The Puritanical Eye

November 26, 2023 11:29 PM

The disappearance of the sex scene in American cinema, the suppression of the body under the moral imperative of commodities in neoliberal capitalism, and Verhoeven as antagonizer.
posted by brundlefly (138 comments total)

This seems incomplete without some discussion of the international market, especially China, affecting sales prospects; only a cursory mention of #MeToo; and especially no mention of how the internet has affected things. We’re somewhat incoherently told “teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read — slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net mobile magazine informational plane” in a passage saying Millennials and Gen-Z are only looking for short clips & product placement without any mention of the fact that those two generations were the first to adulthood with both widespread internet porn and hookup apps, which suggests an alternative explanation that they’re not buying otherwise marginal movies like Showgirls just to see a sex scene.
posted by adamsc at 12:01 AM on November 27, 2023 [36 favorites]

Just reading the link text before checking where it leads, I was preparing to flag this as a double, thinking it would be to Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny (which I see is one of the works cited).
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 12:15 AM on November 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

Highly highly recommend Karina Longworth's "Erotic Eighties" and "Erotic Nineties" series on her You Must Remember This podcast for a more thoughtful well-researched, detailed, witty history of the hinterland to this
posted by melisande at 12:31 AM on November 27, 2023 [23 favorites]

This genre of article is among my favorites. A Very Well Read Person is angry at something being the way it is (here, the lack of sex scenes) and needs to explain why. They pick a thing they dislike ideologically (here, primarily, big C Capitalism) and proceed to weave a path through whatever books they've read that can—with somewhat tenuous logical links—be seen to support the conclusion that the thing they dislike is, in fact, the reason for yet another symptom of our societal downfall. Attempt to mask the shakiness of your arguments with profuse verbiage and boom, you've got yourself an article.

Another Very Well Read Person could use an entirely different set of books to craft an entirely different argument for an entirely different cause for the same thing at which they're also angry, and make it seem equally plausible and equally unverifiable.

Are the claims in either case factual? Are they even partially factual? Who knows! But they're fun and/or infuriating to read, at least. Thanks for the post!
posted by jklaiho at 12:31 AM on November 27, 2023 [65 favorites]

The one sex scene in Starship Troopers is still a mystery to me. Are these two beautiful people looking for genuine intimacy or faking it to establish dominance hierarchy. It doesn't matter anyway, because as satire demands, the State (by way of Rasczak) pops in the tent and gives them a strict military timeline to both orgasm.

The writer is correct that Verhoeven has to go to Europe to make films like Elle and Benedetta. But even before then, most of the sex scenes in his films, if they can be called sex scenes, seem about two people playing dominance or power games - and the physicality comes second, if at all.

Since porn is everywhere here in the US, perhaps the decline of financing for his work here might be less about American discomfort with sex and more about the discomfort of the movie industry to allow questioning of hierarchies sold by its products.

Especially when looking at the alternatives to Verhoeven and Cronenberg, which have boiled down to basically one or another Marvel superhero film, the themes of which are all about protecting hierarchy or at least preserving the social order of the world these films live in. Superheroes in these films are beautiful but sexless; there's no time for real intimacy when they have to punch people to put their universe back into order.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:33 AM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

We watched honey I shrunk the kids for family movie night and it was striking how… horny those teenagers were for each other by the end. And yet I was relieved to find Top Gun Maverick was sexless enough that I could take my kid to it.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:35 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

The sex scene in the algorithm-driven, market-oriented age...

Well, that spoiled the mood

*rolls over*

posted by y2karl at 1:02 AM on November 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

Q: What do you call it when you use ChatGPT as birth control?

A: The algorithm method.
posted by chavenet at 1:24 AM on November 27, 2023 [39 favorites]

when you use ChatGPT as birth control

Does it talk you out of it?
posted by fairmettle at 2:23 AM on November 27, 2023

I don’t miss sex scenes, to the extent they’re absent. I’ve rarely found them actually sexy, and most of the time they’re unnecessary to tell the story. I certainly don’t miss them when I watch a movie with our kids or my in-laws.

I’ve also read far too many accounts/interviews about actors who didn’t really want to do nude scenes being pushed into it. I’d be happy to see that go away.
posted by jzb at 3:41 AM on November 27, 2023 [33 favorites]

Sex is an integral part of life, and has much more to do with our human experience than does any CG-y hallway fight. As the superhero genre fades away, it will be interesting to see whether adult concerns become prominent in films again.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:14 AM on November 27, 2023 [23 favorites]

Yes, I'm not sure what the punching:fucking ratio is for most people, but I'm guessing that most lives tend toward the fucking side of things.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:38 AM on November 27, 2023 [34 favorites]

Sex is an integral part of life, and has much more to do with our human experience than does any CG-y hallway fight.

Any asexual person would disagree on this point.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:43 AM on November 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

Well, asexual people mostly got here because of sex, and not for any reason to do with Spider-Man or Adam Warlock. And I would argue that sex as metaphor for human relationships is more relevant to the average asexual than punching as metaphor for...I'm not sure what. Punching, but with less gravitas?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:54 AM on November 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

I've actually wondered, so we have Pacific Rim, which aimed to deliver giant robots punching monsters. Whatever you think of the movie, it delivered what it said on the tin. Kill Bill aimed to deliver grindhouse and ultra violence, and it did.

Where's the ultimate in "sexy" then?

I was reminded of this when Tarzan The Ape Man (1981) played on free to air TV. It was such a bad movie, I initially thought it was the 1932 movie by the same name, and I was praising how great the movie was and how well it held up. Once I found out it was actually the 1981 remake, I immediately starting lambasting it for how bad it was. (seriously, in that time period, we had Indiana Jones, Star Wars, how could they make... this?)

Anyway, my point was that that movie probably aimed to be the ultimate in sexy. It was panned by critics but was a commercial success. One critic said there were 36 breast exposures and it was pretty much softcore porn. Jane gets into the water with Tarzan and suggestively eats a banana and tells him she's virgin. Then she unbuttons her shirt and Tarzan tenderly fondles her breasts since he hasn't seen a female human before.

Roger Ebert actually gave the film 2.5 stars, because well, there have already been so many Tarzan films focused on other aspects of the myth, so why not make this the one that focused on the eroticism between Tarzan and Jane? At least the director is giving us something new!

Video games are more my wheelhouse. I feel like North American / British games tend to follow in the same footsteps. Even when there is sex - like in Mass Effect or Dragon Age - it's incredibly sterile and puritanical. Morrigan wears MORE clothes in bed than when she's fighting monsters!

Witcher 3 (Polish in origin) was more "sexy", eg the character Keira Metz, sorceresses use glamours to seduce people to get what they want! Of course they're sexy! She makes you a picnic and makes eyes at you and says she wants to sleep with you and by the way she needs a favour from you as a friend. And later she drugs you and double crosses you.

Even in Honkai Star Rail (from China), a totally innocuous AAA game with a PG 12+ age rating, it's a sci-fi game where the crew of the Express go exploring through different galaxies. One of your companions (March 7th) basically invites you to her bedroom and gives you an almost-nude lightcone of herself (think of it like a 3D holographic memory) and then asks you if she looks cute. Maybe she's teasing, maybe she just wanted to share an important part of her past with you, whatever the reason, it felt more raw, direct, authentic and sexy than stuff I see in AAA western games.

I'm sure there are numerous counter-examples, but I'm generally disappointed by how puritanical American and British games tend to be.
posted by xdvesper at 4:59 AM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s were intended to titillate, and could do so and make money because porn was not mainstream. So you could sell a movie like Body Heat or 9 1/2 Weeks or Fatal Attraction with two (or three) hot actors fumbling around an awkward plot for two hours. You went to the theatre because you wanted to see how nasty they'd actually get on screen. That was exactly the pitch: "sexy thriller" emphasis on sexy.

Now no one cares. You wanna see attractive people banging, you open your web browser. You can't sell sex on screen any more, not when it's freely available. You wanna spend $5M of your film's budget on a sex scene, two or three days of filming, paying your actors more, you're not going to get that back in box office. There's no return on investment. Have them fuck off screen, give a wink and a kiss, morning light and loose bedsheet, and we can imagine it for much less money. Get on with the plot, such as it is, and showing things like robot fights, or superhero punches.


It's just economics.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:05 AM on November 27, 2023 [44 favorites]

If people were interested in making movies "about" sex, or "about" sexuality, the sex scenes wouldn't always feature small or at least thin young normatively feminine women with small regular hollywood features performing sex in ways that are titillating even if occasionally unsettling and sexily transgressive, because that's not the sexuality you encounter in life - even in situations where everyone is more or less small thin young and fairly attractive.

I read this piece the other day and found myself wondering a lot about the writer, because I was around for the late eighties and nineties "erotic" movie scenes in the wild and I found them incredibly alienating. To the extent that they affected me at all, they didn't make me think deeply about power or whatever. Their real underlying message shown through - only people who look like this and act like this are "real" sexual people and have stories that are worth telling; all other people and bodies are failed, disgusting, bad, shameful, anti-erotic, etc. It seems to me like they would mostly be successful for people who could identify to some extent with the actors at least enough to get at some kind of "meaning" other than "all other bodies are bad".

I guess I'd say that I'm old enough to have seen a lot of moral panics and when you look back on them you rarely think "yes, we were correct to panic that others had a theory of art that was wrong". And definitely the puriteens/no one is horny discourse is a fairly widespread moral panic. We might ask ourselves why it seems so self-evident that young people need to be consuming a lot of narrative media with explicit sex in it, especially when we hold up the eighties/nineties "erotic thriller" as some kind of terrific way to treat gender, sexuality and bodies. Those movies may be quite interesting to think about and write about, but I saw several of them as a teenager and they were gross and misogynist in how they actually appeared on screen, even if you can extract a "feminist" reading.

Surely if we are anxious about there not being enough sex in movies, we can just stream Nine And A Half Weeks ourselves rather than insisting that other people are doing it wrong.
posted by Frowner at 5:32 AM on November 27, 2023 [38 favorites]

If you want a dingbat theory, I'm suspicious of movies as a form because they are TOO BIG. Not only are they too big if you watch them in the theater - too overwhelming, too encompassing, too easily persuading you of their viewpoint - but they require too much capital to make and distribute, so only the very rarest of movies will be allowed to do anything but recapitulate the usual terrible ideas about bodies, gender, sexuality, the family, etc, no matter what scrim of narrative is over the top.

I mean, I love going to the movies and being overwhelmed by the spectacle, I find the whole thing fascinating, but the movie form itself is pretty much always going to be advertising capitalist patriarchy, no matter how much smart people wish it were otherwise.
posted by Frowner at 5:35 AM on November 27, 2023 [21 favorites]

1. There are intimacy consultants and a number of clever but unobtrusive devices to cover actual genitals that are used to make sex scenes less uncomfortable for actors.

