40 ms·

Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it (2021)

456 points by dogleash 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
2021 based on the comments. I remember reading either this or a similar one some time ago.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Mar 2021 at least, nearly 700 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
- jwilk 3y ago
  Also: <meta property="article:published_time" content="2021-02-14T05:44:41+00:00" />
SamPatt 3y ago
Some interesting points in here, but the author seems to imply that the obesity epidemic is really just in our minds. I don't buy that part at all.
- zolland 3y ago
  This is a pretty extreme article, but I think the argument is not that it doesn't exist but rather that it is blown out of proportion. The metric that is used to calculate obesity (specifically at the time they reference) was BMI which is a fairly flawed metric and significantly the obesity line was lowered. Idk how it is calculated now.
  - jagraff 3y ago
    BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people, it really only fails for people who have far more muscle mass than most people (body builders). It is highly correlated with health outcomes - people with a BMI over 30 (obese) have significantly higher risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer - this is true at a BMI of 30 and it only gets worse from there. 40% of americans are obese. It's not overblown - if anything, I think most people don't understand just how big of a health crisis it is.
    - zolland 3y ago
      > BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people It isn't really measuring anything. It is just a very general index to gauge how far you diverge from a predetermined height to weight ratio. Maybe that's useful to someone but I wouldn't base any of my decisions on it today.
      - Kirby64 3y ago
        On the margins it may not be useful, but for the "average" person, it is definitely useful. I'd suggest there is no one with a BMI of 30 (besides people with a ton of muscle) that is at a healthy weight. Its a gut check, which is what is helpful.
        vintermann 3y ago
        You know what they say, most of the volume of a high-dimensional orange is in the skin. The average person is very rare. BMI is best for populations since it's so easy to calculate from easily and frequently collected data. For an individual, you can fairly easily get more accurate measures to predict whatever it is you want to predict.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        If you're not a bodybuilder and not pregnant, it's one of the simplest useful calculations we have. You'd be amazed at how many medical decision-making tools[0] are very simple and are based on outcomes, not rigorous mathematical theory. [0] E.g. NEWS https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib205/chapter/The-technology https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib205/chapter/The-technology
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    My eyes tell me that the obesity epidemic is real. Go to any public gathering of a couple dozen people or more and count the obese people you see. Heck, pick up a middle school yearbook, we’re starting obesity young these days. We were hoping our future was Star Trek, but it’s looking more like Wall-E.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Claiming that BMI is flawed is a lazy half-argument. Finish the argument, what should be used instead of BMI? Look at the correlation plots and draw your own BMI line [0]. I think the BMI lines look pretty good for men, but for women who fall into the common BMI range of 25 to 30, the BMI formula tends to underestimate the amount of body fat. It would be nice if everyone could get a DEXA scan regularly, but the data shows that 50% of people would find that they have even more body fat than the BMI charts predict. Again, it's worse for women, most women near the overweight threshold would find that their body fat is higher than expected. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/
    - nonameiguess 3y ago
      This needs to become more widely known. BMI underestimates obesity, not the other way around. Studies that use better measures of body fat percentage consistently find even people who are "normal" weight are fatter than they think. It's why doctors are supposed to now use waist to height ratio as a secondary predictor.
    - zolland 3y ago
      My issue with it is two fold. I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc). I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. It doesn't do a great job of identifying whether or not someone is healthy. So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used). There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
      - angrais 3y ago
        Obviously there are edge cases when applying statistical tools at a population level. That's not the purpose of BMI though. If you're pregnant or weight training then OBVIOUSLY your BMI score is not comparable to others. Most people are neither pregnant nor weight training. I'd even bet that most people haven't performed a weighted squat. >> I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. Being fat is bad for your health. That is a fact. No amount of body positivity advertisements will change that fact. It is healthier to be thinner than obese. Look at the graph above to see BMIs impact on other health outcomes. Also, if you think the obesity crisis is fake/blown up then simply go outside in most American cities and you'll see that many people are obese. > There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant. Again, this is not relevant as the subset of people is so small compared with the whole population. The "data given" is included in BMI. Your relative weight is an indicator of multiple other health outcomes.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    It's a starting point for sure, a more thorough research would look at body weight ratios. That said, while BMI is a skewed metric for muscular people, statistically it's still more representative of obesity than 'dry' weight.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. Most people don't look like actors, a lot of people are very overweight and out of shape. It's weird that all movies seem to play in a parallel universe where everyone looks like the fittest people ever.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    I guess it depends on on the movie, but wealthier cities have significantly less obesity rates then others, like cities in the US south east. There's not that many obese people where I live.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      SF is the best in California and it’s still just over 10%.
    - newaccount74 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm not just talking about obese people, cinema is almost completely devoid of even slightly overweight and out of shape people - ie. normal people.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Another jarring thing is movie people don’t stare at a phone every waking hour.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      I mean if you take the Marvel films, it's because interesting stuff is actually happening (to them) all the time. I wonder how many behind-the-scenes shots there are of the actors checking their phones in between shots, lol. A more general remark would be that nobody in films ever uses the toilet.
      - zirgs 3y ago
        They do if it's relevant to the plot. See - Pulp Fiction.
- mvncleaninst 3y ago
  More like: there's a "missing middle" with respect to BMI which is common irl but underrepresented in media
zolland 3y ago
> did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol? I don't think the author actually watched Inception lol
heattemp99 3y ago
While this is unpopular to say, I think the advanced age of marriage and promiscuity earlier in life plays a role here. My parents were together from 19, and knowing their style, they may both have been each other's first. As a teenager, I noticed my mother being extremely difficult. Even more so now. My father is no walk in the park either. But I believe they have a deep rooted love from decades and went through every event and basically adult stage in life together. I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades. Each of us has been overseas with countless friends and exs. Many women have been engaged, some married, and we've all had our hearts broken. We've all gained a few lbs. My hair is starting to grey. Can I find someone that enjoys being with me? Sure. Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure. I've heard many long time married old men say that when they look at their partner, they still see the beauty glimmering through that they saw at 19. If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to? How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner? I know this is a judgemental view, but I think it's human nature. Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
- tscopp 3y ago
  The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    Wouldn't the second best time be an instant after 20 years ago?
    - diarrhea 3y ago
      Peak HN comment.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
Terr_ 3y ago
To proffer a TLDR: 1. The modern American media landscape reflects a changed zeitgeist, one where new (ever more impractical) heights of physical fitness are presented. 2. BUT it comes with a DECREASE of old emphasis on using it to woo sexual partners, or for hedonistic enjoyment of physical activities. 3. It is instead rooted in a kind of cultural anxiety that one must be able to fight an unspecified enemy, or else as a kind of platonic health-investment.
- euroderf 3y ago
  There is a certain aesthetic in public sculpture wherein the human body is unclothed and yet quite asexual. It can be seen in public statuary in certain areas in certain eras. I think that this phenom is not unrelated to the subject of the article. It is a kind of glorification of "health" or "physical well-being" - but the nudity speaks to something that is far, far away from sexuality. It can kinda give ya the creeps.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    Platonism, the worship of ideal forms. Its also associated with 1930s fascism. It is unsurprising that the rise of modern fascism has arrived complete with its iconography.
blueridge 3y ago
If anyone hasn't read The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, I'd highly recommend it. There are a few thoughtful chapters on relationships, love, marriage, sex, etc. that are worth reading.
seo-speedwagon 3y ago
I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny. BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different - movies: less horny - television: slightly more horny? - books: roughly unchanged - music: roughly unchanged - video games: much, much hornier So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Maybe the movie audiences, particularly the blockbuster theater-going audiences, are skewing older and more conservative/old-fashioned now. So the sexuality there tends to be a lot more repressed (while at the same time needing to be optimized around those highly defined abs, in order to maximize profits). And the thirsty kids are all playing video games.
