A word on sex (or lack thereof)

Where have all the sex scenes gone? 

The puritannical foundation of America runs deep. It can be seen as the throughline for this whole mess. The proliferation of violence on screen versus nudity has been well documented. I'd point to Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated for that conversation. Yet it's only gotten worse. Marvel and DC have some of the hottest celebrities suit up for sexlessness. Everyone is chiseled into greek god levels of beauty. Yet nobody is having sex. 

Rich Juzwiak, a sex columnist for Slate and senior writer on Jezebel posits that streaming has changed the game beyond recognition. "That the decline of the sex scene coincided with the rise of internet porn doesn't seem random at all. When sex is at your fingertips, there's less of a need for it in mainstream entertainment. I don't think we're any less sex obsessed than we were in the 70's. I think we're compartmentalising."

As a result, we have seen the near elimination of the erotic thriller. A genre whose popularity flourished in the 90's, wained in the 00's and found itself on direct to video. The big movies that did have steamy sex were Original Sin and Killing Me Softly. Both of which committed the sin of being boring. 

Some erotic films snuck in during the 2010s. On the foreign market, we have gotten probably the best erotic thriller of the past 20 years in The Handmaiden. France's Stranger By the Lake is the rare gay erotic thriller. 2021 got a little sexy with Benedetta and Titane. That being said, the sex that is prevelant in media is mostly on television. This could be because the people performing it are not known names. 

One of the other reasons was back in the 80's and 90's, the big stars in these movies were Michael Douglas, Mickey Rourke, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone. If a film like Basic Instinct came out now, it's hard to imagine any of the big stars of today being in it. Juzwiak's article rings more than true. Even porn has become disposable content now. It's easier to make and distribute. The 70's and 80's had John Holmes and Ron Jeremy. There's no names like those in today's public consciousness. Male nudity is practically non existant. When it is being used, it is either in a gross out comedy for a punchline or it's in an austere art film like Shame. Films are pretending to build a world grounded in realism that is completely devoid of one of the core elements of the human experience 

In the post #metoo era, stories have come out where female stars were pressured to do these nude scenes as far back as Last Tango In Paris. Any sex scene that does happen is recontextualized into "the "male gaze", where women are portrayed as objects, stripped of agency and reduced to man's wish fufillment." says Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post. As if to say women are not sexual beings at all. 

The backlash against how misogynist the film industry has been/still is is warranted. Men haven't had to deal with this as much. But the solutions the industry have come up with are backwards. 

We shouldn't lean into puritanism. Lean into everybody being naked. We now have intimacy coordinators. There are more things in place to create a safe space for nude scenes than there were back then. I would hate to see the industry move forward in being more decent just to be less attacked. Because at the end of the day, it is performative. People are not mad about nudity. They are mad about misogyny. You can have a film without any nudity and still have a misogynist message in it while having a film with nudity and have a sex positive message in it.