chapotraphouse

"Sex is boring unless you're doing it."

-Ridley Scott

No hate to people with a consensual voyeur fetish and all but like...I would say the majority of sex scenes in mainstream films are entirely gratuitous. There are absolutely examples of sex scenes where I think they add to the characterization or story and removing them changes things (off the top of my head: American Psycho, and A History of Violence), but if you're putting sex in the movie because "OOOOH BOOBIES"....yeah...I grew up with internet porn. Its not all that exciting.

sex scenes in movies are boring when you can have the most insane porn imaginable beamed directly to your senses whenever you want. the youth aren't prudes, they're desensitized

i don't care because i don't watch movies but if you're going to show me two people steaming it up unprompted they better not be heterosexuals

I feel like people often ask for more nuance when what they want is more context. Whether not sex is appropriate for a given piece of media is almost entirely contextual.

If it doesn't do anything novel then there's literally no point to it.

If it's between a fucking vampire and a bear it gets a pass because it's kooky.

i'm barely outside the age range of this study and i don't like sex in media because i'm a pathetic basement dwelling troglodyte incel and it makes me sad to remember that sex exists and that other people recieve love and/or attraction sometimes.

edit: this is not ironic, if anything its a bit self deprecating and exaggerated but not much.

I'd love to see the conventional practice of having at least a nude/sex/love scene in every big picture wither away. Most of the time, it's introduced as a formulaic ingredient in the reigning recipe that is Hollywood-ism which has negatively influenced other foreign film industries. Nothing worse than inorganically shoehorned sex scenes in what would otherwise still be perfectly enjoyable, well-rounded films.

I speak from experience of deciding what to watch with my family when I was young. We'd have to flick through the content warning section of IMDB so my parents would know when to skip forward or cover my eyes. It's annoying and doesn't add that much value, if any. Well-written chemistry can reveal physical intimacy without overtly showing it. I say that while keeping in mind that sometimes it can be appropriate, if thematically or stylistically applied.

The going theories that I like are either that alienation and the internet have seriously messed people up, or that this is part of a recursive feedback loop with the conglomeration of media under bigger and bigger corporations. The corps want a bland product they can sell to as many people as possible. Alienated viewers, desperate for connection, watch the bland corporate product and assimilate some part of it into their self-identity.

Back when, independent productions could take more leeway on these things, risk making a movie or publishing a book that might make most people uncomfortable but would become part of the counter-culture. But now there is no independent media, and no counter-culture.

But I'm talking out of my ass, of course. I'm no culture critic or sociologist. This is just cobbled together from online discourse, could be dead wrong.

i might like sex scenes more if most of them weren't so male-gaze-y, but since most are im really not interested in watching softcore porn for a few minutes, no. i didn't think that was a hot take actually so im surprised this struggle session is so long lol

you can definitely have sex scenes that are good and adding to the work, but i think that's unrelated to wanting less sex in media in general. im kind of weirded out by how many people are saying that wanting such is puritan nonsense

definitely agree with the other poster who mentioned how people who still live with their parents want less sex scenes in movies, lmao.

but more to developing a critical theory of mass culture... I am curious if there is some effect of using sex appeal to literally sell everything for the last several decades dovetailing with the constant hijacking done by the attention economy. our brains are constantly trying to filter out unhelpful sensations while billions of dollars are spent trying to insert those sensations to the front of the cognitive experience, and sex appeal is the #1 vehicle for it.

when it comes to media, the sudden appearance of some tittilating visuals tends to fill me with annoyance anymore. like I'm conditioned to associate it with some thought terminating pitch or attempt to undermine my self worth.

ITT exactly what you'd expect.

I like a couple of 🦐 games and honestly love how stupidly horny some stuff like Witcher is. Obviously, everything has its place, though. Ultimately the fucking makes canon sense to me in stuff like Baldur's Gate, but only because adventurers tend to live life in the fast lane.