8 ms·

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 starte

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.
  - Avshalom 6y ago
    which is true and such deeply weird thing. and ties into the idea (though i think it's not super well supported in the article) that some of this comes from basically anxiety over physical threats.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Its a sign of how messed our society is that we can depict torture but not a naked person.
    - pronlover723 6y ago
      Violence in media doesn't lead to violence in real life for various reasons. Most people are generally taught not to be violent to others and laws help enforce that social norm. Sex in media does lead to more sex real life because there's no social norm or law against not having sex and sex leads to STD and unwanted pregnancies. Hence, there is a logic to violence in media is okay and sex in media is less ok. One has no consequences, the other does. https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+sexual+behavior https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+se...
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        Does violence in movies lead to more support for foreign intervention, I wonder?
        josephg 6y ago
        There was a case a few years ago where a US federal judge refused to outlaw torture in case there was a “24 type situation”. (24 was a popular tv show a few years ago in which the main character regularly tortures people for information, to protect America.)
      - astrange 6y ago
        I once read a reader question in a mainstream game magazine (GameInformer I think?) where they asked why it was ok for games to have violence but not sex. The answer was extremely angry they had to explain this, like a parent lecturing a child who'd just embarassed them in public. But anyway, their answer was the opposite of yours. Violence in games is good because you "shouldn't do it in real life". Sex in video games is bad because you "should do it in real life". The kids currently call this "touching grass" or "getting some bitches".
- brushfoot 6y ago
  That's precisely what I mean. It's specialization in mass market genre entertainment. Action films are more purely about action; fantasy films are more purely about fantasy. There's no need to mix in sexual titillation anymore. Separation of concerns.
  - treis 6y ago
    How does Game of Thrones fit into your theory?
    - elefanten 6y ago
      It's not a mass market film? Relatively mass market television series, but there's like 40 times as much run time as a full length movie.
      - lstodd 6y ago
        What has run time have to do with it? It's either accepted, liked, whatever. Or not.
malwarebytess 6y ago
> A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public. This is a disturbing thing if true. It seems a key feature of an oppressive society.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Related: panem et circenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses The idea is that keeping people occupied and diverted then you can fail as a civil leader but still maintain your control and position. The more people are satisfied (by government or business efforts or other large scale entities) the less likely they are to rebel when those entities are failing them. Even if they aren't properly satisfied, they're still made content.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Separating private and public spheres of life respects consent.
automatoney 6y ago
Sexuality consists of much more than plain sexual imagery - one of the key examples in the article states "Neither character is glamorous in this scene, but their relationship feels frisky and lived-in and charismatic and real." Mainstream movies generally have romances, but do they feel real and lived in, or stilted? This has little to do with pornography, and more to do with the way we tell stories about ourselves.
Animats 6y ago
I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song) [2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serve.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...
- gibbonsrcool 6y ago
  I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew. I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
  - kbutler 6y ago
    The covid relief plan would prove a definitive counter to your hypothetical concern over tax money.
    - kbutler 6y ago
      The public clamor for “$2k” checks, which comprise less than 1/4 of the $1.9 trillion dollar package that’s now entering reconciliation proves pretty strongly that the public is not sensitive to the cost of their government “benefits”. The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government. I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend. The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.
miserablegit 6y ago
> The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing. I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something. Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence. I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thing is decent production value in a movie can't be created in home-grown way, it requires serious dollars. Oppositely, there are actors and there are "adult actors" and the two jobs are considered very distinct (in the way that receptionist and sex-workers are segregated and should be segregated, as mentioned on another thread). But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      It's a discovery problem. There are existing puritanical rules in society that break discovery in this industry. Someone solves that safely and they'll do really well imho.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I wonder if the answer isn't more mundane, money. Parents today seem to have no problem with their children seeing a movie where people are eviscerated on screen but won't let their kids see movies with sex in them. I found it funny that "Bridgerton", and "Game of Thrones" both produced with more sex, have been quite popular.
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  I don't think it's just the parents. I think Hollywood relies on an export market. They don't want any country blocking a film from being shown to teens, in the theatres. Teens have the largest disposable incomes, of any market segment, especially when it comes to watching movies. Comical violence is an easy sell. If you add anything sexual, there is the risk of it being censored.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Game of Thrones has plenty of nudity, including full frontal (ermagerd!). But it doesn't have a whole lot of sex that you'd call erotic, as opposed to just being violent rape, carefully catalogued here: https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape It's telling that the closest thing to a loving, normal relationship seems to be the incestuous brother-sister saga of Cersei and Jaime.
- IgniteTheSun 6y ago
  The paying audience for blockbusters is now global - and many movies earn more outside the U.S. than in it. As such, movie makers are probably now paying more attention to what is considered appropriate versus obscene elsewhere.
  - josephg 6y ago
    Or just aiming for the lowest common denominator - and taking out anything that might be controversial in any of their global markets. (Take out sexuality for the American market, and take out politics for China). A $100m+ budget doesn’t have room for risks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
redisman 6y ago
Even simpler. Disney (et al) produces the majority (?) of movie hours the public watches in 2021. That combined with globalization of demand - you don’t want to cut off any geographical regions that can’t handle anything controversial and you have boring, technically immaculate, corporate movies.
viraptor 6y ago
> Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private. That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.
- aksss 6y ago
  McDonalds is popular the world over. I wouldn’t take GP to task over their observation. The observation may imply a shallow society, and whether fries or sex, there’s obviously a massive global market for cheap and easy, so something in that observation is pretty accurate. If everything is biological competition, I think society just hasn’t found a way to compete effectively with massively broad and easy access to porn. I mean, look at some of the posts here about people being disillusioned by the work, expense, and time it takes to even meet eligible people, much less hook up. Maybe the answer is in more meat-space social organizations - all those social (non-government) institutions like church, fraternal organizations, sports leagues, served to build social networks and now all of that is mostly gone for young people. So it’s meeting at work (increasingly taboo), chance encounters, bars maybe (and also often useless or horrible outcomes), or online shopping. Understandably difficult circumstances. What new drivers could compel different preferences?