2. There are a million popular novels with both hot sex and lots of plot. People don't always just want porn

3. One of the legacies of the MPAA is that some sex acts are considered more explicit, often the kind that women like, or anything non-straight, so writing good/ less sexist sex scenes is more difficult.
posted by emjaybee at 5:39 AM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

I enjoyed the read, but this really needs some quantitative analysis to be compelling. Plus, I have two counterarguments:

1. Every fucking show on a streaming platform has the exact same, pointless, sterile, boring sex scenes inserted by reflex by lazy writers or overactive marketers because how else would the audience understand these two people are sexually attracted to one another unless we add a generically-directed scene, and

2.the sex scene in Oppenheimer. We are better off without sex scenes if that is the type of scene we decide needs to exist.
posted by Room 101 at 5:41 AM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

I couldn't even bear to read the piece, though I tried, because it seemed based on a false initial premise. There were not sex scenes in 80s and 90s movies, there was not a sexuality being expressed in mainstream cinema. We weren't seeing some essential part of humanity on-screen. It was just a parade of women being asked to bare themselves for the camera. It was purely transactional--"here, you've paid your three dollars or however much movies cost in 1984, here's a little something for your trouble." And how you know this is that the camera never treated men the same way. All these absolutely essential heterosexual pairings that are missing from the big screen now, in the 80s and 90s they were missing the guy. He was a blurry afterthought, if he existed at all (and often he didn't, if we were being asked to watch, say, someone changing her clothes). To show a man the same way would have risked the movie being labeled gay, because all that male-gaze stuff turned out to be absolutely true of cinema: A movie is a picture of a girl meant to be looked at by a boy in a dark room.
posted by mittens at 5:47 AM on November 27, 2023 [45 favorites]

Sex is an integral part of life, and has much more to do with our human experience than does any CG-y hallway fight. As the superhero genre fades away, it will be interesting to see whether adult concerns become prominent in films again.

I agree, and really hope the superhero genre is on the way out, but echoing others here I think there are two big questions: will Hollywood start making scenes which are more realistic in terms of the plot and characterization, rather than seeming like checking a box in the actor’s contract and/or giving the director an excuse to ogle an actress his daughter’s age?; and how much detail do they actually need to show? Most of the normal sex life stuff works just fine with the actors sharing “do you want this?” looks, maybe a shot or two of eye contact during, etc. There are plots where more might make sense to have a longer scene for plot reasons – e.g. someone rebounding from past bad experiences having a slow escalation of consent as they decide they’re really into it or someone who came out of the closet late in life negotiating a new, somewhat different experience – but those tend not to be the kind of things major movies had in the script, and in a lot of cases they’d be very much different for not involving 20 year olds with perfect abs.
posted by adamsc at 5:52 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are a million popular novels with both hot sex and lots of plot. People don't always just want porn

I feel like that shows the opposite: a lot of those popular novels (e.g., the entire "bodice ripper" genre) were indeed vehicles to deliver basically pornographic sexual content that otherwise would be hard to do.
posted by star gentle uterus at 5:59 AM on November 27, 2023

Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s were intended to titillate, and could do so and make money because porn was not mainstream.

I think that depends on how you define mainstream, though. Certainly, by the 90s, porn had become ubiquitous, largely because you could go into go into almost any independent video rental store in any town, find a well-marked “adult” area, and walk out with as many professional porn videos as you cared to. And, everyone knew the videos were there whether they cared to rent any or not.

The 80s and 90s also saw the arrival of home video recording which...well...you know. Hell, by the late 90s, Volkswagen US ran a commercial for their anti-lock brakes, the subtext of which was that the young couple driving the VW had just accidentally returned their home-made sexy tape to the video store. If that isn’t mainstream, I don’t know what is.

I guess all this is to say that I would contend that sex scenes in the 80s and 90s were intended more to compete with the public’s awareness/mainstreaming of porn.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:04 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Certainly, by the 90s, porn had become ubiquitous, largely because you could go into go into almost any independent video rental store in any town, find a well-marked “adult” area, and walk out with as many professional porn videos as you cared to.

Sure, but with video you're driving to the video store, walking behind the curtain, bringing a tape out front to the cashier, who you may know, and then driving back a day later. It also requires more premeditation, and costs money. I'm sure it was a lot better than going to a gross run-down theater in the seventies and eighties, but it's not exactly friction-free, so to speak.

An erotic thriller didn't solve all those problems, but you can see why there was a bit more pent-up demand.
posted by condour75 at 6:12 AM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

1. Every fucking show on a streaming platform has the exact same, pointless, sterile, boring sex scenes inserted by reflex by lazy writers or overactive marketers because how else would the audience understand these two people are sexually attracted to one another unless we add a generically-directed scene, and

I feel like we are probably watching different shows, just in that I think there is more variety out there in series marketed for adults. First, there are a lot of shows meant for adult audiences that don't have any sex or intimacy at all -- lots of the detective and police procedural shows are like this. Second, you have shows like what you describe that drop in a few sex scenes, often filmed in cheesy softcore. (I recently watched the Netflix Brazilian show "Criminal Code" and it had one of these about every third episode.) And lastly, there are series like "Euphoria" and "Sex Education" that, sometimes imperfectly, are using sex scenes very deliberately, including showing problematic and imperfect sex as well as sex that goes beyond the male gaze.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:14 AM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well, asexual people mostly got here because of sex, and not for any reason to do with Spider-Man or Adam Warlock.

True, but sex isn't the only thing that got me here. We can also credit evolution, and plate tectonics, and colonialism. Out of all these things, the one that is most relevant to my day-to-day life—and the one I would most like to see addressed in more movies—is probably colonialism.

Look, I'm no prude. I'm not even averse to sex. I just don't need it, or romance, shoved in my face in every movie and video game. It rarely advances the plot or provides insight into the characters' psyches or motivations. If I want to see it, I know where I can get it. And yes, I feel the same way about big explodey CGI action scenes, too.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:24 AM on November 27, 2023 [15 favorites]

The fact that they felt Ghostbusters needed a scene with a ghost giving Ray a blowjob was NOT a sign of a better filmmaking industry. We have different problems now, but at least we seem to be rid of that one (though you can blame it on Dan Akroyd personally, an awful lot of other people helped make it happen).
posted by rikschell at 6:24 AM on November 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

Well looking at the thread has convinced me that my life does not have spare minutes for TFA. Responding to a couple of things in the thread:

* I was even more out of touch with mainstream culture than I knew, if there was a "soft core porn" feature-length film with Bo Derek in 1981.

* Also yeah there was a reaction, starting around 1970, where every novel for grownups suddenly had to have sex in it, and 8-10 years later the film industry started to follow, and a lot of what came out in the movies was not anything like sex as a part of normal life. But then movies are not like normal life. I think people's subconscious failure to understand how much movies are not intended to be like real life (they're intended to be the opposite of real life!) is responsible for a lot of harm and suffering.

* There were some 80s-90s films where sex was a central part of the story and the story was worth watching. If you have never watched Body Heat (1981, Kathleen Turner and William Hurt) in which the leads fuck like bunnies until they literally have ice down their privates, you have missed a great film.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:30 AM on November 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am ready for the plate-tectonics movie.
posted by mittens at 6:35 AM on November 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

I think seanmpuckett summed it up well. This is about the revolution of internet porn:

Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s were intended to titillate, and could do so and make money because porn was not mainstream. So you could sell a movie like Body Heat or 9 1/2 Weeks or Fatal Attraction with two (or three) hot actors fumbling around an awkward plot for two hours. You went to the theatre because you wanted to see how nasty they'd actually get on screen. That was exactly the pitch: "sexy thriller" emphasis on sexy.

Now no one cares. You wanna see attractive people banging, you open your web browser. You can't sell sex on screen any more, not when it's freely available. You wanna spend $5M of your film's budget on a sex scene, two or three days of filming, paying your actors more, you're not going to get that back in box office. There's no return on investment. Have them fuck off screen, give a wink and a kiss, morning light and loose bedsheet, and we can imagine it for much less money. Get on with the plot, such as it is, and showing things like robot fights, or superhero punches.


It's just economics.

Which then takes us back to a key line from TFA:

sex scenes – and films like Basic Instinct and Showgirls in the 90s – don’t appeal to the four quadrants, do they, if the four quadrants contain children as a key audience demographic lumped in with the rest of the movie-going public.
posted by doctornemo at 6:39 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

we seek pleasure only in the form of the pristine spectacle of consumption — the ecstatic high that comes not from the touch of another human, but the dopamine rush of a retweet, the serotonin hit that comes with recognizing a character or symbol from your childhood, the euphoria of knowing a thing immediately and uncomplicatedly, the bliss of having the world at your fingertips and being able to curate an experience where you are never challenged, never forced into the discomfort of engaging actively, never shaken from your position as passive consumer. No, there’s no need for sex scenes here, folks.

This is absolutely unhinged. The whole article is unhinged. Sex scenes in Hollywood films (yes, even "mid-budget adult dramas" 🙄) have always been, by and large, fucking awful. They reek of sweaty uncle. If you think they're "hot" 🤮, maybe you're the sweaty uncle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by uncleozzy at 6:41 AM on November 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

true fact: homo erectus flourished for 2 million years
posted by elkevelvet at 6:46 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah I thought sex scenes and/or other excuses to show gratuitous tits were just how they used to get large quantities of straight men to go see movies?
posted by potrzebie at 6:48 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm sure there are numerous counter-examples, but I'm generally disappointed by how puritanical American and British games tend to be.

Eh. There's a difference between a sex scene and a look-at-these-titties scene, and I'd be hard pressed to think of any video game that's trying to give you something hot or even just surprising or shocking and not just look-at-these-titties.

You get this sometimes in film and tv. Obviously this will differ from person to person but to me the moment in A History of Violence when the two main characters start 69ing was kinda actually hot in its mundanity, or early in Sense8 when the Wachoskis pan away from the boobies to clearly remind you that this trans girl is getting fingered and loves it. But I haven't seen anything that didn't have huge "I find the most erotic part of the woman IS the boobies!" energy in games.

Like, I could agree with a broader point about puritanicalism if Cyberpunk had started the main plot with you rescuing a naked dude in an ice bath, carrying him around with his dick and balls ragdolling around. But they didn't; they started with look-at-these-titties. The closest might be if you romance Kerry in Cyberpunk but your "reward" scene is resolutely free of cock because cock is gay and you wouldn't want your actually-gay sex scene with two dudes fucking each other to be too gay. Bleah. At least the one path ends up with Ainara Alvarez letting you call her Abuela.

