living in a filthy home. Sufficient and necessary conditions and all...
    • deepGem 6y ago
      Yeah agreed but the home need not be spotless clean/sterile. Let me take that back, cleanliness with a certain vibe is perfectly fine. Like some homes you walk into, you get this amazingly welcoming and warm vibe, and the home will be spotless. This is very rare though. Most sterile homes you enter, are devoid of any warmth.
      • tiborsaas 6y ago
        What if a cold, dark style matches the owner? Is a "warm" home objectively the best?
        • deepGem 6y ago
          Objectively, there is no best option. What's best for me is very likely gonna turn at least a hundred others off.
• Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Fetishizing and Desexualising is a non sequitur. And the author must have not watched the same wonder woman if they didn't get Steve and Diana's connection. Oh and the reason they don't show food /eating in kitchens is that filming scenes where the actors are eating is problematic given the number of takes needed.
• throwawayhehe 6y ago
  What about combining sex with "action" (a.k.a. violence) in modern film? Some have argued that the problem with sex on the screen is that the money which women earn from doing this looks "too damn easy." Now take a game like football, where male players risk life or limb in order to please their fans. See where I'm going with this?
• tomjen3 6y ago
  Interesting, because at the same time sex in tv-shows have become much, much more free. In the 7 seasons of Buffy there wasn't a single nude, and even in bed everybody was completely covered up (even as adults, even when they were in long-term relationships) and that is not just one franchise, that is how I remember it in almost all media as a teenager. I would be easy to compare with Game of Thrones, but almost all new streaming services have nudity now.
• Thorentis 6y ago
  Our society glorifies pornography and sex-work, but condemns the objectification of bodies. Our society condemns fat shaming, but makes idols out of instagram models. We are very, very confused. Huxley predicted a world where sex became God. Orwell predicted a world where sex was taboo. Unsurprisingly, the reality is that our society has become a paradox by adopting both.
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  • kodah 6y ago
    I think what you're witnessing is the two ideologies coming to a head. One which is a staunchly prude version of society going head to head with a staunchly open version of society in the most proxy way possible. The proxy being art, journalism, and finally public discourse.
    • tgv 6y ago
      I think the left wing of the two sides has embraced prudishness, rationalizing it as being feminist (female nudity => objectification => sexual violence). The left has always had a large prudish faction, so it's not really a surprise.
      • kodah 6y ago
        Eh, there are feminists that embrace sexuality too, so I don't know about all that. Personally, I think it's one of those rare situations that's not divided politically. I think there are entire subcultures in America that just don't appreciate sexuality very much.
    • blowski 6y ago
      You're right. These two might have bumpted into each other while shopping, but for the rest of the time, they barely knew of each other's existence. Now we have social media and 24/7 news channels, so they're constantly in each other's faces. They've always existed, but it's only recently they've both stood in the town square shouting at each other.
• dmje 6y ago
  The title of this thread changed, didn’t it? Pretty sure it was the same as the article (“Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny”). I mean, insomnia had me reading it at 3am so I may be wrong but if so that’s a hilarious commentary on the state of things...
• aasasd 6y ago
  > Rita Hayworth underwent an ethnic makeover to appear more Caucasian Funny how by departing from Europe and landing in the Americas, ‘hispanics’ suddenly turned into a whole separate race.
• torgian 6y ago
  This was a really thoughtful article, and I can say I’ve been influenced by this culture as well, even in my late thirties.
• mberning 6y ago
  There was more sexual tension in an episode of the Golden Girls than most movies today.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  I think the article is spot on. We live in a sanitized, sexless culture that glorifies self-optimisation without purpose. Baudrillard however already recognised this a while ago in America (1989) "The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death. This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, bodybuilding gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession"
  • dawg- 6y ago
    Baudrillard's insistence on reading everything as a symbol gets him in trouble. There are a lot of intellectual fireworks in his writing, but I think he lacks depth and appreciation for the vibrancy and diversity of life. It's another example of cultural criticism failing because it overly textualizes things. Did he ever ask the owners of the bodies he so eloquently critiques, the "bodybuilder", or the "skateboarder", or the "Bronx breakdancer", what they think about all this business? Those aren't real people, they are just archetypes who serve to add color to his writing. Who wants to listen to a humanist who seems to hate actual humans?
• knorker 6y ago
  This is not unexpected. The UK banned gym commercials for daring to suggest that one may be improving the body in order to be "beach ready" (i.e. show off sexiness). No no no, it is not allowed to say that you try to look better for other people. As for movies, of course we want to look at beautiful people. I'll just leave that hanging there for a few seconds. It really should be that simple. So movies need to show the beautiful people, but they can't "objectify" them. But that's not the same thing. A movie will catch shit for one when they've done the other, though. Which of Lost in Translation and Batman (1989) caught heat for objectifying women? Which one had a 2D damsel in distress, and which showed off more body? So you make movies with beautiful people (because that's what people want, all else being equal), but you only put the sexiness "on display", and don't acknowledge it in any way what so ever. Because acknowledging that there such a thing as sexy, or sexual attraction, is harassment. If you acknowledge it, it has to be made a joke, and as nonsexual as possible. E.g. it's only the men who get to compliment Captain America's ass. It can't be sexual, because the men who said it have an established history of not-gays (a female partner). But again, back to the beautiful sexy people. Should we be surprised that actors have been wearing wigs (or wig-like fillers) since the days of black&white? Should we be surprised that people want to look at post-hairplug Elon Musk instead of pre-hairplug? "Fetishize" the body? Wat? It's a fetish to be attracted to "beautiful people" now?
