Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it | Hacker News Reader

Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

bloodknife.com

663 pointsAvshalom665 comments

This was a fun read, especially as someone who grew up with those 80s and 90s movies.

That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.

Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.

Nowadays, that's basically the starting point; what we can we sell outside of the movie? how can we milk the franchise for as much as possible?

And that's where a lot of the sex appeal is lost. Marvel movies can't be as raunchy as a result.

Another topic that the author touched on was the way the ideal aesthetic has changed in not just our bodies but where we live or what we do in our spare time.

I agree that more and more we are optimising for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.

Anyway, it's a complex and interesting topic and I'd love to read more about this perhaps from even further back (50s or 60s) if anyone has something similar to this post?

Even the R-rated ones don’t axtually deal with sex or nudity much - see John Wick

That's because western families often have no problem with watching massive amounts of violence with each other but watching a graphic sex scene with memaw and pepaw is gonna make you squirm.

I guess you mean 'american' when you say 'western'?

Having an R-rating didn't mean a lack of toys. "Alien" came out in 1979 to an R-rating. Yet a friend at the time (we were both 10) received a 12" (30cm) xenomorph action figure for Christmas.

Similarly, Deadpool figures galore.

Correct. But a movie about incest, rape or pedophilia would probably not quality.

« Oh you got a les cousins dangereux dolls honey. So cute »

Most R movies have no incest, rape, or pedophilia, so I don't understand the point of your comment.

Oh I’m sorry then, It’s irrelevant indeed. I assume R was anything except pornography.

Game of Thrones is/was very popular despite featuring all of these (maybe except pedophilia)

How old was Danearys at the start?

13 in the books. I guess they probably bumped that age up in the tv show?

Hell yes they did, the Drogo sex scene would be hilariously uncomfortably outrageous if they even hinted at her being underage.

Game of Thrones was lauded for it's gritty shocking approach to sex and death, at least in the first couple seasons, but I don't think a TV show could ever touch the harshness of the world as described in books.

> Hell yes they did, the Drogo sex scene would be hilariously uncomfortably outrageous if they even hinted at her being underage.

I think it would have been outrageous for a different reason, but the show's scene was still uncomfortable for its lack of consent. One of the key points of that scene in the book was how cautious Drogo was to respect boundaries. In the show, the repetition of "no" was used as a command, as a denial of Daenerys' choices, and to state that her choices do not matter. In the book, the repetition of "no" was used as a question, not a command, in order to ask for consent despite a language barrier. This was used to draw a contrast between Daenerys in Westerosi society, where she had no choices of her own, and Daenerys in Dothraki society, where her choices were respected.

There are a lot of other children in that television show. They did not seem to shy away from implying they had sex with people for all kinds of horrific reasons.

Because it featured all of those. People would justify it as "a gritty and realistic portrayal of historical attitudes", but any historian will tell you that's a load of bull; it was basically just porn. A good partial deconstruction of GoT's shallow relationship with reality can be found here:

https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...

Not explicit but Ser Meryn comes to mind.

True true. I stand corrected. GoT had the « super heroes » treatment when it come to merchandising. And yes it display all of that.

I still think Disney is the culprit. ( vs HBO on TV, but still, I would not be surprised if a happy meal with GoT theme existed )

You're probably not totally off. GoT was special in quite a few aspects, but I would not be surprised if it was true in the general case - in fact, I think GoT was popular exactly for breaking that mold, but this gives diminishing returns.

A more general rating can also cause people to lose interest. The original Star Wars would have had a G rating, Lucas added a severed hand scene to move it to PG rating making it seem more acceptable to adult audiences.

> That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.

I agree, this is the most likely explanation.

It's just like pop songs which are only ever about the one thing everyone on the planet understands. At some point companies decide to target the lowest common denominator in order broaden their audience and maximize profits. The results might still be good but the fact certain qualities were lost in the process cannot be denied.

The only good Star Wars movie of the last umpteen years was Rogue One, where they weren’t trying to sell toys to children.

We have different taste, but as a matter of fact, they did create and sell Rogue One toys.

https://jedibusiness.com/star-wars-figures.aspx?type=toyline...

I think PG-13 had more to do with it than anything else. If you’re coming from an R rating, reaching PG might destroy your movie. PG-13 is far more reachable. No one is trying to peddle serious quantities of Mean Girls merchandise.

I feel like a lot of 80s movies just a generic sex scene or topless woman inserted as a matter of course. Because it was expected whether or not it was remotely relevant to anything.

The infamous “Boob scenes” of 70’s and 80’s cinema always stuck me as a peculiarly pre worldwide web artefact.

ie with ready access to actual, proper porn teenage lads no longer need to see a random set of norks added to films like Police Academy, Porkies or Trading Places solely for titillation[sic].

The world was different back then.

To hook up with someone you had to actually speak to a random stranger, get shot down, deal with it and workout whatever goofy thing you’d said or done before plucking the courage to have another go.

In the meantime there was Sgt Callahan... :P

I remember "Airplane!" took a hilarious crack at this phenomenon.

> Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.

As opposed to... what time in the past where this was not true?

I'd guess this was always true, but to a lesser extent. Movies today are super expensive, and at least the movies discussed here are considered failures if they don't reach a huge ammount of people.

The risk was still there before, but may be not to this extent.

That is the game the studios have been playing. Larger investments, higher risk, but more calculated same-ness with high appeal to the 4 quadrants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-quadrant_movie

Netflix has turned this model upside down and releases films on its platform that are designed to target specific audience groups.

It's now a "solved problem" though. We live in the endpoint where the formula to craft an optimally revenue generating movie is not only possible but expected, and studios are designed with that expectation as a baseline.

There are certainly fewer happy accidents out there now.

I would say it's been a solved problem for all movies. We all know what sells and have for 100 years. People claiming modern movies are all sequels, prequels, and unoriginal aren't really paying attention. We've been telling the same stories for the past 2000 years with the same archetypes, skeletal plots, and emotional presentations. 4 out of 5 times I can tell you what is going to happen at any point in a given movie. All the stories have been told. Critics like to act like this or that is original, but it's really not and they know it. What makes a good movie is acting, immersiveness, humanity, and coherence.

I would argue that there are new twists on the old stories. New settings, new ways of presenting the material, et.c

The Matrix, Memento and Delicatessen come to mind as examples.

And then there are examples of non-original stuff that is just beautifully executed like Die Hard, or Alien.

Marvel movies are also made to export to a global audience looking for family-friendly entertainment. I'm sure some countries' censors would balk at sexual content as much as they would disagreeable political content.

They already make special cuts for china, extended editions for BD releases, director's cut, ... Couldn't they just make another cut for more conservative audiences that omits/tones down a few scenes?

Why would they do that when not spending any resources, time and money on having such scenes is more profitable as it doesn't appear to be hurting their viewership numbers?

Yeah checkout Chinese cinema. A woman in very modest undergarments is considered risque in the movie and treated as such.

> Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.

Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt, Spaceballs (1987) Heck, most of the 1980's cartoons were designed to sell toys.

> I agree that more and more we are optimizing for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.

Social media did this. Before narcissism became en vogue, gym rats and party people existed and no one else really cared because they were not visible. Now they show up in your social media feed every day. They make you feel small and less complete. Maybe you should go to the gym and more clubs to keep up otherwise you aren't cool or interesting. Meanwhile its all senseless, shallow peacocking and hedonism.

This makes me think of a AAA game I was part of where, in early production, it was announced we would target an older audience to be able to stay true to what we were depicting. The art director said not to worry about sales because our actual fan base was adults, anyway.

And then, slowly over the course of the project, the targeted age rating kept decreasing because it was projected we would then sell more.

The author misses the driving force behind most of this - Chinese censorship and the money behind the Chinese market. If you're making a modern blockbuster you'll double your take if you make sure it plays well in China - which you primarily do by making it sexless, ensuring that any gay representation is minor enough to be cut, etc.

https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing...

Bingo! Shooting extra scenes and more CGI for the Chinese audience is way more expensive than just settling the for the LCD of safely not offending people. I also think that's why movies like Deadpool do so well. It's a good movie but it also attracts an audience that is starving for non PG13 movies.

The History of Sexuality (French: L'Histoire de la sexualité) is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality

I find that "invented here first" of western society is nearly always flawed and incorrect. Just like people's claims that "romantic love" is a relatively recent "discovery" of western society when it is readily apparent in literature from civilizations from all over the world. We're all still humans with raw emotions that haven't changed much in probably 100K years.

> And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.

I've been hearing this sentiment lately and don't understand it. What gives one person insight into the psychology of another without an intimate relationship? How can one know another is doing something for "the wrong reasons"? It feels like a lazy stereotyping heuristic.

Actually, I do think I might understand it. It could be introverts failing to achieve full theory of mind about extroverts. Which itself might be a lazy stereotyping heuristic, but at least it has the virtue of reacting to an expressed state of mind, and not an implied one.

> This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure.

This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?

Become financially independent is probably the best you can do. That'll cover not affording to go out and having to live with parents or roommates.

I don't think thats the core issue , sex is down even among school going teenagers

I think teenagers are observing what's going on in their old young adult counterparts.

Live your life and turn off the bullshit. Otherwise, wait for it to burn out. Social media is a bubble, and the milk that helps create the metoo froth.

We’ll sacrifice bad guys to the volcano gods for awhile, then the bubble will pop, the trend will fade and women (in the media) will be thirsting for men who aren’t wusses.

There are almost 7.7 billion people on the planet already, even with less than replacement birthrates, I think we're good on human count for the next 300 years or so at a minimum so unless the birth rate really catastrophically collapses. We could lose an order of magnitude of people without endangering genetic diversity, take significant load off of the environment, and frankly, quite probably improve the human condition with fewer billions of other people to compete with in the world. I recommend seeing how we can extend this trend to demographics and countries it hasn't reached yet.

If your fertility rate is too low, the pention system and the economy collapses

Perhaps a system that relies on ever-expanding populations is bad?

It doesn't rely on ever expanding populations. It relies on retirees to be the minority which is a reasonable assumption to make. After all, everything the elderly buy has to be extracted/made via labor of the young.

The math is more dismal than that. With a 1.5 birth rate (common in Europe) the population drops by more than half in three generations (about 100 years). This causes the economy to collapse—stock valuations have baked in assumptions of future generations of consumers existing. But it can get worse. South Korea has a fertility rate below 1 and Taiwan is headed that way. At that rate, the population drops by almost 90% within a century.