  - coderenegade 3y ago
    I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off. Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      The Matrix scene just wasn't necessary, and went on too long. And was intercut with a raunchy-music-video dancing scene. It was a bit odd all round, especially in the generally clinical, straight to the point world of the Matrix movies.
distant_hat 3y ago
One thing that is not considered here is that media is far more globalized than before. If you want a big budget movie to do well across markets like China, India, and the middle East, you tone down the raunchy content or run the risk of movie getting banned out of large markets. TV is more fragmented so maybe it gets away with local tastes.
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  This is it. The source is the spinelessness of studios rather than some greater societal shift. However, that's not to say a societal shift cannot follow from reality mirroring fiction because mass media manufactures much of the attitudes of society. I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture. “[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy
  - local_issues 3y ago
    The Disney USA logo vs Disney China logo meme is always relevant If you are ok with being a hypocrite, you can push a strong narrative in the US while challenging literally nothing in China/Saudi Arabia.
    - lupire 3y ago
      What meme?
- newaccount74 3y ago
  That doesn't explain why every single actor has a perfect body. Every man is bulked up, every woman is super slim. 50 years ago it was completely normal that sexy woman on screen had a bit of belly fat, now this is completely unthinkable.
  - strken 3y ago
    Does it need a more complicated explanation than increased budgets? 50 years ago CGI was virtually nonexistent and now it's close to photorealistic; does this tell us deep things about how spaceships are secretly aircraft carriers and space explosions are a metaphor for Desert Storm, or is it an artefact of trying harder and paying more?
joker_minmax 3y ago
Personally I feel like the reason behind the change is obvious. Pornography is everywhere. People don't get their kicks from 1970s movie love scenes anymore because hardcore fetish videos are a few clicks away. The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. But the culture carries this at-will objectification as bleedover into everything else. And I think it's also why the youngest generation right now is fixated on knowing their exact, granular label for sexual identity and orientation, even though young people are having less sex than they've ever had.
- tmikaeld 3y ago
  I agree, there's no mystery or effort needed that builds up lust any more.
  - nmz 3y ago
    That's a genre problem, porn is by its definition explosive, too fast to develop anything emotionally, erotica however builds up but it is harder to fund, there is an outlier though, 50 shades, however, for 50 shades to get funding it had to be a best seller for a while, released as an ebook at first. So unless you reach such a level you probably wont be funded, which only exacerbates current puritanical trends.
    - tmikaeld 3y ago
      I find this odd, considering the success of 50 shades and the huge amount of female erotica written in books, there should be a large incentive for pouring money on shows for all of that readily available material. I'm a man and even I find the books more alluring than 99% of what's on TV/Movies.
- Nursie 3y ago
  I think it's that and a sort of equal-and-opposite prudishness reaction - those sex scenes no longer fly in mainstream movies, they are generally described as exploitative of the actors (particularly women) and inappropriate in various ways. To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button. (That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)
bawolff 3y ago
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content 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? > The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters > We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney. There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
- 39 3y ago
  Ghostbusters was PG
  - rlayton2 3y ago
    And Terminator was M (in Australia), which means "recommended" for 15 years and older, but not restricted.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales). i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2021)
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
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aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
qwerty456127 3y ago
This is what perfect physical+psychological health&developedness is. It's Ok to be physically imperfect but being fit is healthier if you can, also having no deficit of sex with equally fit (which means as attractive as you might dream of) partners and no serious psychological trauma unhealed - you only feel easiy containable healthy sexual desire which is more like wanting to listen to good music or tasting a great wine than like urge or need. I have been lucky to achieve this and wish everyone the same luck but luck mostly works when you do you part of the job (i.e. eat healthy, go to a gym, to a therapist and meditate right). That's the lack of the above which makes people so sexually frustrated that they experience disharmonious uncontainable sexuality which can disturbe theirs and others' comfort and cloud their reason.
labster 3y ago
I was not expecting this piece to mention McMansion Hell, but I was expecting it to mention how the Chinese market has caused movies to cut back on edgy films. Or how the international market in general has made movies cut back on dialogue. Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film. The article isn’t bad, it just describes a trend without ever doing the basic role of a reporter: follow the money.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  > Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film. This was my initial impression. No sex on TV? It's a meme that HBO's most popular shows are full of it. Normal People is another recent example of a TV show that did not exactly shy away from intimate moments. "Follow the money" is right, and the author seems to think that movies in the 80s were full of sex scenes for some reason other than a guy in a suit making a decision that a sex scene would increase revenue. Nowadays porn is on-demand and free so it probably doesn't add as much value to a Hollywood blockbuster. Maybe I'm just a prude but I find most sex scenes to be awkward and shoe-horned in anyway. Why do we need a sex scene in a movie about a crime-fighting superhero anyway? Maybe characters in modern movies are having sex, just... off camera?
- NeoTar 3y ago
  To quote the Family Guy theme-song: "It seems today that all you see, Is violence in movies and sex on TV" So this pattern was being noted at least as far back as 1999.
  - badpun 3y ago
    It has been noticed since the sixties, when comstockery was abolished.
- brabel 3y ago
  I found the whole thing only applies to American blockbusters. I watch small budget films all the time and there's sexuality oozing most of the time, specially in European movies. If I have any complaints about those movies it's actually in the other direction: it seems that every time a character looks at another who is their love interest, they immediately hook up and kiss passionately, start taking off clothes after barely a few seconds, and suddenly find themselves having intercourse :D - not that I don't like watching it!! But I don't know, at least for me, it took a whole lot more effort than that to get to that point (and now, being a married man for many years, sex is very, very rare which is why I write in the past tense, hehe).
oytis 3y ago
As a counterpoint - as a non-American millennial watching American movies as a child I couldn't understand why there should be sex/romance everywhere. I was not watching romance not to say erotic movies, just action, comedy, horror - yet every director felt obliged to add a pinch of sex everywhere. That felt pretty awkward and weird.
- GolDDranks 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, where are you from?
  - oytis 3y ago
    Russia
    - caskstrength 3y ago
      That is understandable considering that Soviet movies are even more puritan than modern American ones.
- jiehong 3y ago
  I’m France, I felt the opposite: American movies are so surreal with so much violence and guns for everyone, and sex is weirdly depicted. I think French movies contained some sex scene almost all the time, mainly because it’s what happens in life so it’s just normal to see it in a movie. I think you can see some boobs in a movie if it’s rated for age 12 and up. Nowadays, I think the American culture has rubbed off on Europe a bit more, and nudity alone is less ok in films or movie. So you can go to a movie where it’s expected to not show boobs, and then head up to the public beach where 20% of women are topless and nobody gives a shit. A bit dissonant. Yet, I agree that having a sex scene in a movie sometimes feels like it’s wasting time if it’s not a good part of the story.
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    Well, US is the very definition of christian conservatism in talk and action, southern half would be considered bible nuts in western Europe, so movies are made with that optimization in mind
Teknoman117 3y ago
I wonder if the body positivity movement has anything to do with the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit. In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health. I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit That comes with age :)
- sph 3y ago
  Well done for the weight loss. Also funny, I'm quite overweight (a bit lighter than your current weight) and one of the reason I want to get back in shape is because my flirting experience has been dire and non-existent. To be fair, I am not completely in favour of body positivity [1], I wouldn't date myself at this weight, so it's also a me problem. I guess it's all relative :-) -- 1: In my opinion, accept your body and its flaws, but obesity is not to be celebrated. It is a metabolic disease.
- pravus 3y ago
  I had this same thing happen to me when I went from 343 to 170. It completely messes with me now going into public and having people actually acknowledge my presence and engage with me. I used to just be a ghost. All I can remember from my youth was people pounding on me that being fat was basically evil. You see the same sentiment here from time to time so it still exists.
  - benjaminwootton 3y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
If a hero chooses a woman, he antagonizes the wokes, if he chooses a man, he antagonizes the magas ... can't win.