It also doesn't help that nothing has an animation system that remotely avoids the uncanny valley when character models are touching each other.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:54 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wow that article made it a long way before getting to the fact that our civilization is now completely awash with sex scenes. I mean, just flooded. With less than ten keypresses I can fill my screen with every sort of porn I can imagine including a few I wish I hadn’t.

My generation grew up with the brassieres section of the Sears Catalog as porn. The advent of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar was a major, major event as it legitimized mainstream pictures of sexy women in sexy poses. Up to that point that dwelled in the twilight of calendars sold to mechanics and magazines that were just read for the articles.

And then came new movies with sex scenes that you could proudly display on your shelf without anyone noticing that some parts of that VHS tape were a lot more worn than others.

In many ways the puritanical forces do win the show these days. It is very rare that a sex scene moves the story forward further than "and then they had sex" and as the actual footage serves for nothing other than getting nasty letters why would you include them?

To justify a sex scene in a modern movie it must tell a story. It should draw from Jill Bearup’s position on fight scenes — it’s not enough for two people to bash one another; their changing styles and actions should constitute a conversation. We should learn about the characters and see a progression in their relationship.

To summarize, the modern dearth of scenes of prurient interest results from a lack of prurient interest. We’re all filled to the brim, thanks. And to go beyond prurient interest in sex scenes is frankly quite difficult for the writer and the audience. There is a whole language of sex ("Oh, her attitude towards this encounter has shifted from aggressive to passive. Why?") that is underdeveloped and certainly not widely shared. Best to keep that sort of thing to the parlor, where there is a well developed and well known language to express things.

—————————————

As a (maybe whimsical) side note, as sex scenes really do arouse people I’m kind of curious how many Netflix and Chill evenings ditch the Netflix portion immediately after the on-screen sex gets going. As a director I might omit the sex scenes just to make sure that people finish the movie.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:01 AM on November 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Counterpoint.
posted by rhymedirective at 7:02 AM on November 27, 2023

"Sex is an integral part of life, and has much more to do with our human experience than does any CG-y hallway fight."

I mean, so does getting the groceries every week but I really don't want to watch the characters go grocery shopping unless it's actually vital to the plot. And, let's face it, a lot of sex scenes are not vital to the plot – they're shoehorned in as an excuse to show some skin.

I'm not against sex scenes in movies where it's actually part of the story and all that. But I can think of a lot lot lot of films where the romance subplot and specifically sex scenes are entirely unnecessary. Even when the romantic subplot (or just plot) is necessary, how often do we need to get a graphic depiction of it rather than alluding to it?
posted by jzb at 7:06 AM on November 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

it’s not enough for two people to bash one another; their changing styles and actions should constitute a conversation. We should learn about the characters and see a progression in their relationship

Something that professional wrestling usually gets right, and blockbuster films often get wrong.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:12 AM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm not sure I find the article very convincing, but I think the author's observations about the weird genre silo-ization of the media landscape, the commercial and creative constraints so many movie-making dollars are spent under, are undeniable.

I think some of the takes on display here in the comments about mainstream movie sex scenes -- like "those scenes were mostly terrible" and "we're swamped with sex scenes in other media now" -- could absolutely equally be applied to scenes of violence in mainstream movies. But somehow those circumstances aren't producing a retreat from violence in mainstream movies.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:13 AM on November 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

Something that professional wrestling usually gets right, and blockbuster films often get wrong.

I didn't think Ahsoka was a good show, generally, but one thing I did like was the duel between Ahsoka and Baylan Skoll. Skoll's heavy, crushing swings communicated quite a bit!
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 7:14 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd be hard pressed to think of any video game that's trying to give you something hot or even just surprising or shocking and not just look-at-these-titties

Just the other day I was playing Baldur's Gate and there was a scene / interaction where you knock on this door and are told "go away or else" - I opened the door anyway and it was a human-sized monster boning a giant-sized female monster* doggie style.

It was not hot, but I was surprised.

* I haven't committed the various races to memory, sorry. I'm having trouble getting into the game, really, it's too hard to just play 20 minutes at a time for me, which is what I usually have available.
posted by jzb at 7:20 AM on November 27, 2023

I'd be hard pressed to think of any video game that's trying to give you something hot or even just surprising or shocking and not just look-at-these-titties

The Dragon Age ones were an exception I would say. Clunky to look at but scripted to be about the feels, sans titties. Thinking of Alistair "never licked a lampost" in DA1 and Anders in DA2.
posted by Rhedyn at 7:34 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've seen movies with sex scenes which actually served the plot and/or characterization, and I have also suffered through the one in Ice Pirates in the most uncomfortable silence imaginable with my grandmother sitting beside me.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:39 AM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

When one is talking about sex and power and film - one could make a great movie about sexual coercion in, eg, a chicken processing plant, where sexual coercion absolutely happens. Think about it - the intersection of gore, misery, exploitation, sex, the reeking guts of capitalism - it's like a movie made to be a PhD thesis!

And yet the people who are exploited in chicken processing plants are, for the most part, pretty average-looking, and many of them aren't white. It would be difficult to cast Florence Pugh or Jennifer Lawrence, the characters would be wearing ordinary clothes or work coveralls most of the time and most audiences like chicken, so the whole "chicken production and sexual exploitation share some commonalities" thing would be difficult to market.

(Killer of Sheep takes some of this up, but if you've seen Killer of Sheep it kind of proves my point about whose suffering is invisibilized and whose is recuperated as fun and sexy.)

In a sense, yes, people understand that movies aren't "real", but obviously movies have a degree of "reality" - first, you can see how dismal it is for BIPOC when mainstream movies only have white leads, and second, movies constantly defend themselves with talk of reality. Directors and actors constantly talk about the content of the movie - this movie is "about" WWII, this movie is "about" political polarization in our time, this movie is "about" the empowerment of girls, etc etc etc. We're not meant to, and we don't, see movies as just pretty, entertaining pictures with no social or moral relevance to our "real" lives - in any case, how would this work? How could a narrative even exist if it were totally "unreal"?
posted by Frowner at 7:40 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

As a (maybe whimsical) side note, as sex scenes really do arouse people I’m kind of curious how many Netflix and Chill evenings ditch the Netflix portion immediately after the on-screen sex gets going. As a director I might omit the sex scenes just to make sure that people finish the movie.

So, the major caveat here is that I'm partnered and am not dating, so this is all theoretical currently for me.. But, if tomorrow I had a hot date with someone new and she was coming over for Netflix and chill, I'm pretty sure I'd choose something more low-key, without graphic sex scenes, just because those can be polarizing and frankly are often way more cringe than they are hot. But now I'm curious what people really do choose for Netflix and chill type dates.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:47 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm so old that I had to have it explained to me that the second half of "Netflix and chill" did not, in fact, mean lying on the couch and eating chips together.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:53 AM on November 27, 2023 [16 favorites]

eh? eh? munching the pringles, know what i mean?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:04 AM on November 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

I’m trying to figure out where the Fast and the Furious movies fit into this. Theyve been unabashedly about admiring beautiful machines and bodies and what they can do. And also explosions. So much cheesecake. And also beefcake! I love it! American Dad had a whole subplot about the homoeroticism. But surprisingly few sex scenes.

And then I thought about the most recent one. Which I can’t remember having much beef cake at all? Probably because there is a kid in them now? TBF all the stars are aging, but they are still pretty buff. So I don’t know where to put that.
posted by bq at 8:08 AM on November 27, 2023

Some sex scenes help to push the story along. In The Name of the Rose, for example, the scene where the novice monk has sex with a peasant girl out in the filth was maybe just a tiny bit too porny -- handsome young Christian Slater and, according to IMDB, some beautiful young woman named Valentina Vargas -- but the scene was there to throw more confusion and doubt and wonder at the inexperienced boy.

But I generally prefer off-camera sex scenes. Wavy lines. Fade to the next morning. They're in a place where these people could plausibly have sex. They're being physically affectionate. We're confident that they're going to have some manner of romantic/sexual contact. That's all I need to know. I'm often like a kid wishing the movie people would just skip the boring kissy stuff so we could get back to the story. We all know where to find porn if that's what we're after.

On the other hand, I can see a market for optional scenes in movies, including optional sex scenes. We have the technology. I think we would have the demand. Make it a little bit like fanfic. You choose (generally or specifically) what you want to see and what you don't want to see, then select Play. Generally, maybe select something like skip the gore, show the sex, but not that kind of sex, thank you. Specifically, maybe select items from a menu of optional scenes, so you decide for yourself whether you want to see Uhura peg Scotty in a kilt until he makes a noise like deflating bagpipes.
posted by pracowity at 8:10 AM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm so old that I had to have it explained to me that the second half of "Netflix and chill" did not, in fact, mean lying on the couch and eating chips together.

Ok I feel really old now, same here.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 8:26 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I mean, obviously their thesis is wrong. There's been an absolute flood of sex scenes in all forms of media lately and it shows no sign of abating. I'm fairly sure it's just horny directors who want to get legitimat actresses undressed, but whatever the cause the result is that you can't watch much of antyhing these days without finding a sex scene.

And I don't think of myself as prude, but I can't really say I think that in general sex scenes add anything to a non-pornographic work.

There may be some exceptions, but mostly they just seem pointless and boring.

Look, it's two people pretending to have sex so that we can, um, I guess kind of get horny or something and feel smug about not watching actual porn?

Was there ever any real point to sex scenes except trying to skirt anti-porn laws?

I mean, sure, sometimes it's necessary to establish that two characters have a sexual relationship. But do we need artfully covered nudity and characters inexplicably wearing bras while having sex so the scene of two actors faking sex can get past the censors? What's wrong with a fade to black? Or a cut to the next day? Or whatever.

I thought She-Hulk did that pretty well. Jen has sex, that's actually both plot AND character relevant. But we never got any coy CGI of Shulkie dry humping some dude with her nipples carefully hidden. There wasn't even all that much passionate kissing, just enough to establish that yup, they're gonna fuck, and then we'd cut to the next scene.

In books its even weirder. Authors try to skim this bizarre line between actual pornography and merely "tasteful" sex scenes. How detailed does a sex scene in a book have to be before it crosses the line to pornography? And why are we trying?

There is a fundamental dishonesty to sex scenes, it's people trying to be "artistic" and make porn without actually making porn.

If you want to put some porn in, then just put in some porn or stop faking it. Either go for that close up of genitals intermingled in visual media or detailed descriptions in print, or stop dicking around and faking it.