Poorly constructed economies predicated on ever increasing growth have no business existing. Economies will adapt (and should! it just means more economic drag to provide for seniors until the larger, older cohort has aged out and equilibrium at a lower population level has been reached).

It's disturbing to me that people think population must keep growing. If anything the world could stand to LOSE a significant portion of the population. Resources would be far less strained.

If we built our economies on the expectation of continued population growth, then that just means there was a MASSIVE lack of forethought. But that doesn't mean the solution is to start pumping out more kids. Instead we adapt how these structures work to accommodate the flat or lessened population numbers.

This policy is called degrowth (or ecofascism) and it's not true. Resources were used far more inefficiently and many of them were used more in absolute terms when the population was smaller. It's even possible that we need this many people to do the scientific research needed to use things more efficiently.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom...

Identifying degrowth with ecofascism isn't accurate.

Specially when it's clearly not true. Just look at population not in work in western countries, even outside the current pandemic situation. If we really needed more people wouldn't we have near full employment? Economy will adapt to less demand, though there will be likely pains, but money is just numbers anyway...

The stock market isn’t the only aspect of the economy. The events you propose aren’t universally held to be bad.

Personally I use escorts, it is not easy finding an independent, good looking, permissive, not-very-expensive girl but by my calculations that's a far more efficient way of satisfying my inner-chimp until I want to get married and have kids.

I do not want to participate in some mating ritual that involves two persons lying to each other in order to just relieve some sexual tension. In Romania I do not feel that generally girls are ok with no strings attached sex without this dishonest dance and even so, I couldn't probably get as attractive a girl as an escort. Maybe I could by investing a lot more time than I'm comfortable with just to satisfy a basic urge... but for 100$ I can have sex with girls of the same level of say Emma Stone that really know what they're doing.

So if I make even 25$/h that's 4h of work for 1 sex session, which will take place entirely when I feel the desire for it. To find a similar (looking) girl that will have sex "for free" will probably take more than 10x more time and even then the actual sex might not be as good. Even if it is as good it will happen when the stars align and we both want it at the same time.

I appreciate your honesty. For the last several years I have supported a charity that helps women to escape this cycle of oppression in Romania. I've heard some of their stories, how difficult life is after they've found a way out. All I can say is that victims abound despite appearances.

Thank you. I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me or not and go out of my way to make her feel good (I perform oral and am generally not defensive). When I say I look for 'permissive' girls I mean I look for girls that permit kissing and "sports fucking". I don't choke / slap / hair pull or whatever. If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy sports-fucking I don't persist, finish quickly and simply never visit her again.

I have heard my share of sad stories from them and I don't revisit those. Regardless of my participation or not in this trade I know the trade will go on, there will always be men who seek this kind of service so I appease my conscience by treating the girls well and not revisiting those that don't seem to genuinely enjoy my company.

I simply can not believe one can act so well in front of me and on the side be forced to do this. I mean moaning is simple to fake but the 30 min of conversation of the 1h I pay for? Keeping a cheerful vibe while opressed is hard to do.

> Keeping a cheerful vibe while oppressed is hard to do.

Millions of retail workers would disagree. And acting isn't even the oldest profession.

There is no need for acting, a girl would have lots of visitors and make similar amounts of money even if she wasn't cheerful, probably make more if she's the fast-fuck type.

You underestimate how horny some men are. One girl was telling me how it was 15 years ago.. men would line up in front of the apt building, go in, get a blowjob and a quick fuck for like 20min door-to-door, pay 25$ and leave. I don't know if she in particular didn't perform "girlfriend experience" type work or that's how they mostly were but trust me, there are more men who don't care about how happy the girl is and don't give a crap about her being cheerful or not.

I'm not suggesting you are doing anything morally wrong, but keep in mind that they may be faced with a situation where not only are they being pressured into this by specific people but there simply aren't good alternatives for them to make decent money.

Men tend to make more money than women. If a woman has a child or children to care for, sex work or exotic dancing etc al may be her only really viable option.

I will add that like with any industry, insiders will know some tricks and may have been coached on how to handle certain things. In the book Mayflower Madame, the escorts were explicitly told to act excited if a guy splurged at dinner and bought an entire bottle of champagne and not act like this was an everyday occurrence for them even though it might be the second or third time that day.

There's a world of difference between the girls I'm talking about and the escorts who get booked for whole-night affairs and go to dinner with clients.

Honestly I don't even know if there are any escorts like that in Romania. The few people that could afford them are relatively well known and going to dinner in an expensive restaurant would be seen by basically everybody which I assume is not desired by men of high status. They might book them at the hotel though and honestly for 1000$ a night or more I assume it is easy to act.

However I pay 70$-100$, you think a girl would care enough to act for such little money? Even though it's Romania, most people that make money easily learn to not give a crap about money and are not generally motivated by money.

Edit: also, I never tip, I only pay the advertised price.

I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent any time on the leader board here (under a different handle).

A number of people on the leader board are millionaires. I have reason to believe their participation on HN is part of what makes them wealthy.

I was homeless for nearly six years and remain dirt poor and continue to get a lot of guff any time I try to talk about that, no matter the reason and no matter the framing.

I have six years of college. Etc.

While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty. But trying to network with business professionals on a platform that literally helps a lot of people become quite wealthy has done relatively little for my bottom line and I have been repeatedly told "Go get a real job" and this kind of crap.

You said you are paying four times your hourly wage and I imagine that $25/hour is fairly good money for Romania. It would be decent pay in the US where people are trying to advocate for a minimum wage of $15/hour.

I don't know what her cut is out of what you pay and I don't know how much of her time you are getting, but for a lot of women, that would be vastly better pay than they have any hope of making any other way and they will put up with it simply because the alternatives amount to starving to death and may be just as objectionable as sex work.

Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.

Thank you for your honesty.

> While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty.

The way I find girls is through a community forum which practices reviews. I very rarely visit a "new" girl which doesn't have good reviews from reputable members so while I am sorry to hear your experience, I have never offered money to a girl for sex out of the blue or because I felt she was vulnerable. I've only ever been to girls that explicitly advertise such services.

> Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.

You assume I am going to girls that are generally treated terribly, have a pimp that takes all their money and are happy to act cheerful for 100$ per hour having sex with 20+ different men per week.

There's no need for her to act, there's plenty of demand for warm bodies without any need for good social skills. And I believe generally those girls that don't offer good GFE are probably forced into it. That would probably even be the majority of the market. I don't know, I haven't done any field research on this but I assume I only visit like 1-2% of girls and am very rarely dissapointed with a new girl because it's hard to fake honest signals.

However it is not hard to make a decent living as an independent girl. The good ones generally work from 10am to 22pm at most. They take good care of themselves, screen clients and build up private lists where they won't even take new clients. If she just wants to live a basic good life she could take 5 regular clients 2-3 times per month and make 1000-2000$ easily working at most 20h per month. That money could well pay for eating only takeout and have a very nice appartment in Bucharest.

My very first words in my first comment were: I'm not suggesting you are doing anything morally wrong

I'm not making any of the assumptions you accuse me of. I'm just trying to say that the world of work and opportunities available to women are different than for men, so their logic for why they make certain choices may not be what a man would expect based on how he thinks about his choices in relation to how to earn a living.

I'm medically handicapped and for that reason I have been celibate for nearly 16 years. If I thought I could successfully become a sex worker or exotic dancer and make good money for a while to pay off my debts and pay cash for a house, I would likely do that. I have no moral objection to sex work and I've thought a great deal about it and a lot of marriages are thinly veiled sex-for-money deals, in essence.

I would rather get paid by the hour for sex than be some man's property pretending we "love" each other when we don't. I'm crystal clear on that detail.

I'm sorry if you feel uncomfortable with the idea that maybe some of these women don't really want to be doing this kind of work and feel like it's a big moral issue if they don't. But the simple reality is that, say, in Hollywood, women need to look good and be sexy to become successful. In contrast, men are deemed to be sexually attractive because they are successful.

When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do. This is rampant across multiple industries and it's something people mostly don't want to talk about and it's part of why you see so much sexual harassment of women on the job, etc.

I haven't caved to the pressure to go that route because I have a bigger personal demon looming over me that does such terrible things to a person it is classified as a dread disease.

But trying to get into that probably isn't clarifying anything. It's probably just opening up a giant can of worms pointlessly.

I think I will stop here, whether it served to clarify anything or not. Sometimes the least worst action is just "stop digging your grave deeper."

You have a good day.

I won't comment on the personal stuff because I've stopped trying to save everyone. For the record I rolled on random.org with a 20% chance saying I should offer to personally help you and you got 57.

> When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do

Men are generally not epected to use their sexuality because it doesn't work. If it worked I'm sure some % of men would use it. Proof : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165800

I don't believe women are expected to use their sexuality. Women just have that tool available to them and some will choose to use it. Some men will only hire or promote those kinds of women and honestly I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, we could debate this for hours.

If it worked I'm sure some % of men would use it. Proof : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165800

I absolutely agree that if they could, there are men who would.

I don't agree that women are not expected to use their sexuality. I'm not interested in debating it.

I've stated my opinion. Some folks here will recognize my handle and have some idea of who I am and yadda and others won't. It is inevitable that different people will perceive my opinions differently depending on how much and what they know about me (and no doubt other factors as well).

You have a good day.

> I rolled on random.org with a 20% chance saying I should offer to personally help you and you got 57.

Funniest thing I’ve read today. Is that a normal thing you do? Just online or for the panhandler at the corner via mobile? How do you determine the saving throw? So many Q’s..

Seems like an incredibly disturbing characteristic to me. Especially if they tell the person every time they “didn’t make the cut”

For a while, whenever I felt tempted to goof off a little, I'd look at my phone. It if was an even number, I followed my desire, if [the last digit of the clock] was an odd number I carried on with what I was doing. Figured it would cut procrastination in half. I think it did.

I think many people could benefit by reading “Revolting Prostitutes” by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. I covers how sex worker’s rights are related to worker’s rights in general.

> I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me

Do consider that it is in the service provider’s interest to make you think this. When you are paying money for experience, you can’t use how the experience makes you feel to evaluate how the employees feel about it.

> If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy [it, I] never visit her again.

Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.

I’m not saying that prostitution is wrong or that some sex workers don’t enjoy they job. It just might be the only realistic option for someone.

Some things that a country could do so that people have the option to not be a prostitute:

* food and housing for people who need it

* equal pay and career opportunity for men and women

* drug treatment programs that don’t put people in jail for addiction

See “Revolting Prostitutes” for more details

I have no problem with a girl acting that she likes me in order to get my money. If she truly is that good of an actor then props to her. I only have a problem if she is forced into this profession by someone and my personal belief is that one can not be a perfect actor while being forced and abused by someone.

> Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.

You are speaking from theory and books. I speak from experience, I have been to a lot of girls that will tell you right quick that you are going too hard, won't like any position you want and are generally openly obnoxious to you so that you will leave as fast as possible. Usually you will find these after 23pm with low prices. I could write a small book on all types of sex workers I've encountered and very few of them are actually pleasant to be around. Now is that because they select their own customers just as the customers select them or because they're acting we will never know.

> It just might be the only realistic option for someone.

You are victimizing them because you haven't met them. I have yet to find a girl that is actually grateful as you would expect someone to be when they earn in 30 min what others work a whole day for. They could find a corporate job that easily pays 600-700 euros, live with a roommate and cook their own food like most other girls in Bucharest or have sex for 2h per day and make 4 times that. 99% of them, even the ones I carefully select are arrogant and spend money like there's no tomorrow living an expensive lifestyle. Can't really blame them because I am basically doing the same thing but to suggest these are hidden victims is really showing your lack of inexperience.

I'm not saying there aren't victims of abuse, what I'm saying is that it is hard to hide such abuse.

Not trying to insult but genuinely curious: how do you derive any kind of satisfaction (mental I guess) from this interaction? Don't you feel disgusted with yourself once it's over with? Why is just jacking off not a better option than this?

Why would I pay money to make myself feel disgusted? I am not a masochist. I derive great pleasure and satisfaction from this. My stress levels are kept well below my friends who are desperate to find girls and have sex but are disgusted by sex workers. I have much lower anxiety around women in general too and I am able to communicate with them normally without the overwhelming need for sex.

I just believe that mouthwash and soap works. Been doing this for 5-6 years now and it only gets better as I get better at treating them better, being more relaxed which makes them more relaxed etc.

> Why is just jacking off not a better option than this?

Why are you watching videos in 720p+ instead of using magazines? It's just a higher resolution experience.

Hey I'm glad to see another fellow HNer with a similar mindset - I've actually had those same calculations as you and made similar choices. In fact I travel quite a bit and have basically tried escorts in at least 30+ countries (including Romania).

I see a problem developing though where having so easily "hooked-up" with good looking women for money anywhere I am, even if I do get married at some point, I fear my urge to try someone new (and hence cheat on my partner) will be pretty strong after a while just because it's so easy and convenient to do so. I don't have a solution for this and this is also the reason I'm not able to get myself to commit to a serious relationship.

Not sure if you've thought of this or experienced this issue.

> I fear my urge to try someone new (and hence cheat on my partner) will be pretty strong

I am the kind of person that will stick with anything if I love it. Even with escorts if I find one that I really like and she really stands out I will go see her exclusively until things change. I won't feel the need for variety just for the sake of it but I know not everyone feels this way.

I haven't tried this but there are people out there that build "harems" while being honest about it. If you truly can't live without variety and are confident in yourself you will find a girl that wants an open relationship or maybe you can find someone bisexual that can enjoy variety with you.

How do you prevent catching nasty STD's while trying out so many escorts? Like a lot of the infections like herpes, gonorrhea, Chlamydia and even herpes are spread through kissing and oral sex, so even condoms don't always save you. And a lot of these infections can be asymptomatic so a quick look at the girl also doesn't help. Have always wondered how people who follow lifestyle like you deal with this.

People can get sick after eating wrong food, due to chemical or bacterial contamination. Where do you think this is more likely to happen: in a restaurant with professional staff that feeds 100 people every day, or on a picnic without professional catering?

I think escorts are safer than casual sex, their job is at stake.

The analogy doesn't make sense cause people aren't served the same food. Whereas a prostitute is reusing her body. I agree sex workers are more likely to take precautions but alas just because of having multiple sex partners they are more likely to suffer from various STIs. As I said earlier wearing a condom doesn't save you from a variety of infections. So just having sex with multiple partners increases your risk of infections. A study from England that looked into it:

> FSWs were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia, and three times more likely to be diagnosed with gonorrhoea than other female attendees, adjusting for demographic factors.

https://sti.bmj.com/content/90/4/344

> people aren't served the same food

The contamination is unlikely to come from raw food itself, chefs at restaurants are buying from the same retail channels as the rest of the people.

The source of contamination can be improper storage or handling, kitchen equipment, dishes and cutlery, people doing all the above. All these things are reused in restaurants.

> twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia

See the table on page 347. For chlamydia, "period prevalence" figure is 10.1% for sex workers, 8.5% for other female attendees. That's 20% difference, not twice as likely.

Compensating for demographics factors is hard. You can surely compensate for the factor "young", can probably compensate for the factor "single", but how would you compensate for the factor "promiscuous", i.e. likely to go out and have casual sex? Because that's the demographic group people gonna sleep with, instead of sex workers.

> This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?

Why do we need to? The data shows that sex, drug use, etc., actually peaked with baby boomers. They were peak frivolity. It’s only because they created all the media for decades that we think those were good things. Millennials are a more sober and serious generation for a more sober and serious time. No need to regress.

> Millennials are a more sober and serious generation for a more sober and serious time. No need to regress.

I mean, the US did embark on a multi-decade war. But is our time fundamentally more serious than what the Boomers went through?

A boomer could graduate high school, get a job, buy a car, buy a house, and start saving for retirement.

Younger generations have to work 10X as hard for a chance at that kind of middle class lifestyle.

When it comes to where you live it's poor job prospects or unaffordable real estate: pick one. Everything goes up but wages. If you're not in the "professional class" by 30-40 years old you're in real trouble. There's an alternate path that involves living in low cost of living places and working your ass off while you live below your means, but that's not really easier just different.

Younger generations, especially those younger than GenX, know that you just can't fuck around... literally or metaphorically. The party's over.

Edit: Someone will comment that this was only true for white boomers. You're right. Now it's true for nobody.

It didn’t just “happen” with boomers. My parents didn’t have their first home until in their mid thirties, payed 13% interest on their mortgage, worked plenty of shit jobs on the way there, saving etc. Your description of the boomers is idealized and I think not remotely the norm. They enjoyed far fewer material possessions than we do today, and by many measures had fewer money-making opportunities than exist today, and capital wasn’t nearly as free as it is today. When you’re in your 40’s (provided you make smart choices in your 20’s and 30’s) you’ll have far more wealth than the kids of that time will. Part of it is just a function of longevity and saving. Stop expecting to be able to buy a house when you graduate. It wasn’t true for my boomer parents, wasn’t true for me (younger genX), and doesn’t seem to have changed now. If you seriously think you’re a more dour generation with tougher problems, it should be all the more motivation to stop spending money on frivolous services and throw-away possessions and save, save, save. Focus on bringing social and chemical stability to your life and creating a new, stable family. Leverage the myriad money making opportunities out there. I read comments like yours and then read an article in a business rag talking about the disrupted workforce of today, specifically how easy money is giving younger workers more freedom to set the terms of their employment. I would have killed for the low-barrier-to-entry opportunities available today on the Internet when I was in my teens. If you can’t make it in America in today’s environment, it’s a product more of your informal environmental education. Get new teachers - don’t complain, up your game.

I'm not trying to glorify a life of reckless abandon, but in the context of the actual article, it's a little concerning to me that normal parts of human life like humor and sexuality seem to be a negative to you, and we should instead strive for "sobriety." That seems a rather grim view of human existence. I'm also not sure I can take seriously the notion that somehow this is a more serious moment in history than all of the others that came before it. The Cold War and the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation? World wars that killed millions and the worst genocide in human history? Colonialism and slavery? Religious civil wars? General poverty and starvation? At what point in history were things less serious than now? When were humor and love somehow more appropriate?

In my opinion that (as a mainstream social narrative) is a false dilemma. The real division is between casual relationships and long relationships. The message I got as a young person is that casual sex should be celebrated and endorsed. That is a lie. Casual sex erodes long, meaningful relationships. It makes it that much harder to commit. Long relationships are how functional families are built. Functional families provide a bedrock to the society at large.

I think you are having a very idealised vision of society and families. You would be surprised to see what lies beneath all those "functional" families of the past. To my experience, having an active sex life (not talking here about carelessness) and multiple partners, even one night stands, could be quite helpful for someone and help them open up and experience life.

I mean these are all sort of arbitrary categories. I'm not saying "go have casual sex, it'll enrich your life." I agree that long-term meaningful relationships are fulfilling. But sexual attraction, flirting, humor—these are all spontaneous parts of human societies and human lives. To suggest we're living in such a serious time that they're not appropriate is macabre and anti-human, in my opinion, and will only create more suffering.

How did boomers use more drugs? Since the boomer generation we had a crack epidemic, 2 heroine, 1 of those mixed with prescription opiates, and a non stop meth problem. Marijuana is legal in a bunch of states now. Psychedelics are having a revival. Mdma didn't even exist until recently and there have been two waves of rave culture

See: https://mobile.twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/121316563032673...

> At their peak in 1980 illegal drugs accounted for 5 % of total personal consumption expenditure in US. An astonishing figure corroborated by contemporary estimates that cocaine sales peaked at $35bn in 1980. Rachel Soloveichik @BEA_News

Those comments in the thread have interesting points. 350/g in 1980 compared to what it costs now. (I used to pay 60/g around 2010)

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-cocaine-prices-change-201...

Thinking about it more, I guess you need to clarify if a boomers today use more drugs or was drug use higher in the 60s,70s,80s then in 00s and 10s. Other stuff I searched suggested boomers in the 10s are hit hard by opioids

> boomers today

Drugs are increasingly unkind to the bod the older you get, so I’d imagine it’s the latter.

For the record, I paid about 125/g in the mid nineties. I’m sure someone’s made a chart of this somewhere. I remember High Times magazine or Cannabis Culture used to have a spot price table in most issues based on numbers submitted by their readership. Would make an interesting graph. I don’t tend to trust LE valuations of drug prices because their incentivized to inflate them on capture and deflate them on selling risk.

MDMA was everywhere since 1970-s. What 'recently' are you talking about?

i dont think it was recreational until the 80s but yeah looks i misremembered, it was invented in the early 1900s

I assume this will relax slightly as we see lockdowns and masks ease up after most of a population has herd immunity from vaccines.

I don't really know how to change whole cultures though, other than to change the propaganda (messaging) or improve the support structures so people feel safe enough to experiment and have fun with life.