globular-toast 3y 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 No, no. That's false. I can tell you from first hand experience there are women (and presumably men too, but I've never lived with a man) who actually are thin without trying. In fact, of all the women I've dated, the only ones who even remotely cared about diets, calories, exercise etc. were the fat ones. The difference is now fashion has changed towards that super-lean, "ripped", goes to gym look. Now actors (of both sexes) work out just before the camera goes on, get pumped and make sure they are dehydrated. It's just the Instagram fake reality on the big screen. If you look at beautiful actors from the beginning of cinema through to the 90s they were just naturally beautiful people with a healthy amount of body fat.
trabant00 3y ago
I think it's an unavoidable outcome of optimization. Like when you sacrifice Cha for Str and Dex in RPGs. In games you have limited attribute points, but in real life you also have limited resources. Assign them to competing with people and you won't have them for connecting to people. There is now way around it. If I want to focus on my workouts I can't spend time trying to catch her eye contact at the gym. And she doesn't have time for that either, between actually working out and recording that for Instagram.
uwagar 3y ago
wish this article went on and on.
tgv 3y ago
> no one looks like that without calorie restriction That's just not true.
seydor 3y ago
Why should nudity be connected to sexuality ? Have you seen grecoroman statues? Surely they have noticed the tinypenis The movies are probably responding to the shifts of the audience. The keyword of our culture is safety. Sex is slowly becoming equated with physical abuse, and the solution to horniness is placed behind the screen. > Over and over again, she reiterates the point that McMansions are not built to be homes; they’re built to be short-term investments. This is more interesting, and in this movies reflect reality. Expensive new houses nowadays are wholly architecturally uninteresting. Literally none of them is memorable, and all of them can be mistaken for one another. It's really sad that this period of sky high real estate prices does not coincide with a rennaissance of architecture but with the opposite
- slim 3y ago
  actually grecoroman statues are connected to sexuality https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-men-seemingly-always-naked-in-ancient-greek-art https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-men-seemingly-always-naked-in...
causality0 3y ago
People in real life not being horny is bad but frankly I really enjoy people in cinema not being horny anymore. It's so boring to watch. Watching two people bone in a movie is no more engaging than watching someone browse pornhub.
- 331c8c71 3y ago
  Well, cartoon-ish violence is equally boring to my taste (if that's the alternative)...
  - causality0 3y ago
    Sure, but don't make me watch one in order to get the other. Imagine if every romance movie had to have someone with superpowers in it, and then when they stopped including the pointless superpowers someone wrote a whiny article about how kids these days should want more power fantasies in their romance movies.
wodenokoto 3y ago
I too have noticed how support actors and extras have all become incredibly beautiful and generic. I’ve brushed it off more as a question of availability and less of a directional decision. On the other hand I have lamented the loss of the ugly funny character. Even the lead in scrubs, who is supposed to be scrawny and uncool has a physique to die for. And when shown off in the show it is still the bud of a joke. I’ve always seen that more of a “the actor wants to look good, not for the show, but for everything regarding their career outside the show”. I thoroughly enjoyed this other perspective
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Probably with social media the funnel is wider than ever. Being good looking and fit and putting in lots of effort to that pays decently for thousands of people. So probably all side actors are social mediaing and doing sponsored content on the side. Or more likely the acting / being on reality tv is the side gig
shrubble 3y ago
I'm still surprised every time I come across an article that reminds me of the section in the description of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia about the "Beautiful Ones"... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
javajosh 3y ago
I noticed this when I watched "Raw" recently [0]. It was remarkable because it portrayed horny young students hazing each other and desiring each other and plenty of unselfconscious peer pressuring, which was itself depicted as covertly appreciated and desired by the girls, by way of a license to let go and have fun for a night (like how people often blame alcohol). I kept waiting for the turn or the emotional beat that called out these heinous, sexist, abusive behaviors, but it never came. I noticed something similar when watching Berlin Calling [1] where sex is used in several realistic ways, as both exciting transgression to expressing warmth, friendship and love. Raw is French; Berlin Calling German. Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality. BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film) 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Thanks for the film recommendations. I definitely think SSRIs are a big problem, but the sex problem in general is also not just a US thing. I live in Germany and it is really bad here too. To have sex, first of all you need to meet new people, and it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people What makes you think that?
pelorat 3y ago
Did army service in Sweden in the 90's. 100 men and maybe 5 women in the company. Shared showers. No-one batted an eye.
- dandellion 3y ago
  If that's the case the movie was more accurate than it might have seemed. Did you also fight bugs in an alien planet?
wrp 3y ago
> ...there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural...no one looks like that without calorie restriction. I've known three women who were naturally thin because of their metabolism. They actually had to work at maintaining bulk. I think all three spent some time as models. You can improve a homely face with makeup, but you can't fake a figure (in person).
danw1979 3y ago
> You Are What You Eat, in which a bony harridan screeched at Britons whose feces did not meet her exacting standards This is perhaps the funniest summary of the exploits of “Doctor” Gillian McKeith I’ve ever read.
bowsamic 3y ago
My personal opinion is that there is a far higher rate of neurosis in almost all people now. There is clear evidence from when I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s that there were simply more times where people "bummed about", even very successful people. People drank more and they worried less. IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life. They know they could be working out, they could be calorie counting, they could be learning a new language, they could be sorting out their investments. But, it's impossible to forget this. Once you are infected and connected, you can't return to not taking care of things. Once you have been made aware of the problem, your excuse of ignorance is gone, and you are forever going to be making the explicit decision to not solve your problems. Naturally, this increased neurosis, and lack of ability to let go, is a huge stop on the kind of letting go required for sex. Basically all people now prefer to be alone or in a comfortable space, sorting out their own problems in life.
- badpun 3y ago
  > IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life Funnily enough, if you read Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", his impression of Americans back then (around 1830) was that they're very serious and solemn, because they're aware of how much of their fate is in their hands, and want to work as hard at it as they can. Actually, his point was that people in the US overestimated their agency, as given how many people were working really hard, there were realitvely few who made it into riches that everyone was after.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    I think it happened first in the US and the ideology was spread everywhere else via their media and the internet
pavlov 3y ago
> “Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre” Oppenheimer was horny at least. The sex scenes weren’t tremendous (except maybe for Sanskrit fetishists), but at least Nolan made an effort to show how his wandering eye translated into action.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Interesting enough, I think Oppenheimer needed slightly more sex. There's a part of the movie where he's called a womanizer, yet the movie shows him having two relations (both of them serious) plus an implied flirt with a third woman. According to the biography the movie is based on [1] Oppenheimer "once had half a dozen lovers on the go". That is definitely not the impression I got from the movie. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/truth-oppenheimer-cillian-murphy-christopher-nolan/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/truth-oppenheimer-cillia...
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Noticed this for a while and I think it makes the worlds of movies feel extremely strange and a whole dimension of peoples interactions is missing. 80s movies with the actual violence, actual stakes and actual sexuality feel like watching something in color while a modern blockbuster marvel/disneyslop movie feels like black and white. The corners have all been sanded off.
smallerfish 3y ago
To state the obvious, everything that's in a movie is a deliberate choice by the director. Hitchcock spoke about "playing the viewer like an organ", i.e. manipulating the audience by what is shown, what is not, what is revealed, the order of information being shared with the viewer. Sex scenes can certainly be in a movie for character development, but often are just there to make the audience horny & increase the fun factor and therefore positive experience of the movie. Calling out Nolan for his sterility in movies misses that point; his movies are ideas with stories attached, vs say Bay or Bruckheimer, whose movies are more deliberately products designed for the mass market.
SergeAx 3y ago
2021, please
cubefox 3y ago
(2021)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
naasking 3y ago
Interesting article with some good points. Unfortunately some factual mistakes ruin it a bit. Stark and Pepper Potts did have sexual chemistry shown in their dance and balcony scene in the very first movie. The fact that BMI standards changed does not at all change the fact that average waistlines and weight have been steadily climbing for over 50 years and show no signs of stopping.
RajT88 3y ago
> And I defy you to find a mainstream film with a moment as horny and gay as the Sexy Saxophone Solo from The Lost Boys. It was that, but strangely Tim Cappello is not gay. FWIW, I don't care much about screen chemistry. But friend of mine and her husband are both huge film buffs. The last one which really got her worked up watching was Watchmen in 2009. The author seems to have a point. On the other hand, my wife likes a good love story on screen where sex is not the focus, but emotions. She's a big fan of K-Dramas, and feels like the stories would be impaired by introducing sex (which inevitably would be part of it in American drama). The scope of this complaint seems to mainly be blockbuster films, I suppose.