The actual prudery is in the absence of mainstream media that also includes truly graphic sex scenes, not in the supposed decline of faux sex scenes.
posted by sotonohito at 8:33 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Think about it - the intersection of gore, misery, exploitation, sex, the reeking guts of capitalism - it's like a movie made to be a PhD thesis!

Have you seen Prime Cut?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:33 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sure, but with video you're driving to the video store, walking behind the curtain, bringing a tape out front to the cashier, who you may know, and then driving back a day later. It also requires more premeditation, and costs money.

Eh. You're filtering this through today's "everything, everywhere, all-at-once, from your couch" glasses. In retrospect, sure, that was a lot of friction. But, that was also just how everything was back then. It wasn't considered friction. It was, in fact, liberation.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:39 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Was there ever any real point to sex scenes except trying to skirt anti-porn laws?

I mean, yes? Of course?
posted by rhymedirective at 8:44 AM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Verhoeven uses titillation to get people to watch his films, but is the sex scene about presenting sex on film or about him exploring themes separate from intimacy or affection? I suspect it is more about the latter and wonder if it weakens the writer's point, somewhat.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:51 AM on November 27, 2023

I don't much trust my own judgement from 20 years ago, but the film "Exils" stands out as one of the few times I saw an "intimate" scene in a movie that seemed like it belonged, full stop.

The linked trailer gives you a glimpse of the orchard scene. I love this movie and will watch it again one day.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:53 AM on November 27, 2023

rhymedirective ok so what am I missing? Do you have any links you'd recommend I check out to learn more?
posted by sotonohito at 8:54 AM on November 27, 2023

Have you seen Prime Cut?

I did not know it even existed! It looks unsettling. Depending on how much actual gore there is, it might be too gory for me, but I will add it to the list. That review, though - I could do with a little less of the "who can blame anyone for desiring the fresh young Sissy Spacek" from the writer, tbqh. I am so glad that metafilter mods away all the "I'd hit that" stuff in pop culture posts.
posted by Frowner at 8:54 AM on November 27, 2023

As an asexual person, may I say I wish movies would focus more on gorgeous food scenes. I mean the costumes and sets are frequently wonderful and I would like the bar to stay high, but food is just as essential to existence as sex, and I wanna see it.

Oh, and dance sequences, unless that's too much to ask? Love a good dance sequence.
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 8:55 AM on November 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

rhymedirective ok so what am I missing? Do you have any links you'd recommend I check out to learn more?

I don't really have a strong inclination to teach you about film studies and the art of cinema but I guess go watch any depiction of queer sex on screen and/or grab a copy of Bordwell and Thomas's Film Art
posted by rhymedirective at 8:57 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Dang dude, you could have just said "naah" and not been deliberately insulting.
posted by sotonohito at 9:09 AM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you think they're "hot" 🤮, maybe you're the sweaty uncle.

Huh. Today I learned something about myself.
posted by kimberussell at 9:14 AM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have nothing to add other than finding the currently common compromise of bra-stays-on sex scenes really hilarious and reality breaking.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:14 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh... is that a thing now? I guess I haven't been keeping up. Could you point me to one or twelve examples?
posted by pracowity at 9:29 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's a few things:

The four quadrants thing really has to be emphasized - success requires a fair share of every demographic these days. Sex scenes knock out kids, seniors, the religious. No reason to do that to yourself.

Sex scenes are subject to significant mainstream feminist critique in a way that hasn't been since you started to have breasts exposed in R rated movies 50 years ago.

Actresses are seeking and getting no nudity clauses in their contracts much earlier in their careers than they used to. You simply aren't going to get a real star doing a sex scene other than bra-on.
posted by MattD at 9:33 AM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

rhymedirective ok so what am I missing? Do you have any links you'd recommend I check out to learn more?

I'm not rhymedirective nor do I play them on tv, but:

Go watch _Cousins_. The American remake, not the original. SPOILERS FOLLOW!

There are a couple-few sex scenes with William Peterson and Sean Young, and I think just the one with Danson and Rossellini. I haven't seen the movie in like 10 years but I don't think any of them have lots of skin on display. But anyway. In the movie, Danson and Young are married, as are Peterson and Rossellini. Peterson and Young are both pretty cheaty and are fucking each other, and their sex scenes are (again from memory) notionally-hot and fast and harried and the scenes make it plain that they don't particularly even like each other, they're just fucking, and they're not even really enjoying it very much. The one with Danson and Rossellini is this languid thing with them both laughing a lot and is about how much they're enjoying each other.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:35 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

This article is so bizarrely missing the concept of labor. Being a naked girl on film is work and it doesn't happen in a vacuum free from pressure or outright coercion. Near the end the author basically dismisses all criticisms of sexism with "well, women have sex in real life", but these are women being paid (less than men) to simulate sexual situations on film, usually directed by men, in a roomful of men. Intimacy coordinators are brand-new, and lots of actresses have spoken out about feeling pressured into these kinds of scenes. Younger audiences know about that and bring that context to watching films.
Also.. I don't think the basic premise is even true. Blue is the Warmest Color has come in for some criticism, but that was a critical and commercial success, has explicit sex, and only came out 10 years ago. Netflix just released a new version of Lady Chatterley's Lover (which I thought was quite good and had other themes as well, but would have been NC-17 theatrically for sure). There was a ton of boinking on Riverdale and some of it was pretty graphic for network TV.
It just sounds like this author is sad nobody makes 90s erotic thrillers in all their weird, cheesy, dated glory, and wrote this whole intellectual exercise justifying their nostalgia. But sometimes a genre just doesn't play anymore, like 50s melodramas about unwed mothers.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 9:42 AM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

I’ve always felt that the sex scenes in Pretty Woman, while not conversations, featured choices that revealed a lot about where the characters were at. They were important markers of the whole dominance/submission theme that runs through the movie.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:47 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am ready for the plate-tectonics movie.

That would require a...shift of some sort in Hollywood.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:21 AM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

I must second the rec for listening to Erotic 80s from the You Must Remember This podcast. Not having read TFA yet I do think that Karina Longworth agrees that the main reason there is less sex in movies post 2000 is that movie studios all doubled down on the youth market. The last episode of Erotic 90s is about Eyes Wide Shut which she paints as the last gasp of serious adult erotic movies. It was a box office flop.

The podcast is great and covers a wide range of movies with a serious amount of inside baseball. She finds most of the erotic movies she discuses problematic but does pluck out a few gems. Pretty Woman is one of them! She spends the whole first episode of Erotic 90s lauding it. I also loved American Gigolo on her rec.
posted by macrael at 10:28 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you want a dingbat theory, I'm suspicious of movies as a form because they are TOO BIG. Not only are they too big if you watch them in the theater - too overwhelming, too encompassing, too easily persuading you of their viewpoint - but they require too much capital to make and distribute, so only the very rarest of movies will be allowed to do anything but recapitulate the usual terrible ideas about bodies, gender, sexuality, the family, etc, no matter what scrim of narrative is over the top.

I'm sorry but what? There are so many movies about every different type of subject under the sun, and streaming/DVDs/the "open seas" make it incredibly easy to watch them whenever you wish compared to the erotic thriller days. If you're somehow only getting PG-13 Marvel movies about pumped up sexless androids, that's on you.

(I'd understand the complaint if the worst corporate junk is the only thing available at your local theater because boy have I seen that happen but if you don't even like the theatrical experience... )
posted by kingdead at 10:45 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

"I think film as an art form is problematic" is somehow a take I'm not at all surprised to find on Metafilter 2023.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:55 AM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

Eh. There's a difference between a sex scene and a look-at-these-titties scene, and I'd be hard pressed to think of any video game that's trying to give you something hot or even just surprising or shocking and not just look-at-these-titties.

Indie games can be very, very good at this. The most erotic video game I can think of is mostly abstract.
posted by May Kasahara at 10:55 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't think of myself as prude, but I can't really say I think that in general sex scenes add anything to a non-pornographic work

I Never Thought It Would Happen To Me, But....here I am coming to defend sex scenes on Metafilter.

Sex scenes are not just about sex: they are about the deepest and most vulnerable parts of intimacy, laid bare. And for that reason, they are important, and I actually notice their lack in modern cinema and do not like it.

The following will contain spoilers for various movies and television shows over the past decades.

Inherent Vice (2015) had a sex scene, where two characters start to have sexual interaction, and she puts herself over his lap to be spanked for perceived transgressions and it is revealed - to her, to him, and to the viewer - that he does, actually, have deep and repressed feelings about those transgressions, and about her. No amount of talking could have demonstrated as viscerally as that scene did the depth of those emotions and how much they were not conscious to him until that moment.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 6, Episode 9: Smashed(2001): Two characters (If you've watched the show, yes THOSE characters) fight in an abandoned house and start to have sex in that abandoned house as the house literally comes down around them. We need to see them in that to understand the passion and desperation and emotion of those characters. If we had seen them going to each other, kissing, and then "fade to black", we would be missing an essential part of the characterization of those characters and the arc of their relationship.

In fact, speaking of vampire shows, The Vampire Diaries(2009-2017) was all about the showcasing of how sex scenes could be used to show feelings and emotions and desire. None of the sex scenes were really explicit - in fact, I can't remember nipples ever appearing on screen once - they were not pornographic. But they showed how people interacted with each other when their guards were down and their wants were bare; in a show where a lot of people wore masks that hid their true feelings, they were a reliable way to show what was actually going on.

I think one of the main issues with sex scenes right now is actually the fact that the MPAA still keeps a tight lid on things like, say, showing women's pleasure (I'm still not sure how Willow and Tara got away with it in Once More With Feeling), and so they're impossible to do in an equal way, and there is a distaste for showing unequal sex scenes. But I think we are missing something when we don't show them, and we're also missing an opportunity to show them in a healthier way than they have been.
posted by corb at 11:08 AM on November 27, 2023 [17 favorites]

There is a fundamental dishonesty to sex scenes, it's people trying to be "artistic" and make porn without actually making porn.

I mean I guess this is true in that it’s the same dishonesty that exists in all film? The train isn’t actually coming towards you. Those people didn’t actually get shot. That’s not actually a newborn.
Film is about highlighting something and showing it to an audience. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the time it’s been “look at these titties,” but the sex scene I’m in is “look at what this character will go through to have even the tiniest bit of human connection.” Truthfully though, both of our underwear were on the whole time.
posted by Uncle at 11:21 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Actresses are seeking and getting no nudity clauses in their contracts much earlier in their careers than they used to. You simply aren't going to get a real star doing a sex scene other than bra-on.

This is generally the case. When I see a bra-on sex scene, I assume it is a result of the actor's contract terms rather than an act of censorship (particularly if the movie has another actress who does have a topless scene). Very occasionally, the bra is left on for actual plot or characterization reasons, but usually it's just contract stuff.

the puriteens/no one is horny discourse is a fairly widespread moral panic

And what a weird moral panic it is, compared to the "won't someone think of the children," anti-sex moral panics of past decades.