Part of me wants to put the blame on the female side for the reduction of sex. Mostly because girls will be slut shamed for doing anything sexual. So girls hold it back. You can't blame them for being conservative in the society we live in. Stop telling the female half of the population that they need to be innocent virgins,sex is normal.

The other excuses don't really resonate with me. Roommates? We were having plenty of sex in college, text your roommate to go away for a bit. Parents? Idk I just used my car or wait for them to go to sleep. 17 - to early 20s just do what you can. I don't get the broke thing, college bars are cheap, or we just went to parks or whatever.

Nothing makes sense. Nobody knows what to do or how to work this shit. Moving targets.

Last time I had a girlfriend I'd come off a 2 year spree of virtual homelessness and poverty. I was living with my parents (mom and dad, both separated) transiently. I was dirt poor, drugs problem, losing jobs etc... She was in college studying to become a nurse. It wasn't one of those asymmetrical relationships either. She wasn't on the goon squad.

Now that I have money, my own place, some direction and intention in my life... In most context where I have exposure there's some sort of hazard. Like trying to do anything at work when there might be a signal there seems like a terrible idea. Way too much potential for bad shit. At college, well shit I don't know if I'd be okay with dating anybody younger than 21, or a 21 year old for that matter (which is the rough majority). Even if we assume the age floor was 28 I still wouldn't dare approach anybody without evident interest, and networking at school is impossible because I'm swamped with work and work. I can get conversations started on Tinder, but they burn out fast and hard, no effort on the other end. I get a lot of matches, but I've only managed to finagle 2 dates out of what has to be hundreds of matches. I can't say how many I've actually opened, the odds look like shit regardless. Doesn't help that I live in an ultra-conservative rural cesspool where there's like... .5 degrees of separation.

And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.

I'll go to pornhub, thanks.

> And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.

If you were an alpha male you'd never be paying attention to this in the first place. This is only a concern if you're reading memes spread by neurotic people on the internet.

This makes no sense because women today are more sexually free than they have ever been. In absolute terms women are still often slut shamed, but it's still less than in the past.

How far back does this millenials have less sex thing compare too? Today's women that grew up in the 90s yeah probably is more free then one from 50s and earlier. But compared to the 70s? I don't think it's farfetched to guess that society's feelings towards women sexuality have regressed since the sexual revolution of the 70s. Paris Hilton having a sex tape coming out was a huge deal, that's what millennial girls grew up with.

I don't mean to suggest that this is the only reason, I just think it contributes.

That's true but there's the woke / me-too movement now. I have a "friend" that I met from Tinder during early pandemic, we only met once because of it, and then it was purely sexting exchange of pictures and so on.

Last month she started following a local me-too movement FB group that had women sharing about their past harassment experiences and calling out their aggressors, that ranged from total abuse of power, to sexual innuendos over IM.

Last couple of times we texted each other mostly consisted of her showing me past screenshots of chats where someone (from Tinder) would be sexually suggestive, nothing explicit, and would start to tell me how she didn't realize that she was being harassed and that she's being disgusted by them.

Sounds like you’re on speaking terms still, maybe now’s the time to get that affidavit signed that everything was consensual. :D I’m kidding.. but maybe I’m not.

The youngest millennials are around 25 years old.

Changing your "not sexually active" situation will take putting yourself out there a lot, lowering your standards (you can raise them later), being open to meeting all sorts and getting rejected a lot. You'll certainly gain entertaining stories, and you'll probably meet some new friends, possibly one or more lovers and one of them may become a romantic partner if that's what you're after. Please be good to the people you meet while you're doing this. And along the way you'll develop a tolerance to rejection, which is a somewhere between life hack and superpower.

All that that may be overwhelming though. The block you quoted is riddled with social anxieties. See if that's hold you back, and if so then get a professional to help you out.

Side note, now is a good time to prepare for this change, because the pandemic has put everyone into extended isolation all at once. So there's a lot of pent up desire for connection that will be getting released over the next year.

I'm rooting for you, fellow throwaway!

I'm not OP but I'm not sexually active either and share the same worries and am probably a few years older than him.

Thanks for sharing those videos, even though I was able to make that physique/style/life control transformation several times (get fit -> fall into a hole -> get fit again, rinse and repeat) during my 20s, this pandemic made me fall into a rut and I'm heavily struggling to stay on the right track that makes me climb up again. These videos are were another spark of motivation to try again.

As for the "not sexually active" situation, I've noticed the feeling of frustration has become more intense and had made me more sad about it lately. As an introvert, the co-workers social circle is usually one of the main ones, but unfortunately I'm working alone because it has many more pros (own schedule -> go to gym when it's deserted, beat traffic, do errands at times where there are less waiting times, etc). Old college friends are starting to get married and be more busy, so I've been seeing them less, so less opportunity to be introduced to new people. I've tried salsa classes before the pandemic but didn't workout for that matter (couples that are very private, people that leave once the class ends, tight groups of friends). I've also tried the Tinder way, and the closest I've ended with a woman from it, she ended up losing interest when the pandemic started. Now I'm seeing someone from Tinder, and even though it will probably stay at friendship I'm taking it.

I've been seeing a therapist since a couple years ago after I had my first panic attack, since then I've been using therapy for all my issues. However, even though I've been open about my sexual frustrations, I feel like my therapist ignores it and simply tries to work on my social aspect in general. My therapist is female and I wonder if having a male therapist it would be different, I've been wanting to try but I already invested many sessions with my current therapist.

We all have to be extra kind to ourselves (and to each other) during the pandemic. It's an exceptionally unusual, transient time. Still, it is a long time to be socially distanced in various ways from coworkers, lovers, friends, etc.

Things will get better soon.

And yes, I'd imagine that a more similarly gendered and oriented therapist would find it easier to relate to your concerns. But maybe just being direct with your current therapist would help. There may be a good reason she's redirecting you to more general social aspects, or maybe she's not trained to deal with male sexuality.

Yes. Tell her directly, "I feel like you ignored my concerns about my sexual life," and see what she says. Beating around the bush in therapy (and in most of your important adult relationships) is almost always a waste of time.

> I've been seeing a therapist since a couple years ago after I had my first panic attack, since then I've been using therapy for all my issues. However, even though I've been open about my sexual frustrations, I feel like my therapist ignores it and simply tries to work on my social aspect in general. My therapist is female and I wonder if having a male therapist it would be different, I've been wanting to try but I already invested many sessions with my current therapist.

Get a new therapist. At the very least try a few sessions with someone else. Yes, try a male therapist. Your rationalization of "already invested many sessions" is that of the sunk cost fallacy. You should be so confident that you're not wasting your time in therapy that you'd never think to ask internet strangers if you should switch. The worst that could happen is you waste a few hours trying out a new therapist or two. The best that could happen is that you actually find someone who isn't dismissive of a concern that's clearly animating you, about a very important part of human existence.

Do change your therapist, women find it very hard to see how frustrating lack of a sex life can be unless they themselves have been in a similar situation and most haven't. When I've complained about lack of sex to female friends, they've often said what's stopping you from installing Tinder, they are really oblivious to how different the experience can be for men and women there. If she's dismissing it, its unlikely to improves. Moreover, personally, one can be really good at social stuff but completely not make headway in sexual stuff, and then you've lost a year and are nowhere near where you would like to be.

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Research on satisfaction differences between relationship types is illuminating

Being sexually active is a choice. Nothing's stopping you from going out there and meeting people. There's plenty going on if you're willing to step out of your house and meet people. (And no, swiping on apps doesn't count.)

(Pandemic lockdowns of course might get in the way, but I'm speaking generally when those restrictions aren't there)

For the vast majority of people it simply doesn't work like that. It's a long, expensive, seldom successful and generally frustrating experience which takes a toll on self-esteem.

Unless you're in the top 20% or so of attractiveness.

Consider the plight of the humble salmon: Spend your whole life just for one chance to mate, most likely to be killed by other fish, eaten by bear, yanked out of your home via net or metal hook, it all smells like fish, and then you die on a gravelly shore with birds ripping your eyeballs out.

> what do we do as a society to improve some of these trends?

Well, HIV/AIDS seems relatively under control compared to when I was a young man, and there’s a vaccine for HPV, so get on out there, young blood!

Aversion to anonymous or even just casual sex for my generation (X) was from diseases. That seems like less of an issue now, but maybe the education system doesn’t want to let up on the risks yet, kind of like cities keeping us doing the recycling motions even when they’re throwing it in landfills - the behaviors are deemed valuable or the institutions just haven’t caught up to reality.

Probably your biggest issue as a generation is the freely available custom porn and social media alienating people from each other - there’s a lack of need to hook up and a self-inflicted lack of opportunity. Also, sensitivities to workplace hookups are a much bigger deal than they were even 15 years ago.

The important question is "do we want to?" We are gods by the standards of people five hundred years ago. Even the opportunities 50 years ago pale in comparison to what many of us have access to today; you no longer have to be in the exact right place and time to be exposed to the state of the art in technology and science. You can bring together material and people from anywhere in the world in a matter of days to pursue goals that can dominate your life for years at a time. The pursuit and achievement of these goals can make many people truly happy.

We're at a point in time where our society places a lot of value in sex and romance, but it's now easy to largely forego these things and dump your time into other things you're passionate about. It seems that when these discussions about the relative celibacy of young people come up, people talk a lot about how it must be because young people are facing effectively insurmountable struggles, and mostly ignore that it's possible that it's easier to focus on things other than sex now. That possibility runs contrary to how most of us were brought up, and it's why you're asking what we should do to "improve" these trends. Have we considered that there might be nothing to fix, and that the trend doesn't need to be stopped?

"Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess."

Finally, it's not just me. I can't stand these sterile looking homes and kitchen especially. For the same reason, I am not a huge fan of sterile looking restaurant tables either. The author evokes the emotions behind such feelings better than I can, but it reminds of a famous Joan Rivers joke on the Johny Carson show.

"Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum, "My God, the floor's immaculate! Lie down, you hot bitch."

> "Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum, "My God, the floor's immaculate! Lie down, you hot bitch."

This is technically true, but most men and women will probably be significantly less interested in making love to you if you're living in a filthy home.

Sufficient and necessary conditions and all...

Yeah agreed but the home need not be spotless clean/sterile. Let me take that back, cleanliness with a certain vibe is perfectly fine. Like some homes you walk into, you get this amazingly welcoming and warm vibe, and the home will be spotless. This is very rare though. Most sterile homes you enter, are devoid of any warmth.