• BunsanSpace 6y ago
  "In the early 2000s, there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural, almost accidental. Skinny celebrities confessed their love of burgers and fries in magazines; models undergoing profile interviews engaged in public consumption of pasta; leading ladies joked about how little they exercised and how much they hated it. It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction. We knew it then, and we know it now." No they where taking Clenbuterol or DNP which will make anyone lose weight like no tomorrow no mater their activity level. For a significant cost that is. The more disturbing thing is male actors are clearly taking PEDs and/or being dehydrated for shirtless shots, distorting what a normal body should look like. Even in fitness circles where I live, no one looks that good without juicing or prepping their body for the shirtless pic. [0] https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/hollywood-dirty-diet-secrets-article-1.286090 https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/hollywood-dirty-diet-...
  • plzbo 6y ago
    What is a PED? You mean performance-enhancing drugs? I wanted to read the article you linked to, but seems like they have a region lock for EU countries. Its been what, nearly three years since GDPR took effect? > Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
    • BunsanSpace 6y ago
      PED is a broad term for Performance-enhancing drugs. There's two big categories, SARMs and Roids. Everyone knows roids, you take them, you get big. SARMs are lesser known but tend to lower body fat while preserving/gaining muscle (since normal cutting routine you will lose lots of muscle). There's also fat burning drugs which are their own third category with DNP and Clenbuterol being the most common. Both are very dangerous and have a host of side effects, these are what hollywood/celebrities use to slim up fast. It's a fantastic research rabbit hole to go down, and they're much more prevalent than you think.
• hntrader 6y ago
  I don't really care if there's sex in films, but I just find it so extremely boring. I've seen it all before 100 times and it does nothing to advance the story (compared to implying that sex just happened), it's not creative, it's not original, it's not interesting, it's not dramatic, it's not funny, and I fast-forward it to avoid wasting 2 minutes of my life.
  • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    I've seen a number of pilots that showed-up caked in sex and f-bombs but by the time the series is a few episodes in, it gets traded up for plot and character building.
    • hntrader 6y ago
      The worst example of sex in film has to be the sex scene in the Matrix trilogy. Easily the most boring two minutes of the whole thing. They didn't even show it going in so what's the point
      • chillacy 6y ago
        My understanding (and it’s been awhile) is that the choice Neo made by going with Trinity and being alone with her instead of the group was a crucial moment which foreshadows his decision to save Trinity instead of fulfill his duty to as “the one” to reboot the matrix.
        • deleted 6y ago
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• phreack 6y ago
  The elephant in the room is Disney I'd say, basically. Disney owns all blockbuster movies now, and wants to sell them around the entire world, and no Disney property shall have sexuality. Same goes for Apple, who forbids any adult content to even touch an iPhone, barring (through gritted teeth) what you can find in a browser and Reddit. Power is consolidating into fewer and fewer companies, who want to cater to all world powers, some of which say a naked human body is The Ickiest Thing and must be forbidden. I'm hopeful that in the future though, as costs of producing and distributing high quality movies go lower and lower, more and more indie or low cost films will look as professional as we want today's blockbusters to be, and also be free enough to explore cinema as an art form as they see fit.
• devchix 6y ago
  I wish the title had not been edited from its original: "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny." It captures so much better the essence of this rambling incomprehensible thesis that action movies have many beautiful people not having any sex. Alternate title: "Everyone drives cars in cities and no one is seen parking." To use his example, Starship Trooper is an action movie with satirical subtext, it is not served by having more horny people bang. Every narrative has to be edited to GET TO THE POINT. And then he leans on this faulty premise to criticize a bunch of weirdly unrelated stuff, movies made after the 90s, the cluttered interiors, McMansions, swoles, BMIs and 9/11. What? There's plenty of beautiful naked people having sex on screen, uncomfortably many. Where has this writer been? The Tudors, anachronistic boobs and asses and fornicating beautiful people since 2007. This formula was so successful it's repeated in Games of Thrones, the trope so commonly employed it earned the moniker of "sexposition", naked people banging + dialogue = sex + exposition. It's also repeated in Versailles, Outlander, and from what I've seen of ep.1 Bridgerton. There's also plenty of beautiful people having sex, or at least demonstrating their horny-ness in RomComs, Sleeping With Other People comes to mind. Somehow I don't think the author was the audience for any of the above. He's complaining that there's not enough horny people in the movies he is watching.