I am ready for the plate-tectonics movie.

I know this is a joke, but isn't that just disaster movies?
posted by asnider at 11:21 AM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah I thought sex scenes and/or other excuses to show gratuitous tits were just how they used to get large quantities of straight men to go see movies?

Right? When has nudity/sexiness on screen (or absence thereof) NOT been driven by profitability? "Algorithm-driven" decisions may be new, but only literally and technically. Cold hard $$$ numbers have always been behind these choices.

I also think there's a difference between sexy sex scenes and ... scenes that happen to depict sex. I don't usually think of the latter when someone says "sex scene" but maybe I am wrong.

IMHO the only time we need to see sexy sex scenes are when the sex matters to the story and also it's not exploitative in any sense of the word: protect your actors and pay them well, don't make nonconsensual violence against women look sexy, don't objectify women (i.e. if her body is framed or shown in a sexy way then she'd better also be centered in the rest of the story including the nonsexual parts of it), don't use misogynistic tropes.

Pretty much the only genre that qualifies, imo, is the progressive/feminist bodice-ripper romance. (Yay Bridgerton - even though it's not perfect, it's pretty great.) I seriously can't think of any other genre of sexy sex scenes which pull their weight or justify their existence. You might be tempted make an argument that a femme fatale character seducing a male protagonist matters to the plot (like in James Bond or Basic Instinct) but that's objectification and/or using misogynistic tropes. You know?? I'm glad the ubiquitous and obligatory sexy sex scene is disappearing. It was almost invariably exploitative.

On the other hand, scenes that happen to depict sex but aren't meant to evoke or communicate sexiness are generally less problematic - or at least, the issues that might apply here are different (e.g. depicting sexual violence against women over and over and over again, even if done in a nonsexy way, is a questionable choice from a feminist perspective). The type of sex scene that is meant to communicate character and story beats of a nonsexy nature, like the Buffy scenes that Corb mentioned above, are usually unproblematic, and I don't think that type of sex scene is disappearing? Is it? IDK. I hope not.
posted by MiraK at 11:24 AM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also if somebody was titillated by the sex scene I was in I would hope that they examine their life and view of sex and women, preferably with a professional.
posted by Uncle at 11:28 AM on November 27, 2023

You might be tempted make an argument that a femme fatale character seducing a male protagonist matters to the plot (like in James Bond or Basic Instinct) but that's objectification and/or using misogynistic tropes.

Additionally, the actual sex part doesn't further the plot in this case. You can fade to black and cut to the next morning and convey the exact same plot information.
posted by asnider at 11:31 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am ready for the plate-tectonics movie.

“But did thee feel the earth move?” - For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940, Ernest Hemingway.
posted by pracowity at 11:54 AM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I apologize, I think I was being too absoluist.

There are undoubtedly times when sex scenes can contribute positively to a story. But I do argue that the vast majority of the time it's just porn without the porn and either adds nothing or detracts from the media in question.
posted by sotonohito at 12:09 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you think they're "hot" 🤮, maybe you're the sweaty uncle.
posted by uncleozzy

Also if somebody was titillated by the sex scene I was in I would hope that they examine their life and view of sex and women, preferably with a professional.
posted by Uncle

Eponyavuncular?
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:10 PM on November 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

There are a lot of arguments about whether sex scenes “advance the plot” or “portray relationships”, but that presupposes the idea that movies must always be plot-driven, and that “plot advancement” must always win out over atmosphere, psychology, visual pleasures, wish-fulfillment, self-insertion, etc.

For example I went into watching Crazy Rich Asians thinking, “I bet I’m going to see a sad woman in a couture dress walking through a beautiful setting.” And it was! It was that kind of movie. I also enjoyed laughing at Awkwafina and Ken Jeong, watched Michelle Yeoh stalk across the scene, and gaped — not necessarily disapprovingly — at lavish lifestyles of billionaire consumption in an authoritarian “flawed democracy” which undoubtedly loved being in the news for something other than hanging drug smugglers.

Would this have been more moral if it “advanced the plot?”

You can certainly make other arguments about sex scenes and nudity, gratuitous or otherwise, but “advancing the plot” or “illustrating relationships” is not a silver bullet that either makes sex scenes okay OR is applied to other problematic cinematic aspects.
posted by Hypatia at 12:20 PM on November 27, 2023 [15 favorites]

That's a good point, Hypatia. And, actually, we may be placing too much emphasis on plot in general (not just in terms of sex scenes but, quite literally, in a general sense when discussing movies as a medium). Even with "artsy movies," plot isn't always the point. It might be a character study. It might be just a purely visual art, feast-for-the-eyes type deal. Plot, actually, isn't always the thing.

And, as a tangent, to tack back onto something mentioned upthread: we (as a culture) talk a lot about gratuitous sex and nudity and, at least in most of the anglosphere, do a lot of hand-wringing about how much is too much, what types/acts are appropriate or not appropriate to show, etc. But there is very little talk or public concern about gratuitous violence in film.

It's always been relatively easy to avoid movies with sex and nudity. It's much harder to avoid movies without some level of violence, even if it's as minor as slapstick comedy or literal cartoon violence in children's movies. It's certainly not impossible, and plenty of good movies have no violence in them, but they're comparatively rarer than movies without sex or nudity. We have deemed one acceptable and the other much less so.
posted by asnider at 12:31 PM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Right? When has nudity/sexiness on screen (or absence thereof) NOT been driven by profitability?

Very often, actually, and even limiting the discussion to American cinema (which is impossible in and of itself because the United States has one of the longest filmmaking traditions in the entire world and of which there are dozens if not hundreds of different filmmaking movements across 120 years) there exist a range of portrayals of nudity that run the gamut of human experience.

To believe that every single image of a butt or a breast or genitals ever put to film in the United States was done so out of a desire to maximize profit is one of the weirdest things I've ever read here.
posted by rhymedirective at 12:44 PM on November 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

> There are a lot of arguments about whether sex scenes “advance the plot” or “portray relationships”, but that presupposes the idea that movies must always be plot-driven, and that “plot advancement” must always win out over atmosphere, psychology, visual pleasures, wish-fulfillment, self-insertion, etc.

I get your argument, hypatia, but there is a specific baggage and a specific set of social harms associated with female nudity and sexuality depicted for escapist reasons on screen.

Yeah, a beautiful woman wearing a couture dress and walking around in extravagantly wealthy settings has its own baggae too, because couture = slave labor and wealthy setting = autoritarian country and beautiful woman = conventional beauty standards and body image issues in girls, etc etc etc. But I'd argue that sex scenes (sexy sex scenes, meant to sexually titillate viewers) are much more directly connected to the harm they're causing (the actual exploitation is right there in your face explicitly happening on screen) and much more discrete as a form of harm that can be easily fixed. Take out the gratuitous sex scene and poof! That particular form of exploitation actually fully goes away! Without any huge cost or harm to your production, because sexiness was actually gratuitous and ancillary to your story and themes! (You were trying to make a spy thriller about a suave macho dude, not a sexy porn movie, so it works just fine without the exploitative sex scene.) But Crazy Rich Asians is actually diminished by removing the couture from it because the lifestyles of extravagantly rich people IS the whole point of the story, it's right there in the title, and it just would not work without couture!

It's not just about plot, not in such a shallow and literal way. But the sexy stuff really does need a REASON to be on the screen - like it's valid if you're making porn, sex and sexiness is central to your themes and plot! - otherwise it's probably going to qualify as exploitative, especially for female nudity/sexiness because of our cultural baggage. Sorry but there is no neutral & harmless way we get to have viewing pleasure and wish fulfillment and atmosphere from female sexuality/nudity on screen, just as escapism, without context or reason. Our history of women's oppression has fucked it up for us.
posted by MiraK at 12:49 PM on November 27, 2023

Like, decontextualized and ornamental images of sexualized female bodies is the definition of objectification. It's inherently harmful, there is no way to do it right. This is in a totally different category from using couture or opulence to evoke atmosphere.

> To believe that every single image of a butt or a breast or genitals ever put to film in the United States was done so out of a desire to maximize profit is one of the weirdest things I've ever read here

You didn't read that :) It's really not what I said or meant. For example, if you read the rest of my comment I explicitly made a distinction between sex and nudity that was meant to be sexy vs. scenes with sex and nudity in them just for other reasons.
posted by MiraK at 12:58 PM on November 27, 2023

MiraK, I don’t disagree with your point about the exploitation of women, and I certainly feel that sex scenes in film have more possibility of harming actors. (Not that the death of stunt doubles has stopped us doing violent or action scenes, when the script could be written differently.)

But you can make this argument about, say, glamorizing international flights or being a billionaire or having a suite of live-in servants or vacationing in a place where it’s illegal to be gay. Does this “advancing the plot” make it any more or less moral? No.

Similarly it is very possible to have “tasteful, plot advancing” nudity in a film where the actors are mistreated and traumatized, and the ideas being advanced by the film are awful.
posted by Hypatia at 1:03 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I remember thinking a bit about this when the movie Hustlers came out. On one hand there's very little nudity in a movie about a strip club, which is fine! It's not part of the story the actors or director wanted to tell, which means that you can get a broader variety of actors who have different comfort levels. But at the same time, it did read almost as the movie was ashamed about what it was. Almost like it was only set in a strip club because it had to be, and that it was bashfully trying to tell the audience it didn't matter. Which again, fine, but my read of the article it was based on at least was that sex and nudity were pretty important in the story. And that because the movie felt weird about it, we lost some of that tension. Not that it would have been better with someone like Verhoeven as a director by any means.
posted by Carillon at 1:04 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

> Does this “advancing the plot” make it any more or less moral? No. Similarly it is very possible to have “tasteful, plot advancing” nudity in a film where the actors are mistreated and traumatized, and the ideas being advanced by the film are awful.

Yes, totally agree with that. It's one of the caveats I included in my comment: "IMHO the only time we need to see sexy sex scenes are when the sex matters to the story and also it's not exploitative in any sense of the word: protect your actors and pay them well, don't make nonconsensual violence against women look sexy, don't objectify women .... don't use misogynistic tropes"
posted by MiraK at 1:06 PM on November 27, 2023

Witcher 3 (Polish in origin) was more "sexy", eg the character Keira Metz, sorceresses use glamours to seduce people to get what they want! Of course they're sexy! She makes you a picnic and makes eyes at you and says she wants to sleep with you and by the way she needs a favour from you as a friend. And later she drugs you and double crosses you.

wolfenstein TNO had a scene that was just the hero and his hot polish gf fucking in a closet. just like, you know, doing it. as people do with their partners! it was weirdly refreshing.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:09 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

The sex scene in The Terminator was absolutely pivotal to the plot, to both character arcs, to the future of humanity... If you watch it again sometime, pay really close attention to that scene and the two scenes bookending it. Watch how it changes the characters.