What if a cold, dark style matches the owner? Is a "warm" home objectively the best?

Objectively, there is no best option. What's best for me is very likely gonna turn at least a hundred others off.

But if it doesn't support the narrative it's weird to point out that the kitchen isn't messy. Maybe they got home after a trip/mission? Why would it be messy?

I'm very pleased by this minimalist interior design. You can achieve interesting designs and keep it minimal.

Our society glorifies pornography and sex-work, but condemns the objectification of bodies. Our society condemns fat shaming, but makes idols out of instagram models.

We are very, very confused. Huxley predicted a world where sex became God. Orwell predicted a world where sex was taboo. Unsurprisingly, the reality is that our society has become a paradox by adopting both.

I think what you're witnessing is the two ideologies coming to a head. One which is a staunchly prude version of society going head to head with a staunchly open version of society in the most proxy way possible. The proxy being art, journalism, and finally public discourse.

You're right. These two might have bumpted into each other while shopping, but for the rest of the time, they barely knew of each other's existence. Now we have social media and 24/7 news channels, so they're constantly in each other's faces. They've always existed, but it's only recently they've both stood in the town square shouting at each other.

I think the left wing of the two sides has embraced prudishness, rationalizing it as being feminist (female nudity => objectification => sexual violence). The left has always had a large prudish faction, so it's not really a surprise.

Eh, there are feminists that embrace sexuality too, so I don't know about all that. Personally, I think it's one of those rare situations that's not divided politically. I think there are entire subcultures in America that just don't appreciate sexuality very much.

I disagree. The same ideology simultaneously glorifies sex-work as it criticises the objectification of women's bodies by men. The same ideology normalises both actual pornography as well as the increasingly pornographic advertising we see everywhere, that also attacks the over-sexualisation of everything. Other may disagree, but what we are seeing is liberalism approaching the part of lifecycle where it becomes a paradox. And a society built on a paradox is in its death spiral.

I think you're making some sweeping generalizations about "our society" to be honest, because pornography, sex work and instagram models are condemned just as hard by a lot of people, throughout generations.

This is true, though I would say that pop-culture, mass media, etc. are signs of the direction broader society is trending towards, even if the rest of society lags behind a generation.

I think the article is spot on. We live in a sanitized, sexless culture that glorifies self-optimisation without purpose. Baudrillard however already recognised this a while ago in America (1989)

"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death.

This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, bodybuilding gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession"

Sounds like some critic making excuses for their own laziness to me, since pushing your body past its limits is simply a form of transcendence, but what do I know, I'm just a stupid, sexless sheep I guess!

Baudrillard's insistence on reading everything as a symbol gets him in trouble. There are a lot of intellectual fireworks in his writing, but I think he lacks depth and appreciation for the vibrancy and diversity of life. It's another example of cultural criticism failing because it overly textualizes things. Did he ever ask the owners of the bodies he so eloquently critiques, the "bodybuilder", or the "skateboarder", or the "Bronx breakdancer", what they think about all this business? Those aren't real people, they are just archetypes who serve to add color to his writing. Who wants to listen to a humanist who seems to hate actual humans?

It's best to read his work - and the work of many philosophers - metaphorically, and with a grain of salt. His statements are vectors that point in certain directions, not destinations in themselves.

I think his work is deeply humanist. He's afraid the society we've created for ourselves prevents us from enjoying our own humanity. And this shouldn't be particularly controversial. We can agree that most workplaces can be quite constricting; Baudrillard speaks of our leisure lives instead.

Baudrillard: Please change as a society, you're doing it wrong and losing your humanity!

Rest of humanity: Please leave us alone, we're trying to have fun and/or survive

Well, everything is a symbol. Everything that you will ever do or say means something, whether you knew it at the time or not.

I don't think I agree. Things only become symbols when read as symbols

"In the early 2000s, there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural, almost accidental. Skinny celebrities confessed their love of burgers and fries in magazines; models undergoing profile interviews engaged in public consumption of pasta; leading ladies joked about how little they exercised and how much they hated it. It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction. We knew it then, and we know it now."

No they where taking Clenbuterol or DNP which will make anyone lose weight like no tomorrow no mater their activity level. For a significant cost that is.

The more disturbing thing is male actors are clearly taking PEDs and/or being dehydrated for shirtless shots, distorting what a normal body should look like. Even in fitness circles where I live, no one looks that good without juicing or prepping their body for the shirtless pic.

[0] https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/hollywood-dirty-diet-...

What is a PED? You mean performance-enhancing drugs?

I wanted to read the article you linked to, but seems like they have a region lock for EU countries. Its been what, nearly three years since GDPR took effect?

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

PED is a broad term for Performance-enhancing drugs.

There's two big categories, SARMs and Roids. Everyone knows roids, you take them, you get big. SARMs are lesser known but tend to lower body fat while preserving/gaining muscle (since normal cutting routine you will lose lots of muscle).

There's also fat burning drugs which are their own third category with DNP and Clenbuterol being the most common. Both are very dangerous and have a host of side effects, these are what hollywood/celebrities use to slim up fast.

It's a fantastic research rabbit hole to go down, and they're much more prevalent than you think.

Thanks for this answer, I don't go into the gym so I only knew steroids, and wasn't sure about the rest.

Another example of dehydrating for shirtless shots - Henry Cavill talks about doing just that for The Witcher in an interview on the Graham Norton Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne5xD5XrzOc

i think its also worth noting that actors really exaggerate how hard is it to look good on camera and it ends up discouraging people from improving their diet and exercise.

you dont need a nutritionist, and a personal trainer, and to treat it like a full time jobs and get paid for it to look good.

you need to clean up your diet and do resistance training at least 3 times a week for an hour, and be consistent.

Combine that with how a cleaned up diet typically either costs more time or more money and working ~60 hours a week on minimum wage, yeah, that is pretty hard for a lot of people.

I heard on a genetics podcast recently that your weight is 70% genetically determined. Every family carries in its genome the similar ingredients for weight: how much do you eat, what foods do you like, how efficient is your body at gathering and storing energy, how much do you naturally like exercise, etc. That 30% is obviously important and most people could make huge gains there, simply by eating less.

ya but vegetable oil and corn fructose syrup did not exist >100 years ago as food products. we cook our food in wat used to be called boat varnish (vegetable oil)

yes you are correct, our genes are what determines weight in realtion to the foods you eat. it affects your bodies ability to metabolise those foods , etc

but most of the foods you eat, over 90% of what is available in walmart for instance, is industrial manufactured trash that no human except perhaps escaped roswell experiemnts and MBAs can metabolise correctly

this is compounded by modern trash propaganda telling people not to eat meat, to replace meat with synthetic mineral oils and watered down oats for $500 a litre

> ya but vegetable oil and corn fructose syrup did not exist 100 years ago

They absolutely did, from about the 1870's onward. Read about Harvey Washington Wiley. Modern food isn't a paragon of health, but for most non-rural people in the US, it was quite a bit worse from the 1870's to the 1910's.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley

[2]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/poison-...

From that last one, they talk about a lot of honey simply being flavored corn syrup. There was swill milk. They put all sorts of weird conservatives into food before Wiley's Poison Squad determined what was safe.

not really.

"you need to clean up your diet and do resistance training at least 3 times a week for an hour, and be consistent."

It takes a lot more than that. A good diet and moderate exercise will keep you in a slim/lean shape, but it won't get you Hollywood ripped.

Actually having a muscular looking physic requires aggressive training, or naturally doing activity which requires lots of muscles (Dancing, climbing, acrobatics, sports).

most people dont actually care about looking like Thor. if you want to have visible abs and a decent amount of muscle (brad pitt in fight club), that can be achieved in a couple years of training/dieting for the majority of people

Along with dehydration, I'm surprised he does not mention salt/carb manipulation, which I'm sure he did as well.

Step 7 here is likely counterintuitive for most - to look big and shredded you typically want to carb-load right before the camera comes out: https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/7-scientific-steps-to-c...

Or they actually are naturally thin. Such people do exist and I refuse to believe most people haven't ever met someone like this. Why is it so hard to believe that the tiny fraction of people who make into Hollywood are selected for this trait?

I'm not saying they don't also do unnatural things to their bodies that set unrealistic standards and don't set a good example, but being "thin" is not one of them.

I don't think that's how it works. People you perceive as "naturally thin" probably simply:

* are used to not snacking between meals

* eat when they are hungry, and stop when they are not

* do not drink (excessively)

* are more-than-average active

Calories add up extremely quickly and it's very easy not to notice if you don't pay attention. Say you have one Mars bar per day, as a snack - that makes a difference of 10 kg of body weight per year as compared to someone who skips such a snack (a back-of-the-envelope calculation).

You really believe all bodies react the same to calories intake?

I don't see where they are arguing that. Are you referring to absorption and/or metabolic dysfunction?

Yes, (calories absorbed - calories burned) will always be true.

Yes, but some people's bodies will burn excess calories by generating heat while other's will immediately store it as fat. When it comes to nutrition, nothing is quite as simple as you hope.

I haven’t read much about the heat fact but the less body mass you have, the more you’d have to burn for heat (there is a relationship between body size and metabolic rate which is inversely proportional, small mammals and infants burn insane amounts of energy just keeping warm).

I did read a study on non exercise thermogenesis and how some people managed to burn quite a bit of calories just fidgeting throughout the day.

So while we all run around the same human body temperature and thermodynamics is all the same, different people arrive at different results because of different behaviors. To what extent they are genetic is up to debate but much is genetic like “a tendency to fidget” or “a tendency to like sweets”.

And what is "not natural" about any of that? Some people naturally regulate their intakes such that they don't get fat. It's not a conscious effort on their part. They eat what they want to and don't get fat. It's as simple as that.

There are certain breeds of dogs and cats that will eat until it makes them sick and easily get fat. Other breeds don't. Even with food readily available they just don't get fat. Humans are no different.

So I'm guessing you're fat?

Don't be rude

I'm naturally thin and so are both of my parents.

Her take on the Starship troopers shower scene seems to be an american point of view. Nudity in an unisex shower isn't about flirting and sex for a european. Paul Verhoeven was naked too while filming it, because the actors felt uncomfortable at first.

Europe is a very diverse continent, I kind of doubt we can generalize whether the modal European would associate a unisex shower scene with flirting and sexiness.

I find that statement about Europeans hilarious. I am in Italy and here within a few kilometers you can find families who see total nudity at home as perfectly normal and families in which the daughter must not walk around the house in her pajamas because her brother could see her.