GuB-42 3y ago
Maybe there is a backlash against the "obligatory sex scene". I have always find them boring and it is not because of the lead couple bodies. First, they tend to feel out of place. When an epic battle is coming up, I want to see an epic battle, not a couple fucking. And then the fucking is often done in the least exciting way possible, as if the producers main goal was to minimize the number of erections in the audience. You don't want your movie to be mistaken as porn do you? So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. The alternative of making really good sex scenes would push the movies into 18+ territory, and I understand the reluctance. And looking and actors with great bodies and sexy outfits is enjoyable as it is, no need for a half assed sex scene that reveals nothing more.
- gspencley 3y ago
  > So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. My opinion is that, just like with "foul language" and violence, we are speaking of artistic devices. These are tools. Does it aid the story or detract? I was a child of the 80s, so I remember the 90s very well. I remember people complaining about "gratuitous" sex scenes. But how do you tell the story of Basic Instinct or Cape Fear without the sex scenes? You know, the ones where the murderer kills during sex. In forbidden love stories, a well placed sex scene can represent crossing the Rubicon. The point at which the characters decide to break taboos and expectations and proceed with their relationship, despite the inevitable consequences that are to follow. I never read or saw 50 Shades of Grey, and I know it's probably a bad example due to it's reception, but from what I understand of that story it could not work without sex scenes. As with everything, use the right tool for the job. If a sex scene is a good way to drive home an important beat in a story, then I say go for it. Just like if a well placed "f-bomb" in a stand-up comedian's joke can drive impact. One last example / analogy: during the early 00s I began to develop an extreme distaste for CGI and action sequences in movies. Just like with the "gratuitous" sex scene, it was blatant, in your face, over done and didn't seem to advance the story. As a practical FX lover, I thought that CGI was a cheap alternative. These days CGI and modern technology are used in conjunction with practical FX more than ever, so that each can contribute what it does well. At least, when the FX themselves are done well. And I don't remember too many recent examples that remind me of The Matrix 2, where the highway chase scene felt like it went on for hours and contributed nothing but boredom. When we recognize that these elements are tools, and that the best result comes from choosing the best tool for the job / problem at hand, then anything and everything ought to be on the table.
chaostheory 3y ago
Imo the root problem to most if not all the issues that he’s citing is time. There’s usually not enough screen time to show the minute details like that. This is why TV is so much better than the movies now. None of his criticisms would apply to TV. Stuff like The Boys is already out there. The other big issue is sales. PG and PG13 tend to have much larger sales due to larger audiences than R rated movies
giantg2 3y ago
While it makes some good points, I think a lot of it depends on what content you are consuming. I feel like there used to be a lot of family oriented shows in the past. There may have been some innuendo for the adults, but nothing really sexual, no vulgar language, etc. It seems incredibly rare to find a show like that today. Think Brady Bunch vs Modern Family. There are plenty of shows available today that are highly sexual, but most of them have moved out of the mainstream because you can cater to the niche more than if it were for a general audience. Sex Life, Spartacus, etc has lots of sexual content. I'm not sure if Game of Thrones fits with the author's take or mine, but there are likely examples of each depending on the scene. We don't really need this content in blockbuster movies when we can get even more graphic content through these shows.
metabagel 3y ago
Outlander (Starz) is a good counterpoint, or perhaps an outlier, with rather long scenes of tender love-making. There are also scenes of sadistic torture and rape, though.
HollowEyes 3y ago
I just assumed the labido waned. After experiencing trauma, both myself and partner haven't really been into that. Add the pandemic, and it's a downer. I now have a tumour in the nethers, and that's kind of killed all opportunity. Appreciate it while you have it. But one thing that annoys me is the thin line between perversion and respectability. And it swings drastically all over the place. It's normal for people to want sex, fantasize etc. And quite healthy. But express that in the wrong company and you can be castigated. As for films I barely ever see any kind of believable relationship. Better call Saul and breaking bad did well. And there are few dramas that make the right nods. Single people make the effort, those in long term relationships not so much. I remember my partner saying something along the lines of, will you still love me when I am old and fat? I hope so. Then I got old and lost my teeth and partner looks at me and sighs. We still love each other.
daniel-cussen 3y ago
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lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Beauty is good. Sex is good. Sexual pleasure per se is good. However, sleeping around is not. Lust is not. Why is beauty good? Because beauty is convertible with the good. What is beautiful is good and vice versa. In this case, a physical beauty is good as it is nearer physical perfection. There are different kinds of beauty, but this is the one currently under discussion. Why is sex good? Because it the actualization of human nature as procreative being. No one has a right to sex, of course, but the dimensions of procreation not directly involving intercourse may be realized otherwise, though also not something you can impose (procreation isn't just sex that successfully realizes its intrinsic end of new human life, but the raising of the children afterward, and we can be mother and father figures in purely spiritual ways, through adoption, or in relations with younger generations; it's why Catholic priests are called fathers, and the heads of convents mothers, for example). The unitive end (which includes bonding) of sex, which can only be understood through the lens of the complementary procreative potentials and the procreative raison d'etre of the sexes and their manifestation in human nature, is also a good of sex, and hence pleasurable. Why is sexual pleasure good per se? Because as noted above, sex is good per se. Good things are pleasurable. Of course, this does means we can suffer from deficiencies, excesses, and disorders in this regard. We can become insensate and inert to goodness in a way that we derive little or no proportionate pleasure from the good. Depressed people are an example. We can experience excess pleasure disproportionate with the good in question. Having an orgasm eating a slice of pizza is an obvious example. We can also experience disordered pleasures, taking pleasure in acts that are depraved and evil. Rape or non-procreative sex or sadism and masochism are examples. But given the objective good of sex, it is normal for it to be pleasurable. Why is sleeping around evil? Because it is opposed to the intrinsic "structure" and end of sex. It is intrinsically exploitative, reducing people to objects to be used for pleasure, and this destroys one's ability to respect human life and love human beings and relate to members of the opposite sex. It destroys the person doing it. Note that you don't need to sleep around to achieve the same effect. People who indulge in pornography are actually worse. At least the person sleeping around is sleeping around with people. The porn user lives in a fantasy land, locked within himself, reducing people to fleeting phantasms of sexual gratification, never relating in anyway to a human person. As disordered as sleeping around is, porn users are worse. Abstain if you can't marry. You'll live. Why is lust evil? Lust is essentially sexual desire divorced from and opposed to reason, which is to say, human nature as rationally knowable. Human nature determines our objective good. It is our duty to recognize it and subjectivize it so that it reflects and is aligned with objective reality. Indulging a subjective that is at odds with the objective is evil. Appropriate strong sexual attraction or desire toward a spouse is not what I have in mind, only disproportionate or disordered sexual desire. One of the effects of lust is that it blinds the mind. The object of sexual desire is reduced to an object of selfish sexual gratification, and nothing besides that object is perceived. It dulls the wits. When we speak of chastity, we mean sexual restraint and purity of intention. It is a matter of discipline and self-control. It is only through chastity that sexuality can be expressed in a healthy and morally licit manner. Love is the willing of the good of someone. Thus, to love yourself is to will your own objective good. To love another is to will their objective good. Since we are social animals, it is bad for us to harm or exploit or will evil on another person. Doing evil destroys the evil doer. Our age is an age obsessed with sex, and yet also an age that is full of sexual disorder and impotence and pornography and loneliness and selfishness. This is not an accident. Sexual immorality destroys a society, making a man a slave of his passions and incidentally someone who is easy to control.
atlas_hugged 3y ago
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Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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fennecfoxy 3y ago
Modern action films show glorious HD violence on screen too, and the victims are usually men. With detailed shots of the gore for us and camera cut-aways or knock-outs for women. I always get some semblance of body count when watching stuff like that. Even with ones like John Wick III that were modern enough to have a couple female "henchmen", or movies that have a female lead action hero or villain, still overwhelmingly gory male deaths. I know _why_ it's done; any violent against women on screen is deemed misogyny porn. But why is it okay for us to see a man's brains blasted out on screen? Or the "shock value" castration or nut shot (which is still apparently hilarious to audiences btw, but maybe not so much the other way around). I'm not calling for more violence against women on screen per se, but I am intrigued by their exclusion even in an environment where we're really starting to embrace strong female characters in media, but the protectionism still runs strong. It mirrors reality, I suppose.