But for a completely different take on movie sex scenes, I highly recommend John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Gleefully graphic, goofily sexy, frighteningly erotic, embarrassingly personal, pornographic but somehow not obscene, it's the best portrayal of the complexity of human sexuality that I've seen on film.

Remember, folks... fascists hate debauchery. A puritan society, whatever the motivation behind it, is an easy target for the fascists; fascism only a hop, skip, and a goosestep down the road. There's a reason that the fascism always starts with rants about cultural purity. A sanitized, sexless, chaste media is what they want, and 'defending the children' is how they get it. Convincing people that sexuality is more appalling than violence has been one of the most effective PR moves the fascists ever made; having that built into the foundations of every movie made under the Hays Code and the MPAA probably set us up for the fascist movement we see around us today.

Fight fascism. Be sexy.
posted by MrVisible at 1:12 PM on November 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

The sex scene in The Terminator was absolutely pivotal to the plot, to both character arcs, to the future of humanity...

The characters having sex is pivotal to the plot & etc., but does the audience need to actually see them having sex to understand that they had sex?
posted by kirkaracha at 1:14 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

The characters fighting the Terminator is pivotal to the plot & etc., but does the audience need to actually see them fighting it to understand that they fought it?

And yes. It was very illuminating about both of them, and contained a ton of foreshadowing. Plus, Michael Biehn is like, some sort of paragon of hotness in that film. It was awesome.
posted by MrVisible at 1:17 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

> The characters fighting the Terminator is pivotal to the plot & etc., but does the audience need to actually see them fighting it to understand that they fought it?

Not to understand that they fought it, but to see how exactly they fought is pivotal. That's pretty much the definition of an action movie.

In Bridgerton Season 1, we see lots of sex and lots of sexy scenes and all of the details, ALL, were absolutely thematically relevant to the show and its plot and its characters. In contrast, the boxing-fight scenes were just a side show, as it were, and were not shown in any extraneous detail beyond what was bare-minimum necessary for plot, theme, etc. There were scenes when characters were engaging in a boxing fight with one another, but the actual sparring was verbal and so the camera work & sound highlighted this instead of lovingly following their fists, their punches, their parries. Why? Because this is a show that centers sex, not violence.

The Terminator is a movie that centers violence, not sex. I can't remember the sex scene at all, but I hope it treated the sex scene the same way Bridgerton Season 1 treated its fight scenes: bare minimum detail, focus on something other than the sex itself, no gratuitous framings of the camera to titillate

And BTW it's not fair to characterize all objections to gratuitous and exploitative sex scenes as "prudishness" or "fascism".
posted by MiraK at 1:27 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, I happen to believe that action movies can have good sex scenes, and vice versa. Why? Because I've seen them. This thread is rife with examples.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean no-one should enjoy it.

See, that's the fascism peeking in.
posted by MrVisible at 1:38 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

I guess I would argue that, in a perfect world free from exploitation, it could be morally okay to watch people who are okay with it performing in a sex scene, or a nude scene, for our aesthetic pleasure as part of a larger work of art. Wholesome sex portraying romance in escapist light fantasies, “these people are messed up because of sex”, “because sex makes people dumb, I understand letting that person up to the hotel room and they would steal the mcguffin”, “wow I would not make a plot where people have sex in a soybean field think of the pesticides! but whatever, that is life in Rural America.” Tragic sex, sure. The gamut of human experience.

There would be none of this “You can see a butt, but only if you don’t enjoy it!” “Nudity can only exist when people are portraying the worst of humanity like slavery and genocide.” “Well I would argue that we can see a dick, but only if it’s played for laughs!”

And somehow in this perfect world the sex scenes would be better, not cringe-inducing (unless the artists are going for that), and there would also be nothing like the Transformers movie prurient gaze on Megan Fox, who felt gross and exploited on that movie set even though she never got nude.
posted by Hypatia at 1:40 PM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

> I guess I would argue that, in a perfect world free from exploitation, it could be morally okay to watch people who are okay with it performing in a sex scene, or a nude scene, for our aesthetic pleasure

I think this is possible in OUR world! Ethical porn is awesome, good sex scenes in thematically appropriate shows and movies are the best, etc. Sex depicted on screen for our pleasure is not inherently objectionable IMO, not even when it involves female sexiness in service of the het male gaze.

But a decontextualized and thematically out-of-place sex scene featuring female nudity in service of the het male gaze, just for atmosphere or as set dressing, is the movie equivalent of a bikini-clad woman with her head cropped out of frame stuck on a billboard ad for men's underwear. It's objectification. These women are usually not even present in the movie except to be sexy, and (this is crucial) the movie is not a sexy movie - it's some other kind of movie. If it was a sexy movie with sex as a central theme/plot it would be a lot better! The sexy woman would be as much a real part of the movie as any other character in it! But in an action movie or a spy thriller, the sexy woman is less than every other character, she is turned into object for het male pleasure. She has as much relevance to the movie as the headless bikini woman does to the male underwear she is selling.

This is why I'm such a pedant about thematic or plot relevance when it comes to sex scenes with female sexiness in it. It's not that sexiness is bad or sexy scenes are bad (they're not!). It's that objectification is bad.

> There would be none of this “You can see a butt, but only if you don’t enjoy it!” “Nudity can only exist when people are portraying the worst of humanity like slavery and genocide.” “Well I would argue that we can see a dick, but only if it’s played for laughs!”

... does anyone actually argue this? *shudder* Well, let's all agree that THIS is fascism, lol.
posted by MiraK at 1:52 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

in a perfect world free from exploitation

I don't know if I personally know any committed fascists, but I suspect some fascists operate fervently under the belief that they know what a perfect world is, and to double down on their derangement they think they can create that world

I do not want to live in anyone's perfect world, there is no such thing. I'm all on board for seeking to eliminate exploitation. Let's be real here, let's talk about and live in the world that exists.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:05 PM on November 27, 2023

This is why I'm such a pedant about thematic or plot relevance when it comes to sex scenes with female sexiness in it. It's not that sexiness is bad or sexy scenes are bad (they're not!). It's that objectification is bad.

So I think you've hit actually on one of the issues I have with what I'll call I suppose Reverse Pendulum Anti-Objectification. Because I agree that it was a problem when we had random sexy women walk into a scene with no characterization whose only function was to exist as a way to say that This Dude Is Cool Because Sexy Women Want Him. But I think the argument that we don't get to see female sexiness unless the female sexiness is itself necessary to the plot is itself a world that argues for sexlessness as purity and winds up accidentally doing a sort of reverse objectification. It winds up harkening back to another time, where any sexiness on the part of a woman was a marker that she was immoral and to be viewed as a Bad Woman - and that's the stuff that was so useful to the fascism morality police being referenced above. It's just a different type of objectification.

The opposite of sexual objectification is not, in my view, to button women up and put them in flannel, but rather to put the full gamut of female experience which includes sexiness and sexual experience into movies.
posted by corb at 2:06 PM on November 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

So, this seems like really good news:

How Hollywood’s Sex Scenes Will Change With the New SAG-AFTRA Contract: Intimacy coordinators say it’s a “big win” that they’re finally being acknowledged in a union deal and a big step forward for performer protections

Members of the Screen Actors Guild have until Dec. 5 to vote to ratify the tentative agreement and were sent the full 128-page contract on Friday. “Producer will use best efforts to engage an Intimacy Coordinator for scenes involving nudity or sex acts. Producer will also consider in good faith any request by a performer or a performer’s representative to engage an Intimacy Coordinator for other scenes. Producer shall not retaliate against a performer for requesting an Intimacy Coordinator,” the contract reads.

It also states there should be transparency regarding non-discrimination and anti-harassment, including clear instructions on how to report. When it comes to background actors, they need to be given notice if their role includes any nudity or simulated sex scenes ahead of their audition or interview. There’s also a stipulation about training that says there needs to be a commitment to update harassment prevention programs to make sure best practices for scenes involving nudity and simulated sex are in place, as well as when it comes to “scenes and situations of a ‘triggering’ nature in a trauma-informed manner.”

posted by MrVisible at 2:10 PM on November 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also if somebody was titillated by the sex scene I was in I would hope that they examine their life and view of sex and women, preferably with a professional

Everyone is somebody’s fetish.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:15 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

But in an action movie or a spy thriller, the sexy woman is less than every other character, she is turned into object for het male pleasure. She has as much relevance to the movie as the headless bikini woman does to the male underwear she is selling.

Look I know you're not specifically saying Terminator here but since we just discussed that actual specific movie, in which the sexy woman character is literally basically the main character, perhaps you could concede that it is entirely possible for a sexy woman character to be an integral focus point of an action or spy thriller?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:16 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

> But I think the argument that we don't get to see female sexiness unless the female sexiness is itself necessary to the plot is itself a world that argues for sexlessness as purity and winds up accidentally doing a sort of reverse objectification.

Really?

Do we consider it "reverse objectification" when men aren't sexy on screen for no good reason?

I think this may be an example of double standards being applied to women. Men being presented as sex objects, with gratuitous shirtlessness etc. is a comparatively rare phenomenon (that has only recently become more common). And even now there's rarely men having sex on screen in ways designed to appeal to the het female gaze, especially in a movie or show that's about something completely different. If men require a real good reason to be sexy on screen, why shouldn't women?

> It winds up harkening back to another time, where any sexiness on the part of a woman was a marker that she was immoral and to be viewed as a Bad Woman

Yeah I kind of get this - well, I'd make it more gender neutral in that these days everyone is hot and nobody fucks on screen, right? I agree, it's super unrealistic that neither Valkyrie nor Thor nor The Grandmaster ever had sex with anyone in Ragnarok, you know? Dripping with hot people, everyone is sexless. That movie was BEGGING for a scene showing the Grandmaster in an orgy (Loki in attendance), Valkyrie with a drinking buddy or two getting gropey with each other, etc. It would have been thematically relevant, furthering characterization, etc. It wouldn't have been out of place in the least. If ever there was a movie that could be made wholer and better with sexy debauchery, it was Thor: Ragnarok. (That's my super specific pet rant, tyvm.)

It's when we're talking about Transformers or James Bond etc. that I get my hackles up about objectification. (I'm sorry that I really don't recall the sex scene in The Terminator, I'll take you all's word for it that it was not icky or objectifying.)
posted by MiraK at 2:19 PM on November 27, 2023

It is really weird for me to be on the anti side of this.