Robocop also has a scene with male and female cops in a locker room together. I always thought those scenes were meant to shock American audiences and therefore make it clear that the cultures we're seeing are futuristic (if only slightly).

I'm not american (Nor european) but I would still be extremely uncomfortable in an all-male shower let alone a unisex shower.

I'm curious what you think the reasons that nudity is not as big of a deal to Europeans are.

I mean for one, a nude shower is the standard at pretty much all pools. Gender-separated most of the time, but still. From elementary school swimming lessons (which to be fair happen before pools open to the general public), to attending them as an adult, you drop all clothes when you enter and shower in one big room. Sure there might be partial walls for the extra shy, but most just don't care.

Same goes for gym showers. Maybe not the commercial ones, but def sport clubs or similar.

As a European (German), not sure what would be uncomfortable about that. The enormous gaps in US toilet stalls are far more terrifying ;-)

> As a European (German), not sure what would be uncomfortable about that

I don't have a rational reason for feeling uncomfortable, nudity just feels very personal to me.

> The enormous gaps in US toilet stalls are far more terrifying

ADA compliance?

I think he refers to the 1-inch gaps between the stall and the wall, and on the hinge side of the door. He might also refer to the 1-foot gap below the door or the half-inch gap by the door latch. American stalls are also short, so tall people can look right over the top.

With gaps so big, why do we bother?

Ohh I see. Yeah, that is a little weird but it’s hard to look in the gaps casually when you’re walking by without being obviously creepy (a friend tells me). Like it seems more visible from the inside where you’re stationary than from the outside in motion.

I’m American and the public pools I’ve been to are mostly not like this. They have individuals “cubicles” that you go into and then you can take close off and shower.

Huh. I’m American and we had a change room at work and all the guys would walk around nude and nobody thought anything of it.

You can definitely walk around naked in the pool locker rooms I’ve been to, but they have cubicles so you don’t have to

I don’t think there’s any complicated explanation; if you are never exposed to a particular state of being (e.g. public nudity) while growing up, it will probably be uncomfortable as an adult if you only have a normal level of openness to new experiences. I don’t think fear of nudity is much different from fear of flying or fear of fear of public speaking or whatever.

At least among my friend group, public nudity has never actually been a problem in culturally appropriate circumstances (eg at a public bathhouse or sauna while traveling through Japan or Scandinavia).

I meant more from a cultural perspective than a purely behavioural one.

Just curious if there are some obvious cultural differences which contribute to being brought up with nudity being more normalized.

I can only speak for Germany, but nudity is not seen as much of a big deal. Gyms in schools usually have communal changing rooms and it's not unusual to see naked people in movies, even in non-sexual manners. I guess it just never established as a big deal and the relative prevalence of nudity just carries on to the next generation.

For Scandinavia, some things come to mind.

Most TV shows and movies have sex scenes. The people having sex are always very average looking. Sex scenes are usually not sexy or romantic but just chaotic and awkward, and very every-day-lifey. Like a middle aged couple having sex in the bedroom and their 5 year old kid opens the door and one of them is chocked and falls out of the bed and breaks a finger. They have to drive to the emergency room and so on, and next scene they enjoy a meal together at home in complete and awkward silence. And a finger in a cast is there as a reminder of the incident.

This could be a scene in any TV show airing at 20.00 on public service TV. There's also a lot of nudity without it being sexualized. Like people in saunas or women breastfeeding. Normal every day stuff.

For examples check out Love & Anarchy on Netflix, great show with only one short season. Or Bonus Family also on Netflix.

Sex education is also a thing. You are taught that of course you should have sex because it's great and fun etc. and here's how to do it safely. Oh and now class, we are going to watch a 1 hour long sex tape with two normal people having sex in a loving way. That was an awkward class to attend. And next class, practicing putting on condoms on dildos, so we all know how to do it. Imagine being 13 and sitting next to some cute girl in your class and having to practice putting on condoms!

Compared to other parts of the world where sex and nudity is banned and censored, which is of course ridiculous if you want sexually healthy citizens. If you can only see sex through porn, with smoking hot models, I'm sure it messes with your young mind.

I really wish scandis did film classification for us. I really don’t care about my kids seeing nudity or sex scenes ( they self censor anyway!) but I really hate it that PG or even U rated films and games can have a body count in the thousands and hint as sadism and torture. The Anglo world is so weird on this and I really think we have our taboos backwards.

In Finland going to sauna is commonplace and normal - families will do it in mixed groups, though they'll often start to segregate based on genders in early teens.

That may get better with age. At some point in my life I stopped having the cycles to care as much about such things. Plenty of people look weird in life, many weirder than you, your value as a person is far higher than how your physique compares to a model. Shared facilities are just functional tools, get in, do ur thing, get out, done.

I think this is also simply a thing of familiarization. It seems daunting at first, but at the end of the day the others are humans as well, have their flaws and don't have anything on either. Once you're used to communal showers or saunas it ceases to be a big deal, or at least it was for me.

Some parts of Europe have a sauna culture, and not uncommon to go with friends (m/f)

It's probably a part of it. People rarely associate nudity with sex when in a sauna -- it's simply too hot. :D

60 degs sauna are perfect for some hot games ;-)

60 deg is not a sauna, it's a mildly warm room.

I was actually surprised when moving to Sweden that saunas are typically no more that 65-70 deg and that everyone wears swimwear. Completely different to e.g. Germany.

The openness towards nudity amongst Europeans has changed and has been changing significantly. The most noticeable is through the closings or re-brandings of nudist camps as numbers have been falling for years now. There are articles discussing why, but essentially this generation is way more ashamed of their bodies than the previous one. This is mostly apparent among the Germans, French and Scandinavian who were the most open about it.

If you've ever been on a wrestling team in America you've showered with other males

>Nudity in an unisex shower isn't about flirting and sex for a european.

VERY hard to make a sweeping generalization under "European" in this context. I'm from Scandinavia and I'm fine with it, but my SO that is from France, bordering to Germany, always tell me how horrified she (still) gets when she cross the border and end up in changing rooms. Heard similar story from Italians.

If you’ve ever been to Iceland and visited one of their excellent spas or swimming pools you’ll come across the staff who’s job it is to watch you shower to ensure you’ve washed yourself properly.

All of yourself. Properly.

Having someone stare at you as you soap your junk is not a common experience across most of Europe based on the warnings in travel guides.

If you want entry to the spa it’s something you just have to go through.

I'm a USian and I could imagine folks here showing up for that and never bothering with the spa

I think the lack of sex in Hollywood can be traced at least in part to the Chinese market. There's a lot of money in it and studios are more than happy to comply with CCP guidelines to get a share of that pie.

Came here to say this. Big budget Hollywood movies have to be internationally viable nowadays and that means conforming to the least common denominator of the target audiences. The result is movies that are palatable to the US and China and are utterly vacuous garbage.

Adults also don't tend to go to movies, so movies are made for kids. I wonder if Hollywood executives sit around the conference table wondering if a kid that doesn't speak English, doesn't live in N. America, will get the movie.

And sadly the next/upcoming big market, India, isn't any better than China when it comes to censorship.

I'm actually okay with this. I only watch movies with my family and I'm sick of having to pass up on actually interesting movies because they're excessively vulgar.

If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me, I would.

Yeah, I actually prefer a minimal sex scene (conveying the idea that it happened) to the explicit and lengthy stuff in your average HBO mini-series. Even less tolerant of sexual violence and torture. When I think of how many fake rapes I’ve witnessed/mentally onboarded via cinema/tv it makes me throw up a bit.

I've linked to it in the past but I think it's relevant again.

"Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies", 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908

fascinating.

> If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me,

We used to have a number of them. Cleanfilms was one. Send them a DVD, they'd sanitize the content onto another disc, ruin the original and send you both.

Legacy copyright gatekeepers couldn't resist their own compulsions for control - they systematically sued CF and others out of existence.

ref:https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=554802...

ref:https://www.audioholics.com/news/studios-sue-family-friendly...

Site is down now; here's a working link courtesy of the Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210215153656/https://bloodknif...

Was really glad to see 9/11 mentioned in the article in relation to the American male body entering its militaristic phase. It validates an armchair theory I've had related to the correlation between media coverage / dramatization of Special Forces operations in the early to mid 00's and the general trend of American dudes getting very ripped and growing beards.

At some point around 2005-2008, I just started noticing every guy around me was lifting weights like they were going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan, and if you could grow a decent beard, you did. And then the ripped look was kinda table stakes. Everyone had to mirror that alpha male SEAL physique and eventually people forgot why, and it became a self reinforcing cycle for the next 10-15 years.

The article makes a great point about the softer bodies of sex symbols in the 80s and 90s. That's rare to see now.

It is definitely still a thing of course, just look at start up people. Everyone in a leadership position is bulging out of their clothes.

At least it's healthy and linked with great health outcomes, so maybe it's a good thing :)

We’ll know if it’s more than a fad if we ever elect someone to President with facial hair again. Hasn’t been a thing since Teddy Roosevelt, right? Hitler and Stalin absolutely murdered the mustache brand (along with millions of people).

> And then the ripped look was kinda table stakes. Everyone had to mirror that alpha male SEAL physique and eventually people forgot why, and it became a self reinforcing cycle for the next 10-15 years.

You might be in a bubble. Outside of a few US cities and outdoorsy areas, when I look around, almost nobody looks like they are going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-american-obesity-rate...

And physical fitness shows you have the time, money, and discipline to take care of yourself, and it can't easily be faked, so it serves as a pretty good signal of those traits. I'm not surprised leaders would want to differentiate themselves using it, especially when you're trying to stand out in a crowd of people who have time and money, since discipline is the rare trait.

It's also objectively healthy to lift weights for bone density and strength, among numerous other advantages, especially in our sedentary lifestyles. And the standard abdominal fat/beer belly is incredibly damaging to one's health, so if your goal is to stay healthy through your 60s to 80s, I welcome being "fit" as a fad.

>You might be in a bubble.

You’re right. It’s mostly a city thing, places with major business centers (but bleeds out into the suburbs).

> https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-american-obesity-rate...

It says right there in the original post that the BMI definition shifted downwards, and discusses exactly these articles like you linked.

Have you ever looked at the BMI? 100 kg at ~183 cm is classified as ‘obese’, whereas if you have barely any muscle 100 kg won't even be enough for a proper beer belly—in my experience. But search the web for ‘obesity’ and lo, landwhales galore.