456 points by dogleash 3y ago

version_five 3y ago

2021 based on the comments. I remember reading either this or a similar one some time ago.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Mar 2021 at least, nearly 700 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
jwilk 3y ago
Also: <meta property="article:published_time" content="2021-02-14T05:44:41+00:00" />

SamPatt 3y ago

Some interesting points in here, but the author seems to imply that the obesity epidemic is really just in our minds. I don't buy that part at all.

zolland 3y ago
This is a pretty extreme article, but I think the argument is not that it doesn't exist but rather that it is blown out of proportion. The metric that is used to calculate obesity (specifically at the time they reference) was BMI which is a fairly flawed metric and significantly the obesity line was lowered. Idk how it is calculated now.
- jagraff 3y ago
  BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people, it really only fails for people who have far more muscle mass than most people (body builders). It is highly correlated with health outcomes - people with a BMI over 30 (obese) have significantly higher risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer - this is true at a BMI of 30 and it only gets worse from there. 40% of americans are obese. It's not overblown - if anything, I think most people don't understand just how big of a health crisis it is.
  - zolland 3y ago
    > BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people It isn't really measuring anything. It is just a very general index to gauge how far you diverge from a predetermined height to weight ratio. Maybe that's useful to someone but I wouldn't base any of my decisions on it today.
    - Kirby64 3y ago
      On the margins it may not be useful, but for the "average" person, it is definitely useful. I'd suggest there is no one with a BMI of 30 (besides people with a ton of muscle) that is at a healthy weight. Its a gut check, which is what is helpful.
      - vintermann 3y ago
        You know what they say, most of the volume of a high-dimensional orange is in the skin. The average person is very rare. BMI is best for populations since it's so easy to calculate from easily and frequently collected data. For an individual, you can fairly easily get more accurate measures to predict whatever it is you want to predict.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      If you're not a bodybuilder and not pregnant, it's one of the simplest useful calculations we have. You'd be amazed at how many medical decision-making tools[0] are very simple and are based on outcomes, not rigorous mathematical theory. [0] E.g. NEWS https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib205/chapter/The-technology https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib205/chapter/The-technology
- lockhouse 3y ago
  My eyes tell me that the obesity epidemic is real. Go to any public gathering of a couple dozen people or more and count the obese people you see. Heck, pick up a middle school yearbook, we’re starting obesity young these days. We were hoping our future was Star Trek, but it’s looking more like Wall-E.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Claiming that BMI is flawed is a lazy half-argument. Finish the argument, what should be used instead of BMI? Look at the correlation plots and draw your own BMI line [0]. I think the BMI lines look pretty good for men, but for women who fall into the common BMI range of 25 to 30, the BMI formula tends to underestimate the amount of body fat. It would be nice if everyone could get a DEXA scan regularly, but the data shows that 50% of people would find that they have even more body fat than the BMI charts predict. Again, it's worse for women, most women near the overweight threshold would find that their body fat is higher than expected. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/
  - nonameiguess 3y ago
    This needs to become more widely known. BMI underestimates obesity, not the other way around. Studies that use better measures of body fat percentage consistently find even people who are "normal" weight are fatter than they think. It's why doctors are supposed to now use waist to height ratio as a secondary predictor.
  - zolland 3y ago
    My issue with it is two fold. I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc). I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. It doesn't do a great job of identifying whether or not someone is healthy. So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used). There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
    - angrais 3y ago
      Obviously there are edge cases when applying statistical tools at a population level. That's not the purpose of BMI though. If you're pregnant or weight training then OBVIOUSLY your BMI score is not comparable to others. Most people are neither pregnant nor weight training. I'd even bet that most people haven't performed a weighted squat. >> I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. Being fat is bad for your health. That is a fact. No amount of body positivity advertisements will change that fact. It is healthier to be thinner than obese. Look at the graph above to see BMIs impact on other health outcomes. Also, if you think the obesity crisis is fake/blown up then simply go outside in most American cities and you'll see that many people are obese. > There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant. Again, this is not relevant as the subset of people is so small compared with the whole population. The "data given" is included in BMI. Your relative weight is an indicator of multiple other health outcomes.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  It's a starting point for sure, a more thorough research would look at body weight ratios. That said, while BMI is a skewed metric for muscular people, statistically it's still more representative of obesity than 'dry' weight.
newaccount74 3y ago
Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. Most people don't look like actors, a lot of people are very overweight and out of shape. It's weird that all movies seem to play in a parallel universe where everyone looks like the fittest people ever.
- tayo42 3y ago
  I guess it depends on on the movie, but wealthier cities have significantly less obesity rates then others, like cities in the US south east. There's not that many obese people where I live.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    SF is the best in California and it’s still just over 10%.
  - newaccount74 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm not just talking about obese people, cinema is almost completely devoid of even slightly overweight and out of shape people - ie. normal people.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Another jarring thing is movie people don’t stare at a phone every waking hour.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    I mean if you take the Marvel films, it's because interesting stuff is actually happening (to them) all the time. I wonder how many behind-the-scenes shots there are of the actors checking their phones in between shots, lol. A more general remark would be that nobody in films ever uses the toilet.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      They do if it's relevant to the plot. See - Pulp Fiction.
mvncleaninst 3y ago
More like: there's a "missing middle" with respect to BMI which is common irl but underrepresented in media

zolland 3y ago

> did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol? I don't think the author actually watched Inception lol

heattemp99 3y ago

While this is unpopular to say, I think the advanced age of marriage and promiscuity earlier in life plays a role here. My parents were together from 19, and knowing their style, they may both have been each other's first. As a teenager, I noticed my mother being extremely difficult. Even more so now. My father is no walk in the park either. But I believe they have a deep rooted love from decades and went through every event and basically adult stage in life together. I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades. Each of us has been overseas with countless friends and exs. Many women have been engaged, some married, and we've all had our hearts broken. We've all gained a few lbs. My hair is starting to grey. Can I find someone that enjoys being with me? Sure. Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure. I've heard many long time married old men say that when they look at their partner, they still see the beauty glimmering through that they saw at 19. If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to? How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner? I know this is a judgemental view, but I think it's human nature. Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.

tscopp 3y ago
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  Wouldn't the second best time be an instant after 20 years ago?
  - diarrhea 3y ago
    Peak HN comment.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago

Terr_ 3y ago

To proffer a TLDR: 1. The modern American media landscape reflects a changed zeitgeist, one where new (ever more impractical) heights of physical fitness are presented. 2. BUT it comes with a DECREASE of old emphasis on using it to woo sexual partners, or for hedonistic enjoyment of physical activities. 3. It is instead rooted in a kind of cultural anxiety that one must be able to fight an unspecified enemy, or else as a kind of platonic health-investment.

euroderf 3y ago
There is a certain aesthetic in public sculpture wherein the human body is unclothed and yet quite asexual. It can be seen in public statuary in certain areas in certain eras. I think that this phenom is not unrelated to the subject of the article. It is a kind of glorification of "health" or "physical well-being" - but the nudity speaks to something that is far, far away from sexuality. It can kinda give ya the creeps.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  Platonism, the worship of ideal forms. Its also associated with 1930s fascism. It is unsurprising that the rise of modern fascism has arrived complete with its iconography.

blueridge 3y ago

If anyone hasn't read The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, I'd highly recommend it. There are a few thoughtful chapters on relationships, love, marriage, sex, etc. that are worth reading.

seo-speedwagon 3y ago

I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny. BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different - movies: less horny - television: slightly more horny? - books: roughly unchanged - music: roughly unchanged - video games: much, much hornier So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.

lamontcg 3y ago
Maybe the movie audiences, particularly the blockbuster theater-going audiences, are skewing older and more conservative/old-fashioned now. So the sexuality there tends to be a lot more repressed (while at the same time needing to be optimized around those highly defined abs, in order to maximize profits). And the thirsty kids are all playing video games.
- coderenegade 3y ago
  I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off. Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    The Matrix scene just wasn't necessary, and went on too long. And was intercut with a raunchy-music-video dancing scene. It was a bit odd all round, especially in the generally clinical, straight to the point world of the Matrix movies.

distant_hat 3y ago

One thing that is not considered here is that media is far more globalized than before. If you want a big budget movie to do well across markets like China, India, and the middle East, you tone down the raunchy content or run the risk of movie getting banned out of large markets. TV is more fragmented so maybe it gets away with local tastes.