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.
- Avshalom 6y ago
  which is true and such deeply weird thing. and ties into the idea (though i think it's not super well supported in the article) that some of this comes from basically anxiety over physical threats.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Its a sign of how messed our society is that we can depict torture but not a naked person.
  - pronlover723 6y ago
    Violence in media doesn't lead to violence in real life for various reasons. Most people are generally taught not to be violent to others and laws help enforce that social norm. Sex in media does lead to more sex real life because there's no social norm or law against not having sex and sex leads to STD and unwanted pregnancies. Hence, there is a logic to violence in media is okay and sex in media is less ok. One has no consequences, the other does. https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+sexual+behavior https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+se...
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Does violence in movies lead to more support for foreign intervention, I wonder?
      - josephg 6y ago
        There was a case a few years ago where a US federal judge refused to outlaw torture in case there was a “24 type situation”. (24 was a popular tv show a few years ago in which the main character regularly tortures people for information, to protect America.)
    - astrange 6y ago
      I once read a reader question in a mainstream game magazine (GameInformer I think?) where they asked why it was ok for games to have violence but not sex. The answer was extremely angry they had to explain this, like a parent lecturing a child who'd just embarassed them in public. But anyway, their answer was the opposite of yours. Violence in games is good because you "shouldn't do it in real life". Sex in video games is bad because you "should do it in real life". The kids currently call this "touching grass" or "getting some bitches".
brushfoot 6y ago
That's precisely what I mean. It's specialization in mass market genre entertainment. Action films are more purely about action; fantasy films are more purely about fantasy. There's no need to mix in sexual titillation anymore. Separation of concerns.
- treis 6y ago
  How does Game of Thrones fit into your theory?
  - elefanten 6y ago
    It's not a mass market film? Relatively mass market television series, but there's like 40 times as much run time as a full length movie.
    - lstodd 6y ago
      What has run time have to do with it? It's either accepted, liked, whatever. Or not.

malwarebytess 6y ago

> A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public. This is a disturbing thing if true. It seems a key feature of an oppressive society.