Not disputing that US people might all be walking barrels of fat—I have no idea. But if you're ripped, I don't see how you wouldn't automatically fall under the ‘obese’ BMI in the stats. Moreso if you have a ‘dad bod’ with both muscle and fat.

Edit: funny how BMI is illustrated with abstract silhouettes on most sites, but I found some photos of certifiedly obese people: https://height-weight-chart.com/600-220.html

These two dudes close to ‘obese’ are especially illustrative, I think: BMI 29 https://height-weight-chart.com/l/601-230_Mike_L2.jpg

and BMI 28 https://height-weight-chart.com/l/511-200_Alex_L1.jpg

The person I was responding to was saying over the past 15 years, being fit and muscular became the norm, and my link was intended to show data where 9 years ago, a third of US 20 to 39 aged people were obese.

And if you’ve traveled around the US, you can simply see there is practically zero risk of classifying a material number of people as obese when they are actually just muscular and healthy. Or you can look at accompanying data for heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension.

The vast majority of Americans don't have anything near a body in peak physical shape. This can be cross-checked with stats of Type 2 diabetics, BMI, etc. The media vs reality, well, there's an entire sub-reddit dedicated to that: /r/instagramreality. Who knows the long-term psychological consequences of being able to effortlessly morph ourselves digitally into physically impossible states.

I wonder if the rise of the Chinese movie market and U.S. studios catering to it has any bearing. Obviously they can and do create a foreign edit, but it might be possible the economic incentives to just create a "cleaner" movie to begin with is a factor here.

Teen birth rate is currently less than a fifth what it was in its peak in the 1950s baby boom. (And has reduced about 20% relative to the figure here) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/why-is-the-...

And the overall fertility rate in 2020 was 1.779 births per woman as of 2020 in the US. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

What's your point?

I'm not sure, frankly, but I think there's a connection. A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate. When the pressures of urbanization and modern life mean few people choose to have children while the trends in the article and in many of these comments show that people are less likely to accidentally/serendipitously become pregnant as well combine to somewhat drastically reduce the birthrate.

Birth rates plummeted through the 1960s and 1970s across the Western world, while the gonorrhea rates skyrocketed, in a period specifically noted for its sexual forwardness.

Birthrates plummeted in the 1960s but were still vastly higher than today. Birthrates peaked in the 1950s. Current birthrates are equal to the nadir of birthrates in 1980, but they appear to still be falling (but we shall see!).

Not necessarily. There have been about 60 million abortions since then in the US which don’t get counted in the fertility rate.

US abortion rate is now lower than it was before Roe vs Wade and fertility rate has been dropping in tandem with the dropping abortion rate, so I don't think that explains it.

Not necessarily, morning after pills and IUD-induced abortions are not counted.

Neither are regular hormonal pill abortions. In fact, the pill (monthly pill, not morning-after) is the most common birth control method and most prolife people support it, even though technically there’s a possibility that it may prevent implantation (if for whatever reason ovulation happens anyway).

If you want to call that abortion, then go right ahead but I think you’ll be in the minority (just like people probably wouldn’t call a natural lack of implantation a miscarriage because they have literally no way of knowing that it happened... a dewer containing 100 frozen undifferentiated embryos is just not the same as an actual child, and I think most people do not act like it is). I think the vast majority of people understand a sort of gradient between conception and birth. Most people who are prolife would be uncomfortable banning the pill and most people who are nominally pro choice probably aren’t too comfortable with later-term abortions. Reality is complicated and so are people’s opinions.

It's probably many things, but I think another factor is a delayed transition to (biological) adulthood, which leaves fewer "prime years" for the tiring task of raising children. That delayed transition comes in part from an increased focus on the self. Although individualism is often attacked or derided in modern American culture (from the political left at least), I feel like there is a near-universal individualism across our society that never existed in the past - people are delaying/skipping having children and putting their own exploration and experience first. It's a luxury in that we didn't have this option previously as a species, but now we can entertain "finding ourselves" or traveling as a lifestyle and so on. For many, delaying parenthood or skipping it outright is a simple matter of not disturbing that freedom of choice that they've come to enjoy. For others, that freedom itself becomes tiring and the search for purpose brings them back to children. But the side effect in aggregate, is a more sexless society and lower overall birthrate. Just a thought...

That, and the hyper-individualism of capitalism makes it super hard to AFFORD that collectivist goal of perpetuating the species. Housing is much more expensive, as is healthcare, which are two things you need when starting out as a young family. Lack of collective bargaining power compared to the 50s means starting wages are also much lower and jobs are less stable, so it’s harder to take that leap to add another person to the household (which requires probably another room plus thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses which as a young person could be the same as an entire year’s income).

So I think the challenge is a kind of selfish individualism from both the left and the right, although of different types. And let’s not even count the cost of schooling (which the right wants to burden the parents for).

> That delayed transition comes in part from an increased focus on the self.

Mostly no. It comes because modern hiring practices are trending toward making first time job applicants unemployable - and because under-25 incomes are less likely to come anywhere near covering minimal living expenses.

> A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate.

Since the 1950s, basic living has steadily become increasingly complex and decreasingly affordable. Sex is harder for six exhausted roommates under one roof.

Is this a side effect of normalizing porn, that sexuality is more effectively partitioned?

I once had a debate in an online forum about legalizing prostitution, and most participants were supportive of it. Then I asked the same group, what about legalizing partial prostitution, like a receptionist that also has sex with the boss as part of the job description. The participants all immediately switched to revulsion at the idea and none would support it.

So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? I don't think it is. But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more tolerable. The same pressure seems to be bifurcating entertainment.

> But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more acceptable.

Does it? You asked this on an online forum, not a national survey. I don't think our culture has a majority view on the nuance of prostitution. The most engagement I'd expect on this topic is from people who feel strongly that it shouldn't exist at all.

On the other hand there are people who are all for it provided the prostitutes are not their own daughters.

I think because prostitution is considered “dirty work”, must like many other dirty professions.

Receptionism is “clean work”, consequently a receptionist cannot be forced to lower himself to dirty work. — this would apply to working with human waste or various medical work as much as prostitution, I would gander.

A receptionist can be required by contract to serve drinks, play the piano, and various other things that a receptionist does not ordinarily do, but weeding through garbage, performing sex acts, or changing diapers, — that is off limits.

So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work?

Gotta say that often questions like this are often as just taken as ways to win rhetorical points and not thought about seriously by those who ask them. But there's actually a good answer. Yes, sex work is extremely exploitative in the sense that you selling a "big piece" of yourself. Which doesn't mean it should be illegal but it should segregated. Why?

Other kinds of work exists that extremely exploitative - dangerous, physical exhausting, possibly-humiliating and damaging. Those should be segregated also and usually are. But let's an experiment:

    Receptionist + some danger deep diving
    Receptionist + some heavy underground construction
    Receptionist + some lion tamer work
    Dangerous heavy construction for part off your rent

The reason all those are a problem is because they take a lot out of a person and if you pair them with receptionist, you'll get someone who is paid as a receptionist but often doing these things. Which screws both ordinary receptionists and people paid more to do the highly exploitative labor.

Receptionist + some heavy underground construction at the boring company.

Sounds awesome.

None of those examples seem to have a problem...

This phenomena doesn’t apply to just dangerous work. One should expect any provision in a contract to be the norm. If a contract specifies that work on Saturdays is ok, assume every Saturday that you will work. Adjust your pay requirements to reflect this. Don’t let the other party to convince you that “it’ll only be sometimes” or “just in case”. For the 50% stuff, the real answer is empower the worker and train people to sign 2 different contracts for seemingly unrelated jobs. If that screws them out of benefits, then ask for more money. At the very least, it prevents the low pay for hard labor.

Honestly those examples you provided take a lot more skill and effort than most people put into exploitive sex. The consequences of doing those examples “wrong” are far higher, too, e.g. loss of life or limb.

I think a better retort would be that people want professional jobs where their contribution is based on seemingly objective merit. If 50% of your performance is judged by one person in an entirely subjective way, i.e. their satisfaction with sex, it’s not a very well protected job for one thing. Further, the benefit of exploitive sex industries is not having to commit - to be able to switch it up. Tightly coupling your exploitive sex with job positions whose value increases directly with the amount of institutional knowledge retained would not be wise - your turnover or dissatisfaction would be too high. Finally, despite all the efforts of exploitive industries, sex is still a biological function and very personal to many (most?). There are subtle relationships involved in such intimacy despite efforts to avoid it. From a management perspective, there’s a risk to being “friends” with people that work for you, much less having sex with them. I think it would introduce too many opportunities for personal feelings interrupting optimal productivity. Put directly, the integrity of your decision-making ability on behalf of the company would likely be compromised.

Most people have no job protection whatsoever.

Could just as easily argue that providing sexual services increases her job security.

That’s not remotely true for US corporate work. Companies want to protect their investments - progressive discipline policies are set up with the intention of avoiding the liabilities and wastefulness incurred by the hasty decision making of a single individual. Most companies reserve their “at-will” status, but in practice getting fired on the spot for an exception or omission (non-criminal) is pretty rare. Usually there’s a layer or two before outright termination. It took me years to appreciate the fact that my skills and knowledge made me more valuable to a company than a single screw-up could overshadow. Took a lot of stress and anxiety off my shoulders when I did.

Others have explained why certain jobs are "segregated", and how sex work could plausibly fit into that category. But even if it does not, there's nothing we can learn about sex work from the reactions described above.

Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?

Oh wait, it's not strange at all! Most people who work as programmmers do not want to serve coffee, and will naturally coordinate to avoid normalizing it, lest it become a recurring part of every job description. This happens even though work as a barista does not fit into the 'dangerous and therefore segregated' category. Indeed, there would be nothing unusual about a receptionist who also handles catering at events and serves coffee to management.

Or is serving coffee also "effectively partitioned" by "our culture"?

At my salary I would welcome serving coffee while everyone is in the standup.

A quote that I picked up from my grandfather, "They pay me the same no matter what they've got me doing."

I'd rather be doing something that will lead me to get paid more in the future, learning new skills

I optimize the way I put dishes in the dishwasher, I design my own closets so I'll have the best design for what I do every day (i.e. clothes I use regularly are close by) — eg. I hang my t-shirts because it's faster than folding them — etc.

There are things that can be optimized in serving coffee too!

And when you had enough, you can just start serving terrible coffee :D

Those things can be optimized, but the payoff for that optimization is pretty low.

That depends on how you measure the payoff.

Maybe they don't pay you enough if they can afford to waste your skills by making you serving coffee.