sacnoradhq 3y ago
This is it. The source is the spinelessness of studios rather than some greater societal shift. However, that's not to say a societal shift cannot follow from reality mirroring fiction because mass media manufactures much of the attitudes of society. I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture. “[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy
- local_issues 3y ago
  The Disney USA logo vs Disney China logo meme is always relevant If you are ok with being a hypocrite, you can push a strong narrative in the US while challenging literally nothing in China/Saudi Arabia.
  - lupire 3y ago
    What meme?
newaccount74 3y ago
That doesn't explain why every single actor has a perfect body. Every man is bulked up, every woman is super slim. 50 years ago it was completely normal that sexy woman on screen had a bit of belly fat, now this is completely unthinkable.
- strken 3y ago
  Does it need a more complicated explanation than increased budgets? 50 years ago CGI was virtually nonexistent and now it's close to photorealistic; does this tell us deep things about how spaceships are secretly aircraft carriers and space explosions are a metaphor for Desert Storm, or is it an artefact of trying harder and paying more?

joker_minmax 3y ago

Personally I feel like the reason behind the change is obvious. Pornography is everywhere. People don't get their kicks from 1970s movie love scenes anymore because hardcore fetish videos are a few clicks away. The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. But the culture carries this at-will objectification as bleedover into everything else. And I think it's also why the youngest generation right now is fixated on knowing their exact, granular label for sexual identity and orientation, even though young people are having less sex than they've ever had.

tmikaeld 3y ago
I agree, there's no mystery or effort needed that builds up lust any more.
- nmz 3y ago
  That's a genre problem, porn is by its definition explosive, too fast to develop anything emotionally, erotica however builds up but it is harder to fund, there is an outlier though, 50 shades, however, for 50 shades to get funding it had to be a best seller for a while, released as an ebook at first. So unless you reach such a level you probably wont be funded, which only exacerbates current puritanical trends.
  - tmikaeld 3y ago
    I find this odd, considering the success of 50 shades and the huge amount of female erotica written in books, there should be a large incentive for pouring money on shows for all of that readily available material. I'm a man and even I find the books more alluring than 99% of what's on TV/Movies.
Nursie 3y ago
I think it's that and a sort of equal-and-opposite prudishness reaction - those sex scenes no longer fly in mainstream movies, they are generally described as exploitative of the actors (particularly women) and inappropriate in various ways. To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button. (That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)

bawolff 3y ago

> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content 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? > The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters > We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney. There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.

39 3y ago
Ghostbusters was PG
- rlayton2 3y ago
  And Terminator was M (in Australia), which means "recommended" for 15 years and older, but not restricted.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales). i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2021)

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381377
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aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

qwerty456127 3y ago

This is what perfect physical+psychological health&developedness is. It's Ok to be physically imperfect but being fit is healthier if you can, also having no deficit of sex with equally fit (which means as attractive as you might dream of) partners and no serious psychological trauma unhealed - you only feel easiy containable healthy sexual desire which is more like wanting to listen to good music or tasting a great wine than like urge or need. I have been lucky to achieve this and wish everyone the same luck but luck mostly works when you do you part of the job (i.e. eat healthy, go to a gym, to a therapist and meditate right). That's the lack of the above which makes people so sexually frustrated that they experience disharmonious uncontainable sexuality which can disturbe theirs and others' comfort and cloud their reason.

labster 3y ago

I was not expecting this piece to mention McMansion Hell, but I was expecting it to mention how the Chinese market has caused movies to cut back on edgy films. Or how the international market in general has made movies cut back on dialogue. Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film. The article isn’t bad, it just describes a trend without ever doing the basic role of a reporter: follow the money.

NoboruWataya 3y ago
> Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film. This was my initial impression. No sex on TV? It's a meme that HBO's most popular shows are full of it. Normal People is another recent example of a TV show that did not exactly shy away from intimate moments. "Follow the money" is right, and the author seems to think that movies in the 80s were full of sex scenes for some reason other than a guy in a suit making a decision that a sex scene would increase revenue. Nowadays porn is on-demand and free so it probably doesn't add as much value to a Hollywood blockbuster. Maybe I'm just a prude but I find most sex scenes to be awkward and shoe-horned in anyway. Why do we need a sex scene in a movie about a crime-fighting superhero anyway? Maybe characters in modern movies are having sex, just... off camera?
NeoTar 3y ago
To quote the Family Guy theme-song: "It seems today that all you see, Is violence in movies and sex on TV" So this pattern was being noted at least as far back as 1999.
- badpun 3y ago
  It has been noticed since the sixties, when comstockery was abolished.
brabel 3y ago
I found the whole thing only applies to American blockbusters. I watch small budget films all the time and there's sexuality oozing most of the time, specially in European movies. If I have any complaints about those movies it's actually in the other direction: it seems that every time a character looks at another who is their love interest, they immediately hook up and kiss passionately, start taking off clothes after barely a few seconds, and suddenly find themselves having intercourse :D - not that I don't like watching it!! But I don't know, at least for me, it took a whole lot more effort than that to get to that point (and now, being a married man for many years, sex is very, very rare which is why I write in the past tense, hehe).

oytis 3y ago

As a counterpoint - as a non-American millennial watching American movies as a child I couldn't understand why there should be sex/romance everywhere. I was not watching romance not to say erotic movies, just action, comedy, horror - yet every director felt obliged to add a pinch of sex everywhere. That felt pretty awkward and weird.

GolDDranks 3y ago
Out of curiosity, where are you from?
- oytis 3y ago
  Russia
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    That is understandable considering that Soviet movies are even more puritan than modern American ones.
jiehong 3y ago
I’m France, I felt the opposite: American movies are so surreal with so much violence and guns for everyone, and sex is weirdly depicted. I think French movies contained some sex scene almost all the time, mainly because it’s what happens in life so it’s just normal to see it in a movie. I think you can see some boobs in a movie if it’s rated for age 12 and up. Nowadays, I think the American culture has rubbed off on Europe a bit more, and nudity alone is less ok in films or movie. So you can go to a movie where it’s expected to not show boobs, and then head up to the public beach where 20% of women are topless and nobody gives a shit. A bit dissonant. Yet, I agree that having a sex scene in a movie sometimes feels like it’s wasting time if it’s not a good part of the story.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Well, US is the very definition of christian conservatism in talk and action, southern half would be considered bible nuts in western Europe, so movies are made with that optimization in mind

Teknoman117 3y ago

I wonder if the body positivity movement has anything to do with the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit. In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health. I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit That comes with age :)
sph 3y ago
Well done for the weight loss. Also funny, I'm quite overweight (a bit lighter than your current weight) and one of the reason I want to get back in shape is because my flirting experience has been dire and non-existent. To be fair, I am not completely in favour of body positivity [1], I wouldn't date myself at this weight, so it's also a me problem. I guess it's all relative :-) -- 1: In my opinion, accept your body and its flaws, but obesity is not to be celebrated. It is a metabolic disease.
pravus 3y ago
I had this same thing happen to me when I went from 343 to 170. It completely messes with me now going into public and having people actually acknowledge my presence and engage with me. I used to just be a ghost. All I can remember from my youth was people pounding on me that being fat was basically evil. You see the same sentiment here from time to time so it still exists.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

If a hero chooses a woman, he antagonizes the wokes, if he chooses a man, he antagonizes the magas ... can't win.

globular-toast 3y 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 No, no. That's false. I can tell you from first hand experience there are women (and presumably men too, but I've never lived with a man) who actually are thin without trying. In fact, of all the women I've dated, the only ones who even remotely cared about diets, calories, exercise etc. were the fat ones. The difference is now fashion has changed towards that super-lean, "ripped", goes to gym look. Now actors (of both sexes) work out just before the camera goes on, get pumped and make sure they are dehydrated. It's just the Instagram fake reality on the big screen. If you look at beautiful actors from the beginning of cinema through to the 90s they were just naturally beautiful people with a healthy amount of body fat.