I'm absolutely not saying anyone should be prohibited from including sex scenes. People should do whatever they want for art, as long as they aren't exploiting vulnerable people in the process.

I suppose mostly what I'm arguing is that to me, most of the time, sex scenes seem tacked on for the purposes of seeming more edgy and grown up and like a real big boy director than for other reasons and, to me, that makes the media worse.

Was Game of Thrones better for having all those sexposition scenes? I don't think so, and that's an entirely subjective values judgement by me I'm not claiming otherwise. But I still think it's true that they put in those scenes because they wanted to show some tits for titilation.

I suggest one possible test would be to ask if the sex scene would still be a good idea if it was full on porn filming all the details. Not that it would actually be possible given the likely refusal on the part of the actors to do it and the issues of distribution. Just would it be just as valid, just as useful, just as artistically a good idea, if you could?

If not, is it really worth the time it takes to film/write it? Including a sex scene without even contemplating if it would work and serve your purposes if you could include actual sex seems odd to me.

The way they film sex scenes seems like a product of prudery rather than rebellion gainst it. It's a little like if they were making a movie and decided a fight was important, but instead of showing the fight they carefully arranged the set and costumes so that you saw people preparing to punch and moving around like they were going to fight, but you never saw a punch land or any fighting.

Is it really a fight scene if you don't see the fighting? And if you don't, why should I be interested in watching it?

If I'm reading a book, or watching a movie, or whatever, I'm mostly bored by the faux sex stuff and just wait for it to be over so we can get back to the story. I'm not sure if including real sex would be an improvement from my POV or not.
posted by sotonohito at 2:26 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

The biggest flaw in the Terminator movies is that they fail to spend any time considering Skynet's point of view.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:26 PM on November 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is the love scene from The Terminator.

Warning: Hint of sideboob.

Watch that and tell me; who has agency in that scene? Who is the camera exploiting?

Can you spot the moment, the actual pivotal moment that defines the whole theme of the Terminator franchise? Because it's in there.
posted by MrVisible at 2:29 PM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

It would be nice if we could have movies where the choices for primary female characters were not "normatively beautiful but just here to be decorative" and "normatively beautiful but an important, well-developed character". It does not really matter to me whether we are purely catering to the cishet gaze or whether non-cishets also enjoy movies about eye candy when we do this; it matters that female beauty is treated as a precondition for being important and interesting.

Movies are a system, they're not just a bunch of totally disconnected things. In the system, the default assumption is that any woman main character has to be pretty. She can wear glasses or be daubed in mud or wear unflattering clothes, but underneath it all, she needs to be beautiful, because we cannot be expected to care about women except when they are beautiful. If this were not the default assumption, it would not matter if some random movies were just normative women being sexily decorative, because the default assumption would not be that women have to be beautiful in order to have any kind of value or interest.
posted by Frowner at 2:33 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

For the record, that was AWESOME. Thanks MrVisible! I totally get what you mean - this scene is essential to the whole franchise, in more ways than one. I assume this is when Sarah Connor gets pregnant? But even if not, they used this scene to show how inhuman human lives have become after skynet, Sarah's utter loneliness, etc etc etc. A lot was packed in there. Nicely done.
posted by MiraK at 2:35 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

underneath it all, she needs to be beautiful, because we cannot be expected to care about women except when they are beautiful

You aren't wrong about normative assumptions of beauty and our society's valuations of it, but this is actually a different problem to the issue of sexiness and sex scenes. Sexiness does not require normative beauty standards; when I say that I want to see more sexuality on screen, I am not saying that I want to see more thin white twenty year old women with normative beauty standards on screen. I'm saying that I want to live in a society where sexuality is accepted and embraced as a part of life rather than being hidden and sequestered; and that acceptance should extend to the media that we consume and produce.

these days everyone is hot and nobody fucks on screen, right?

This is kind of the problem I think that the author has really correctly identified: movie stars have had to get more and more conventionally 'hot', but have less and less sex and romance on screen. It creates a fiction of a sexless world where people still have body insecurity but don't have any hint of what the point of bodies might actually be. I agree that past decades gave unhealthy standards of how to pursue love and romance to previous generations, but I don't think that the answer is simply "well hide it away now; they can take no messages, be plastic Instagram stars, and just figure it out themselves".
posted by corb at 2:47 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

If you watch the scene in the context of the movie, it's clear that Sarah is changed by the experience. The bombs are a brilliant bit of symbolism; notice that the scene begins with them, then pivots when Kyle starts stuffing them roughly into a bag. Sarah distracts him from that. After the clip I posted, in the scene directly after the sex scene, they're light-hearted and happy, and Sarah tosses the bag of bombs to Kyle confidently. And he almost drops them. Their dynamic has changed completely; Sarah Connor has committed to the fight.

But what gets me most is simple. When the sex starts Sarah Connor is on the bottom; at the end she's on top.

It's the only time she and Kyle have sex, so it's definitely the moment that Sarah Connor got pregnant, and I use that term advisedly. She knew she was going to be the mother of humanity's greatest hero, who would go on to save millions and lead us in a war against the robots who had just tried to kill her. She knew her son had sent a time-traveler friend of his who was madly in love with her to rescue her from a time-traveling robot. I'd say she knew exactly what she was doing in that moment; saving humanity by banging a ridiculously hot guy.

But whether she was aware of that at the time or not, that was the moment she stopped being a victim. And started being a mother.

The transformation in her character is so notable from that point that if you watched the movie on TV back in the day it made no sense whatsoever; they cut most of the scene. But if you saw it uncensored, you never questioned it.

I like sex in my art. I have a major thing for gay romance novels, they're awesome. I'd much rather watch or read about two characters having sex than fighting. But when a masterful artist manages to combine both those aspects of the human experience in a moving way, absolutely astonishing things can happen. It's really difficult to do, which is why it's done badly so often, but I think it's worth aspiring to.
posted by MrVisible at 3:24 PM on November 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

"Is it necessary to advance the plot?" is perhaps a nice hook for getting people to click on your dumb YouTube "movie explainer" video but it's a pretty facile way to judge what is or what isn't valuable in a work of art.
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:11 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Well, what method do you recommend for judging what is or isn't valuable in a work of art?

(Spoiler: it'll come down to "I know it when I see it.")
posted by MrVisible at 4:33 PM on November 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

These days I only watch movies that are endorsed by the Junior Anti-Sex League
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 5:44 PM on November 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well, speaking as a person who generally fast forwards through fight scenes/action sequences/battles in order to get to the romance, I am generally, but not unconditionally, pro-sex scene.

And I know I’m not alone in this because fanfic, as a concept, exists.
posted by thivaia at 6:44 PM on November 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

The whorephobia/anti sex worker sentiment here is loud

Also lol at the idea that not having a sex scene in a movie makes the production automatically less exploitative than productions with sex scenes. I've been on porn shoots and sex-based performance spaces that were done ethically and with full consent of all involved. Meanwhile there are plenty of productions that are all chaste and pure but turn out to be horribly exploitative - and often they use the "but we're the pure good ones!" as a cover.
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:54 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

"Is it necessary to advance the plot?" is perhaps a nice hook for getting people to click on your dumb YouTube "movie explainer" video but it's a pretty facile way to judge what is or what isn't valuable in a work of art.

I suppose if you don't mind your art loaded up with meaningless cruft you could toss in tons of crap that doesn't mean anything. Me, I like my art lean.

Your values may vary.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:34 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's a little like if they were making a movie and decided a fight was important, but instead of showing the fight they carefully arranged the set and costumes so that you saw people preparing to punch and moving around like they were going to fight, but you never saw a punch land or any fighting.

That sounds like the first Hunger Games movie.
posted by Tenuki at 7:46 PM on November 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

The whorephobia/anti sex worker sentiment here is loud

If Metafilter is known for anything it's for its wise and unassailable judgment about what people should do with their bodies.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:49 PM on November 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

I suppose if you don't mind your art loaded up with meaningless cruft you could toss in tons of crap that doesn't mean anything.

Here's a radical thought - why a plot in the first place?

In the extremely early days, when movies were first introduced to the world, moving pictures were simply a means to impress the audience with spectacle of light and color.

Even today there's a market for "plotless" work - Slice of life is pretty popular in the anime or manga genre. You could argue that, say, Dazed and Confused (review by Roger Ebert) goes along those lines too.

I accept that everyone wants different things, and even interprets everything differently - but when I said I was disappointed with the fare on offer, I wasn't asking for nudity or sex. Sexy can just be in the way a person looks at another, like the person upthread who mentioned the ending of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

The one that always makes me laugh is the infamous Folgers Christmas Ad from 2009 that somehow inadvertently had loads of sexual tension between the supposed brother and sister. Interview with the producer where they asked him what the hell he was thinking, lol.
posted by xdvesper at 8:59 PM on November 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Every filmmaker saw the sex scenes in The Room (2003), and said "Oh god, is that what our sex scenes look like to other people? Y'know what, let's just stop doing them, just to be safe.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 4:35 AM on November 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

xdvesper ! ZOMG! I somehow missed the real commercial and only saw the parody and was mildly confused about why anyone was making a weird fake commercial about Folgers and incest. I just thought it was like the Blowjob Mastercard video but in somewhat poorer taste and not as funny.

Thanks!
posted by sotonohito at 6:23 AM on November 28, 2023

The one that always makes me laugh is the infamous Folgers Christmas Ad from 2009 that somehow inadvertently had loads of sexual tension between the supposed brother and sister. Interview with the producer where they asked him what the hell he was thinking, lol.

The parody video link is buried partway through the article, here it is.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:01 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

This article (and discussion) is reminding me of a Metafilter comment which talked about how lots of Roman women converted to Christianity despite its demonization of sexual pleasure in general and female sexual pleasure in particular because the context was a Roman empire in which sexual assault was rife, from the emperor all the way down the hierarchy. I'm sure there's some sort of Harvey Weinstein analogy to be made here.
posted by clawsoon at 9:11 AM on November 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Was Game of Thrones better for having all those sexposition scenes? I don't think so, and that's an entirely subjective values judgement by me I'm not claiming otherwise. But I still think it's true that they put in those scenes because they wanted to show some tits for titilation.

Game of Thrones is probably the ultimate example of adding extra sex and nudity for titilation and to create a faux sense of "this is serious TV for serious adults, you can tell because of the sex scenes." They added plenty of scenes that were not in the book and, occasionally, rewrote consensual sex scenes to be instead portrayed as rape (i.e., Dany and Kal Drogo's first time, which is still problematic in the books due to her age, but it is explicitly written as consensual and, if I recall correctly, he actually accepts her initial refusal and doesn't attempt anything until she later comes to him willingly; in the show, he unquestionably rapes her and then she still somehow falls in love with him).