Jtsummers 6y ago
Related: panem et circenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses The idea is that keeping people occupied and diverted then you can fail as a civil leader but still maintain your control and position. The more people are satisfied (by government or business efforts or other large scale entities) the less likely they are to rebel when those entities are failing them. Even if they aren't properly satisfied, they're still made content.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Separating private and public spheres of life respects consent.

automatoney 6y ago

Sexuality consists of much more than plain sexual imagery - one of the key examples in the article states "Neither character is glamorous in this scene, but their relationship feels frisky and lived-in and charismatic and real." Mainstream movies generally have romances, but do they feel real and lived in, or stilted? This has little to do with pornography, and more to do with the way we tell stories about ourselves.

Animats 6y ago

I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song) [2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serve.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...

gibbonsrcool 6y ago
I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew. I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
- kbutler 6y ago
  The covid relief plan would prove a definitive counter to your hypothetical concern over tax money.
  - kbutler 6y ago
    The public clamor for “$2k” checks, which comprise less than 1/4 of the $1.9 trillion dollar package that’s now entering reconciliation proves pretty strongly that the public is not sensitive to the cost of their government “benefits”. The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government. I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend. The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.

miserablegit 6y ago

> The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing. I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.

fractionalhare 6y ago
I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something. Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence. I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thing is decent production value in a movie can't be created in home-grown way, it requires serious dollars. Oppositely, there are actors and there are "adult actors" and the two jobs are considered very distinct (in the way that receptionist and sex-workers are segregated and should be segregated, as mentioned on another thread). But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    It's a discovery problem. There are existing puritanical rules in society that break discovery in this industry. Someone solves that safely and they'll do really well imho.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I wonder if the answer isn't more mundane, money. Parents today seem to have no problem with their children seeing a movie where people are eviscerated on screen but won't let their kids see movies with sex in them. I found it funny that "Bridgerton", and "Game of Thrones" both produced with more sex, have been quite popular.

mymythisisthis 6y ago
I don't think it's just the parents. I think Hollywood relies on an export market. They don't want any country blocking a film from being shown to teens, in the theatres. Teens have the largest disposable incomes, of any market segment, especially when it comes to watching movies. Comical violence is an easy sell. If you add anything sexual, there is the risk of it being censored.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Clewza313 6y ago
Game of Thrones has plenty of nudity, including full frontal (ermagerd!). But it doesn't have a whole lot of sex that you'd call erotic, as opposed to just being violent rape, carefully catalogued here: https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape It's telling that the closest thing to a loving, normal relationship seems to be the incestuous brother-sister saga of Cersei and Jaime.
IgniteTheSun 6y ago
The paying audience for blockbusters is now global - and many movies earn more outside the U.S. than in it. As such, movie makers are probably now paying more attention to what is considered appropriate versus obscene elsewhere.
- josephg 6y ago
  Or just aiming for the lowest common denominator - and taking out anything that might be controversial in any of their global markets. (Take out sexuality for the American market, and take out politics for China). A $100m+ budget doesn’t have room for risks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

redisman 6y ago

Even simpler. Disney (et al) produces the majority (?) of movie hours the public watches in 2021. That combined with globalization of demand - you don’t want to cut off any geographical regions that can’t handle anything controversial and you have boring, technically immaculate, corporate movies.

viraptor 6y ago

> Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private. That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.

aksss 6y ago
McDonalds is popular the world over. I wouldn’t take GP to task over their observation. The observation may imply a shallow society, and whether fries or sex, there’s obviously a massive global market for cheap and easy, so something in that observation is pretty accurate. If everything is biological competition, I think society just hasn’t found a way to compete effectively with massively broad and easy access to porn. I mean, look at some of the posts here about people being disillusioned by the work, expense, and time it takes to even meet eligible people, much less hook up. Maybe the answer is in more meat-space social organizations - all those social (non-government) institutions like church, fraternal organizations, sports leagues, served to build social networks and now all of that is mostly gone for young people. So it’s meeting at work (increasingly taboo), chance encounters, bars maybe (and also often useless or horrible outcomes), or online shopping. Understandably difficult circumstances. What new drivers could compel different preferences?