trabant00 3y ago

I think it's an unavoidable outcome of optimization. Like when you sacrifice Cha for Str and Dex in RPGs. In games you have limited attribute points, but in real life you also have limited resources. Assign them to competing with people and you won't have them for connecting to people. There is now way around it. If I want to focus on my workouts I can't spend time trying to catch her eye contact at the gym. And she doesn't have time for that either, between actually working out and recording that for Instagram.

uwagar 3y ago

wish this article went on and on.

tgv 3y ago

> no one looks like that without calorie restriction That's just not true.

seydor 3y ago

Why should nudity be connected to sexuality ? Have you seen grecoroman statues? Surely they have noticed the tinypenis The movies are probably responding to the shifts of the audience. The keyword of our culture is safety. Sex is slowly becoming equated with physical abuse, and the solution to horniness is placed behind the screen. > Over and over again, she reiterates the point that McMansions are not built to be homes; they’re built to be short-term investments. This is more interesting, and in this movies reflect reality. Expensive new houses nowadays are wholly architecturally uninteresting. Literally none of them is memorable, and all of them can be mistaken for one another. It's really sad that this period of sky high real estate prices does not coincide with a rennaissance of architecture but with the opposite

slim 3y ago
actually grecoroman statues are connected to sexuality https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-men-seemingly-always-naked-in-ancient-greek-art https://aeon.co/essays/why-are-men-seemingly-always-naked-in...

causality0 3y ago

People in real life not being horny is bad but frankly I really enjoy people in cinema not being horny anymore. It's so boring to watch. Watching two people bone in a movie is no more engaging than watching someone browse pornhub.

331c8c71 3y ago
Well, cartoon-ish violence is equally boring to my taste (if that's the alternative)...
- causality0 3y ago
  Sure, but don't make me watch one in order to get the other. Imagine if every romance movie had to have someone with superpowers in it, and then when they stopped including the pointless superpowers someone wrote a whiny article about how kids these days should want more power fantasies in their romance movies.

wodenokoto 3y ago

I too have noticed how support actors and extras have all become incredibly beautiful and generic. I’ve brushed it off more as a question of availability and less of a directional decision. On the other hand I have lamented the loss of the ugly funny character. Even the lead in scrubs, who is supposed to be scrawny and uncool has a physique to die for. And when shown off in the show it is still the bud of a joke. I’ve always seen that more of a “the actor wants to look good, not for the show, but for everything regarding their career outside the show”. I thoroughly enjoyed this other perspective

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coffeebeqn 3y ago
Probably with social media the funnel is wider than ever. Being good looking and fit and putting in lots of effort to that pays decently for thousands of people. So probably all side actors are social mediaing and doing sponsored content on the side. Or more likely the acting / being on reality tv is the side gig

shrubble 3y ago

I'm still surprised every time I come across an article that reminds me of the section in the description of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia about the "Beautiful Ones"... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...

javajosh 3y ago

I noticed this when I watched "Raw" recently [0]. It was remarkable because it portrayed horny young students hazing each other and desiring each other and plenty of unselfconscious peer pressuring, which was itself depicted as covertly appreciated and desired by the girls, by way of a license to let go and have fun for a night (like how people often blame alcohol). I kept waiting for the turn or the emotional beat that called out these heinous, sexist, abusive behaviors, but it never came. I noticed something similar when watching Berlin Calling [1] where sex is used in several realistic ways, as both exciting transgression to expressing warmth, friendship and love. Raw is French; Berlin Calling German. Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality. BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film) 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Calling

bowsamic 3y ago
Thanks for the film recommendations. I definitely think SSRIs are a big problem, but the sex problem in general is also not just a US thing. I live in Germany and it is really bad here too. To have sex, first of all you need to meet new people, and it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people What makes you think that?

pelorat 3y ago

Did army service in Sweden in the 90's. 100 men and maybe 5 women in the company. Shared showers. No-one batted an eye.

dandellion 3y ago
If that's the case the movie was more accurate than it might have seemed. Did you also fight bugs in an alien planet?

wrp 3y ago

> ...there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural...no one looks like that without calorie restriction. I've known three women who were naturally thin because of their metabolism. They actually had to work at maintaining bulk. I think all three spent some time as models. You can improve a homely face with makeup, but you can't fake a figure (in person).

danw1979 3y ago

> You Are What You Eat, in which a bony harridan screeched at Britons whose feces did not meet her exacting standards This is perhaps the funniest summary of the exploits of “Doctor” Gillian McKeith I’ve ever read.

bowsamic 3y ago

My personal opinion is that there is a far higher rate of neurosis in almost all people now. There is clear evidence from when I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s that there were simply more times where people "bummed about", even very successful people. People drank more and they worried less. IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life. They know they could be working out, they could be calorie counting, they could be learning a new language, they could be sorting out their investments. But, it's impossible to forget this. Once you are infected and connected, you can't return to not taking care of things. Once you have been made aware of the problem, your excuse of ignorance is gone, and you are forever going to be making the explicit decision to not solve your problems. Naturally, this increased neurosis, and lack of ability to let go, is a huge stop on the kind of letting go required for sex. Basically all people now prefer to be alone or in a comfortable space, sorting out their own problems in life.

badpun 3y ago
> IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life Funnily enough, if you read Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", his impression of Americans back then (around 1830) was that they're very serious and solemn, because they're aware of how much of their fate is in their hands, and want to work as hard at it as they can. Actually, his point was that people in the US overestimated their agency, as given how many people were working really hard, there were realitvely few who made it into riches that everyone was after.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  I think it happened first in the US and the ideology was spread everywhere else via their media and the internet

pavlov 3y ago

> “Christopher Nolan’s inexplicably sexless oeuvre” Oppenheimer was horny at least. The sex scenes weren’t tremendous (except maybe for Sanskrit fetishists), but at least Nolan made an effort to show how his wandering eye translated into action.

probably_wrong 3y ago
Interesting enough, I think Oppenheimer needed slightly more sex. There's a part of the movie where he's called a womanizer, yet the movie shows him having two relations (both of them serious) plus an implied flirt with a third woman. According to the biography the movie is based on [1] Oppenheimer "once had half a dozen lovers on the go". That is definitely not the impression I got from the movie. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/truth-oppenheimer-cillian-murphy-christopher-nolan/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/truth-oppenheimer-cillia...
- networkchad 3y ago
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whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Noticed this for a while and I think it makes the worlds of movies feel extremely strange and a whole dimension of peoples interactions is missing. 80s movies with the actual violence, actual stakes and actual sexuality feel like watching something in color while a modern blockbuster marvel/disneyslop movie feels like black and white. The corners have all been sanded off.

smallerfish 3y ago

To state the obvious, everything that's in a movie is a deliberate choice by the director. Hitchcock spoke about "playing the viewer like an organ", i.e. manipulating the audience by what is shown, what is not, what is revealed, the order of information being shared with the viewer. Sex scenes can certainly be in a movie for character development, but often are just there to make the audience horny & increase the fun factor and therefore positive experience of the movie. Calling out Nolan for his sterility in movies misses that point; his movies are ideas with stories attached, vs say Bay or Bruckheimer, whose movies are more deliberately products designed for the mass market.

SergeAx 3y ago

2021, please

cubefox 3y ago

(2021)

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naasking 3y ago

Interesting article with some good points. Unfortunately some factual mistakes ruin it a bit. Stark and Pepper Potts did have sexual chemistry shown in their dance and balcony scene in the very first movie. The fact that BMI standards changed does not at all change the fact that average waistlines and weight have been steadily climbing for over 50 years and show no signs of stopping.

RajT88 3y ago

> And I defy you to find a mainstream film with a moment as horny and gay as the Sexy Saxophone Solo from The Lost Boys. It was that, but strangely Tim Cappello is not gay. FWIW, I don't care much about screen chemistry. But friend of mine and her husband are both huge film buffs. The last one which really got her worked up watching was Watchmen in 2009. The author seems to have a point. On the other hand, my wife likes a good love story on screen where sex is not the focus, but emotions. She's a big fan of K-Dramas, and feels like the stories would be impaired by introducing sex (which inevitably would be part of it in American drama). The scope of this complaint seems to mainly be blockbuster films, I suppose.