It's so infamous for this that SNL had a parody sketch in which the show was written by a teenage boy adding in all the boobs and the George RR Martin character was saying how much he approved and that this kid really understood that, even though he didn't actually say so in the books, he was definitely imagining all these scenes full of nude women.

Which is to say, I guess, that although I don't think sex and nudity in film is inherently bad or exploitative, it often is and can definitely be used by lazy writers as a way of trying to telegraph that what you're watching is very serious and adult because it deals with serious and adult things like sex and nudity.
posted by asnider at 9:28 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

telegraph that what you're watching is very serious and adult because it deals with serious and adult things like sex and nudity

I.e., the "Caligula" school of cinema
posted by Devoidoid at 9:32 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I.e., the "Caligula" school of cinema

Movies you read for the articles.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:58 AM on November 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

I guess what I don't understand is, what is so adult and serious about not including sex scenes? I'm afraid that suggestions that one is simply too above it all to be easily taken in by depictions of sex and nudity don't really work for me; I think, ace folks aside of course, that a person who is categorically unmoved by sex, who finds it ridiculous or embarrassing, is uncommon. I am not going to judge anyone who does feel that way, but I strongly suspect this is not the default setting for most viewers.

That said, can sex and nudity be gratuitous? I think so, but I don't think we can all agree on what that looks like. There is copious nudity in Deadwood, not all of it titillating, and I would argue that nudity is necessary to show us the lives of the people in a hardscrabble frontier town. (It's necessary for us to see pigs eating dead bodies, too.) Whereas I would argue that much of the sex and nudity in Game of Thrones is purely there as softcore porn, and sometimes that nudity actively distracts the viewer from what is actually happening in the story -- the story, as in a '70s porno, becomes in those moments present simply as a setting FOR the sex and nudity. That's one thing when the story is a guy delivers pizza and the next thing you know... and it's something else altogether when the story is a series of critically acclaimed novels.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:33 AM on November 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Calvin and Hobbes on the subject.
posted by clawsoon at 11:52 AM on November 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

what is so adult and serious about not including sex scenes?

Is anyone making that argument? I said that including them is sometimes a lazy way of conveying that something is "adult and serious." That doesn't mean that excluding them is what is actually adult and serious.

Sex scenes can be done well. They can be done poorly. They can be done in service of the art as a whole. They can be done purely gratuitously. Including them (or deliberately excluding them) doesn't automatically make something better or worse, more or less serious, more adult or more childish (except that things that are actually for children shouldn't include them, generally speaking).
posted by asnider at 2:17 PM on November 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

The avid and unerring focus on plot as the 'art' of film is one of the most difficult habits to break my film theory students of. Yes, there is a plot and a story and narrative. But how it is told affects that! Which can include gratuitous sleazy director abuse of acting staff. But also can include specific notes about eye contact between characters in a scene.

I like that Pacific Rim got mentioned above - del Toro specifically said he filmed the dojo fight scene like a sex scene. How does a director do that? By having established visual language not just "plot". Lean art doesn't avoid sex or characterisation through sex or so on, it just makes scenes do double or triple work.

I am reminded of one of the few sex scenes in Good Girls where Beth (Christina Hendricks as a housewife whose life has been blown to pieces by a cheating lying husband) and Rio (Manny Montana a gang leader who works with her on the counterfeiting revenge work) fuck in a bathroom while she is on a date with her husband. No nudity, barely even excessive skin. It's all eye contact and gestural, breathwork. It's brilliant acting, lighting, sound design. It's integral to understanding the deeply fucked up relationship between the two, and Beth's character arc as it relates to Rio. It illustrates the differences between Beth as the brilliant housewife she was, and Beth as someone who is taking control of her life. It's an upmarket bar bathroom, but it's still a bathroom. It's a break from Beth's prior life and a moment where she is prioritising not just herself, but her pleasure. It's immaculately done and incredibly hot.

Fade to black doesn't show the negotiation in body movement and eye contact the pair do. It doesn't show the restrained beginning becoming less and less manageable as they continue. It doesn't show the very specific ways in with Rio touches Beth as a comparison to her husband. To take the sex scene out - to just leave the obvious interpretation of Rio going into the bathroom after Beth - removes the important character work that shows how much this is a facet of Beth's increasing independence and power. In fact it would likely make that unclear - the cinematic language of a man following a woman into a bathroom, the implication of sex, the characters they play - would likely show the opposite. Changing to to no sex would be possible, but would undermine the mirroring parallel of Beth's husband's affair and her own, and the difference for their identity and self of self, and damage to the marriage.

A scene is always there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is the director is an exploitative sleaze. Sometimes because it shows something in the most evocative way. Sometimes it is the 'leanest' way to combine elements into one moment. Analysis is kind of important in working that out.

(I mean I have similar feelings about the sex scene in Starship Troopers - it's Dizzy finally getting the sex and connection she has been wanting and foreshadows that she won't make it home, and that for all the fancy future shit, they're still humans desperate for moments of connection - and that its way more meaningful for her than for him. From the awkward playfulness to the tender moments it's all her, all about her, and he is just doing his part. It's tragic and awkward and sad, while also being desperately awkwardly hot, the pacing is off and they're trying but it's not endgame for either)
posted by geek anachronism at 3:02 PM on November 28, 2023 [9 favorites]

I find it kind of ironic that one of the 'sex positive' directors includes Verhoven and Starship Troopers, with a side comment that 'the characters are not horny for each other, only for annhilation' when the main plot of the movie is a 3 way love story between the 'hot characters', the sex scene is classically exploitative (the sexed lady dies immediately afterwards like a James Bond conquest) and since she dies, he can date the other hot girl whose husband or whatever also died so it's not cheating. The movie may be camp but that's why nobody likes sex scenes - if you miss the camp it just reads as lazy.

Of course if you like the movie more than I do you can read it geek anachronism's way and see it sort of positively. I just disagree.

Also, Euphoria sex scenes were meant to be straight up male fantasy but also to show minimum amounts of skin, and as fake as 'bra on' sex. It was just a CW show turned up to 11 to occasionally show dicks and tits. It's also kind of ironic that the subset of students they wanted to focus on are the ones who report having far less sex than they might have in the past - all that abstinence and disease stuff worked and now that's a problem to the same subset who pushed it! It's also obvious Zendya had so much more power for how she would be dressed than any other actress. Yikes.

Also I think the thesis is kind of wrong - doesn't every Leonardo DeCaprio movie have a sex scene for him? I haven't see Killers of the Flower Moon, but if it doesn't it might be the first.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:13 PM on November 28, 2023

Comes down to the observable fact that depicting sexual acts in a feature film within a narrative in a convincing non-trivial manner is a rather difficult challenge. I can think of non-cringe examples on one hand. For 80s erotic thrillers, maybe Betty Blue (less thriller more psychological) or under-rated Two Moon Junction (cheese with clever subtexts)?

Writing convincing sex scenes in literature is just as challenging. John Updike (often criticized, recipient of 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction award) could evoke sensual erotica in his works (his poem about neutrinos is swell). Jacqueline Susann was a talented (and under-rated) American pop fiction author who could write vivid sex scenes (which were often bad-sex as a commentary on character dynamics).
posted by ovvl at 5:03 PM on November 28, 2023

I find it kind of ironic that one of the 'sex positive' directors includes Verhoven and Starship Troopers, with a side comment that 'the characters are not horny for each other, only for annhilation' when the main plot of the movie is a 3 way love story between the 'hot characters', the sex scene is classically exploitative (the sexed lady dies immediately afterwards like a James Bond conquest) and since she dies, he can date the other hot girl whose husband or whatever also died so it's not cheating. The movie may be camp but that's why nobody likes sex scenes - if you miss the camp it just reads as lazy.


I suspect 'sex positive' is less the cultural term and more as a note that he is a director who will use sex on screen. Positive sign for sex on screen, not lack.

Because your response isn't wrong! These characters are horny for annihilation! Dizzy is the exception, being so horny for Rico, and as a result she does die, as the sexed up lady. Clearing the way for the more normative character to be the upstanding hetero lead against the alien invasion.

The themes of fascism are not subtle. It is camp, yes. But like all camp there is a vicious mockery at play - in this case the militaristic, power horny, acceptable alien enemy aspects of both contemporary war and war/action film. I don't claim the man as a brilliant auteur, but I do enjoy the film while also acknowledging that the things it critiques it also does. The perennial problem of the war film.

I read a lot of romance, and fanfic. The ability to write a good sex scene hinges on two things - hitting the right horny buttons or the right characterisation ones. If it is for titillating it needs to do the first and therefore tends to be absolutely bland market appropriate for commercial film/fiction, or absurdly specific and comfortable in alienating everyone who isn't into it. Characterisation through sex can also still be arousing or off-putting, but it accomplishes something otherwise. And often something that cannot be communicated without sex because it is about sex AND whatever the thing is.

Commercial film absolutely relies on blockbuster style common appeal. Therefore rarely will do anything niche or interesting, but similarly doesn't go excessively hard on characterisation either and due to the broad market, rarely with something as intimate as sex. It's not that sex and a fight are cognate forms - fighting is cognate to the broad familiar, romantic, aesthetically pleasing, flirtatious, or relational interactions; sex is cognate to the highly intimate and personal violence on screen. The death scene, torture, the point where two characters interact in a raw way - that is where fighting accomplishes what sex does on screen. Not the ensemble choreographed CGI scene, or the chase, the shoot out. The fight can show character in that scene, sure, but the level of characterisation in a good sex scene is one that requires far more attention than just choreography and explosions.
posted by geek anachronism at 10:55 PM on November 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well, from my queer perspective we are currently living in a Golden Age of thoughtful, erotic, plot-relevant sex scenes in movies and TV shows from around the world. The 80s and 90s had a few moments but were nothing compared to the joyful, free, smart and easily available portrayals of realistic gay and lesbian sex we now have in many stories.

I guess I should rtfa now, and will be looking for an acknowledgement of that.
posted by mediareport at 9:15 AM on November 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

“Make it sexy or the fascists win” is my new life motto
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:02 PM on November 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel actively hostile to this because the rhetoric sounds too much like reactionary dudes complaining that stuff like the Me Too movement is a sign of the culture becoming "Puritanical."

Those 80s and 90s sex scenes were overwhelmingly written, directed, cast, and photographed by and for a certain kind of straight dude with a pretty narrow taste in what kind of women were considered attractive. Most people saying "meh" to that aren't saying "meh" to sex scenes. They're saying "meh" to sex scenes that clearly aren't meant for them.
posted by straight at 8:48 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]