GuB-42 3y ago

Maybe there is a backlash against the "obligatory sex scene". I have always find them boring and it is not because of the lead couple bodies. First, they tend to feel out of place. When an epic battle is coming up, I want to see an epic battle, not a couple fucking. And then the fucking is often done in the least exciting way possible, as if the producers main goal was to minimize the number of erections in the audience. You don't want your movie to be mistaken as porn do you? So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. The alternative of making really good sex scenes would push the movies into 18+ territory, and I understand the reluctance. And looking and actors with great bodies and sexy outfits is enjoyable as it is, no need for a half assed sex scene that reveals nothing more.

gspencley 3y ago
> So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. My opinion is that, just like with "foul language" and violence, we are speaking of artistic devices. These are tools. Does it aid the story or detract? I was a child of the 80s, so I remember the 90s very well. I remember people complaining about "gratuitous" sex scenes. But how do you tell the story of Basic Instinct or Cape Fear without the sex scenes? You know, the ones where the murderer kills during sex. In forbidden love stories, a well placed sex scene can represent crossing the Rubicon. The point at which the characters decide to break taboos and expectations and proceed with their relationship, despite the inevitable consequences that are to follow. I never read or saw 50 Shades of Grey, and I know it's probably a bad example due to it's reception, but from what I understand of that story it could not work without sex scenes. As with everything, use the right tool for the job. If a sex scene is a good way to drive home an important beat in a story, then I say go for it. Just like if a well placed "f-bomb" in a stand-up comedian's joke can drive impact. One last example / analogy: during the early 00s I began to develop an extreme distaste for CGI and action sequences in movies. Just like with the "gratuitous" sex scene, it was blatant, in your face, over done and didn't seem to advance the story. As a practical FX lover, I thought that CGI was a cheap alternative. These days CGI and modern technology are used in conjunction with practical FX more than ever, so that each can contribute what it does well. At least, when the FX themselves are done well. And I don't remember too many recent examples that remind me of The Matrix 2, where the highway chase scene felt like it went on for hours and contributed nothing but boredom. When we recognize that these elements are tools, and that the best result comes from choosing the best tool for the job / problem at hand, then anything and everything ought to be on the table.

chaostheory 3y ago

Imo the root problem to most if not all the issues that he’s citing is time. There’s usually not enough screen time to show the minute details like that. This is why TV is so much better than the movies now. None of his criticisms would apply to TV. Stuff like The Boys is already out there. The other big issue is sales. PG and PG13 tend to have much larger sales due to larger audiences than R rated movies

giantg2 3y ago

While it makes some good points, I think a lot of it depends on what content you are consuming. I feel like there used to be a lot of family oriented shows in the past. There may have been some innuendo for the adults, but nothing really sexual, no vulgar language, etc. It seems incredibly rare to find a show like that today. Think Brady Bunch vs Modern Family. There are plenty of shows available today that are highly sexual, but most of them have moved out of the mainstream because you can cater to the niche more than if it were for a general audience. Sex Life, Spartacus, etc has lots of sexual content. I'm not sure if Game of Thrones fits with the author's take or mine, but there are likely examples of each depending on the scene. We don't really need this content in blockbuster movies when we can get even more graphic content through these shows.

metabagel 3y ago

Outlander (Starz) is a good counterpoint, or perhaps an outlier, with rather long scenes of tender love-making. There are also scenes of sadistic torture and rape, though.

HollowEyes 3y ago

I just assumed the labido waned. After experiencing trauma, both myself and partner haven't really been into that. Add the pandemic, and it's a downer. I now have a tumour in the nethers, and that's kind of killed all opportunity. Appreciate it while you have it. But one thing that annoys me is the thin line between perversion and respectability. And it swings drastically all over the place. It's normal for people to want sex, fantasize etc. And quite healthy. But express that in the wrong company and you can be castigated. As for films I barely ever see any kind of believable relationship. Better call Saul and breaking bad did well. And there are few dramas that make the right nods. Single people make the effort, those in long term relationships not so much. I remember my partner saying something along the lines of, will you still love me when I am old and fat? I hope so. Then I got old and lost my teeth and partner looks at me and sighs. We still love each other.

daniel-cussen 3y ago

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lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Beauty is good. Sex is good. Sexual pleasure per se is good. However, sleeping around is not. Lust is not. Why is beauty good? Because beauty is convertible with the good. What is beautiful is good and vice versa. In this case, a physical beauty is good as it is nearer physical perfection. There are different kinds of beauty, but this is the one currently under discussion. Why is sex good? Because it the actualization of human nature as procreative being. No one has a right to sex, of course, but the dimensions of procreation not directly involving intercourse may be realized otherwise, though also not something you can impose (procreation isn't just sex that successfully realizes its intrinsic end of new human life, but the raising of the children afterward, and we can be mother and father figures in purely spiritual ways, through adoption, or in relations with younger generations; it's why Catholic priests are called fathers, and the heads of convents mothers, for example). The unitive end (which includes bonding) of sex, which can only be understood through the lens of the complementary procreative potentials and the procreative raison d'etre of the sexes and their manifestation in human nature, is also a good of sex, and hence pleasurable. Why is sexual pleasure good per se? Because as noted above, sex is good per se. Good things are pleasurable. Of course, this does means we can suffer from deficiencies, excesses, and disorders in this regard. We can become insensate and inert to goodness in a way that we derive little or no proportionate pleasure from the good. Depressed people are an example. We can experience excess pleasure disproportionate with the good in question. Having an orgasm eating a slice of pizza is an obvious example. We can also experience disordered pleasures, taking pleasure in acts that are depraved and evil. Rape or non-procreative sex or sadism and masochism are examples. But given the objective good of sex, it is normal for it to be pleasurable. Why is sleeping around evil? Because it is opposed to the intrinsic "structure" and end of sex. It is intrinsically exploitative, reducing people to objects to be used for pleasure, and this destroys one's ability to respect human life and love human beings and relate to members of the opposite sex. It destroys the person doing it. Note that you don't need to sleep around to achieve the same effect. People who indulge in pornography are actually worse. At least the person sleeping around is sleeping around with people. The porn user lives in a fantasy land, locked within himself, reducing people to fleeting phantasms of sexual gratification, never relating in anyway to a human person. As disordered as sleeping around is, porn users are worse. Abstain if you can't marry. You'll live. Why is lust evil? Lust is essentially sexual desire divorced from and opposed to reason, which is to say, human nature as rationally knowable. Human nature determines our objective good. It is our duty to recognize it and subjectivize it so that it reflects and is aligned with objective reality. Indulging a subjective that is at odds with the objective is evil. Appropriate strong sexual attraction or desire toward a spouse is not what I have in mind, only disproportionate or disordered sexual desire. One of the effects of lust is that it blinds the mind. The object of sexual desire is reduced to an object of selfish sexual gratification, and nothing besides that object is perceived. It dulls the wits. When we speak of chastity, we mean sexual restraint and purity of intention. It is a matter of discipline and self-control. It is only through chastity that sexuality can be expressed in a healthy and morally licit manner. Love is the willing of the good of someone. Thus, to love yourself is to will your own objective good. To love another is to will their objective good. Since we are social animals, it is bad for us to harm or exploit or will evil on another person. Doing evil destroys the evil doer. Our age is an age obsessed with sex, and yet also an age that is full of sexual disorder and impotence and pornography and loneliness and selfishness. This is not an accident. Sexual immorality destroys a society, making a man a slave of his passions and incidentally someone who is easy to control.

atlas_hugged 3y ago

[flagged]

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Modern action films show glorious HD violence on screen too, and the victims are usually men. With detailed shots of the gore for us and camera cut-aways or knock-outs for women. I always get some semblance of body count when watching stuff like that. Even with ones like John Wick III that were modern enough to have a couple female "henchmen", or movies that have a female lead action hero or villain, still overwhelmingly gory male deaths. I know _why_ it's done; any violent against women on screen is deemed misogyny porn. But why is it okay for us to see a man's brains blasted out on screen? Or the "shock value" castration or nut shot (which is still apparently hilarious to audiences btw, but maybe not so much the other way around). I'm not calling for more violence against women on screen per se, but I am intrigued by their exclusion even in an environment where we're really starting to embrace strong female characters in media, but the protectionism still runs strong. It mirrors reality, I suppose.