I don't want to serve coffee... or apply application hotfixes (stuff more typically "administrators" or "ops")... but at my pay rate? I'd do it and question why I'm getting paid $$$$$ to do something that $ can do.

If your boss is the sort of person who would serve coffee to the team you're probably fine cowtowing in this way. Otherwise, I think you risk being tainted in their eyes. They might see the others at the meeting as superior, wrt the role of programmer (etc.); and unconsciously associate you with less technical work.

I think you risk "why are we paying $$$$$, isn't that the guy who serves the coffee" even if it's subconscious.

I think this plays a funny parallel to SNL in 15/16 with Trump and Hillary... Trump played President on the show and Hillary played a bartender. (I may be off slightly on details, but the idea is there - perception is reality).

But my attitude is more along the lines of "I'll do what it takes to get the job done" and that attitude comes from my veteran experience - there was no shortage of times where the NCOs (mid level enlisted) would get "dirty" when a job has to get done...

You can see it as "why is that person relegated to nothing duties"... I see it as "that guy is part of the team and will get the job done, no matter what".

I do get your point and can see how "office politics" can spin things that way.

If it were part of the job description, there would be nothing wrong with being asked to serve coffee to management, no matter what your position is. If it is not in the job description, then it is generally inappropriate.

Neither is wrong in the sense that it goes against any proven cosmic principle (depending on where you live it might go against national law, see below).

It's just that, as it was written above, the people who would be requested to do it "feel revulsion at the idea and none would support it". They'd coordinate against ones that tried to normalize such a policy.

Many programmers don't want to live in a world where they have to agree to serve coffee every morning if they want to make their living as programmers. And they have sufficient leverage to make sure that things won't turn out that way. Doesn't mean that they have anything against people who choose to make their living serving coffee. That's the whole point.

People have even stronger feelings about the importance of sexual service not being part of receptionist job descriptions. They felt so strongly about it that they outlawed the practice, and they make sure that it stays illegal even in countries where prostitution is otherwise allowed.

Many job descriptions have a catch-all “other duties as assigned”.

> Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?

It's trivial to get that exercise on its' head. If management is ok putting clauses into highly trained workers' contracts about coffee serving, as a highly trained worker, I'd demand they introduce a clause for highly-trained and highly-paid management to clean others' shoes. What's fair is fair, right?

If they can't take the same high, non-elitist ground, well, that's a clear-cut abuse, ain't it?

But to be honest, "elite" jobs classification is present across the population (ask anyone in "low-skilled" job what they think of University professors; now ask us who know how Universities run internally :)).

There is a huge difference if those "non-job" things are "communal" or written-down or coming from authority. I think most people would not have a problem taking the broom and cleaning up after someone else has left a mess at the office ("look at this mess, let me clean it up" — "hey, let me help too"). But having your "boss" order you do it is an altogether different matter.

You have missed the point entirely.

If a company advertised for a part time programmer, part time barista, how would people react? They might think it was funny, and they probably wouldn't apply, but they wouldn't think that the very existence of such a position was unacceptable.

There isn't generally a common problem with people being coerced into programming or into serving coffee against their will. There is a common problem with people being coerced into sex.

In my eyes, the issue is that it the becomes the norm that receptionists need to have sex with their bosses and people who are only interested in the receptionist part are put in the position of needing to go into sex work or someone else getting the job they want.

> why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work?

I oppose receptionist that also has sex with the boss. Exploitation has nothing to do with that.

At least in my world view, having sex at workplace is unprofessional.

First of all, spending corporate or investor's money on paying sex workers is wrong.

Even if the boss is the sole owner of the company i.e. spending their own money, boss fucking a receptionist causes unhealthy atmosphere in the company. The company gonna have hard time attracting female candidates on other positions. Employees who have families gonna have interesting conversations with their SOs.

Did you just assume that the receptionist is going to be female?

You seem to be suggesting there would be logistical problems with the idea of the prostitute/receptionist, but I think that even if those problems were solved it would still be a bad idea. If there was a clause in the contract that sex had to be outside the workplace and the money to pay for the sex act had to come from the entertainment accounts and the company had no problem attracting female employees or retaining workers, would you support it then? That would seem to answer all your logistical concerns.

> even if those problems were solved

I think the only way to solve them, pay all employees way above market. If you do that, it doesn't matter the money to pay the receptionist comes from entertainment accounts.

Another hard to solve issue is envy. A manager in the company might want to have their own receptionist.

> would you support it then?

In a hypothetical world where all parties are totally OK with a boss sleeping with a receptionist - sure, why not?

Why is spending investor's money on sex workers any more wrong then spending it on other job perks?

What's "unhealthy" about boss having sex with receptionist.

Got news for you: it already happens a lot :)

As far as employees who have families, can't they just go poly if they don't want to risk being fired?

> Why is spending investor's money on sex workers any more wrong then spending it on other job perks?

Because it harms the company. This perk gonna reduce hiring pool by a factor of 2-4. I think many married people, women, and probably many lgbtq+ people wouldn’t want to work there.

> What's "unhealthy" about boss having sex with receptionist.

Sex between consensual adults is fine. The unhealthy atmosphere is caused by other people in and around the company knowing, and discussing, what’s going on.

> can't they just go poly if they don't want to risk being fired?

Gonna be hard to sell that idea to wives/husbands of these employees.

It's OK to spend investor's money on massages or fitness coaches to keep the team in top shape, but not OK to add a happy ending and blow off some steam?

Some people aren’t gonna be interested in sex at work. I would expect many women and non-binary people gonna pass. This means they’re unfairly compensated. While you can argue employer-provided or subsidized childcare is unfair too because people without children don’t benefit, I think there’s a consensus that productivity hit is too expensive for the company.

Other people have families, for them it’s even harder to solve in a good way. You can’t just pay them more money, they might find themselves in a position to choose between job and marriage, that’s not a good position to be.

Sex at work might be a great perk for single male employees, but I think issues caused for the rest of the people are worse, gonna affect bottom line in a negative way. Hiring is the worst of them, IMO.

Sex work and pugilism I think can be strongly equated. Both involve using ones body and adult consent. One for sex, the other for violence.

We don't outlaw boxing or MMA. But we put regulations on it. We shut down illegal basement fights. And we hope people going into it aren't coerced and have recourse if something goes wrong. We accept that if an adult wants to get punched in the face for money that's something society can accommodate with reasonable expectations.

But there's no world where we would see a boss getting in the ring with his employees to fight for money as something acceptable.

I don't think that's a perfect analogy because the worker can win in boxing in a way that they can't as a prostitute and there is likely far less of an appetite for compelling your workers to fight you than there is for compelling your workers to have sex with you.

I agree we shouldn't normalize employer/employee boxing matches (although I'd be willing to participate in some instances...) but it seems a lot less consequential a choice as legalizing the hybrid prostitute role.

I think people are confusing the notion of being a secretary and having sex with your boss with the idea that it is inherently wrong for superiors to use their workplace capital to exploit those who work under them. It is completely correct that the latter idea is exploitative; however, if a woman is a secretary and is also arranged to have sex with her boss via her job description, and she consents to this when accepting the job offer with full understanding of what her job entails -in effect being a fifty fifty secretary sex worker- then there is nothing wrong with this at all, quite self evidently. It would be consensual and in writing. If she is not coerced into the job, it is not exploitative.

What about when all of the unfilled job listings include this requirement?

The only way I can see prostitution as ethical is if someone can choose to have no job and be fairly comfortable.

I get what you're saying and think that's a pretty reasonable view. But why do we see having to use your brain to earn a living, or use your muscles to earn a living as any less exploitative? Why is any job ethical unless someone can choose to have no job and be fairly comfortable? Either way, you're essentially forced to do something you'd otherwise not do.

So you'd wank a stranger off as soon as carry their bag?

Depends entirely on how much you're paying now doesn't it.

But that wasn't the condition that the OP said made him comfortable. He said he'd be okay with legal sex work only as long as the person could otherwise live a life of comfort without the need to work. He didn't say he'd be okay with legal sex work as long as the person could have chosen to carry a bag instead.

Well they're pretty identical in effort, so the same - you apparently consider them to be entirely the same class of work with no moral/ethical difference.

Lifting a pen to write a cheque for 10,000 is identical in effort to doing the same thing to write a cheque for 10. Physical effort is not the only criteria we use to assign value. I don't believe that it's ethical to enforce my moral/ethical beliefs on other consenting adults.

So you would, I'm assuming they asked you so there's no issue of forcing beliefs on people.

Why is 'forcing beliefs' even at question, you surely don't think whether you're forcing your beliefs on someone when the issue is carrying luggage?

Or, maybe they're different classes of activity and you already realise this ...

Buying the time of a Nasa engineer and buying the time of a day labourer are different classes of activity. Just because it costs more for one than the other does not change the ethics of the situation.

You feel differently about someone charging for sex than someone charging to use their brain or their brawn, but that does not mean that everyone feels the same way. Why should your feeling rule the day and be enforced on adults who feel differently about it? Sounds like the church of old.

My initial post in this thread was about the legality of consenting adults engaging in whatever activities they both agree to. I tried to highlight the distinction being made and think it has a lot to do with slightly prudish notions of sexuality and frankly a notion that men and especially women aren't capable enough to make the correct choice for themselves.

I’m not sure I can describe to you why I feel this way in logical terms. Perhaps it’s just cultural but I know I, and the vast majority of the population finds mental and physical work far less undesirable/bad than sexual.

Yes, that all makes sense. Will just note that there was a time not so long ago when just as large a majority of people thought homosexuality was a horrible abomination, or worse.

Attitudes change and in my view it's time to stop being so emotionally negative toward sexuality and the diverse choices made among consenting adults.

I think there is something very wrong with that requirement. In the name of sexual liberation you would make sexual wage slavery common. In a world where this is normal or acceptable corporate lawyers and HR departments may write in such clauses into employment contracts just to cut down on the number of sexual harassment cases and issues.

The reason why “50%” sex work shouldn’t be legal is because job descriptions change over time so it could easily be the case that every attractive women with a male boss suddenly has to have sex with them or be fired for not completing their job description. Sure, a lot of women can quit, but exploitation already happens now when it is illegal so if the law was on the exploiters side things would only get worse.

Things wouldn't get worse ... they'd just have to start paying taxes on it.

I disagree, a world where any job can be coerced into being a sex job is a worse world over all. People don’t generally get away with coercing women who are researching astrophysics into sex these days, your idea would make that legal and thus more common.

Is it the exploitation or is it the idea of it being a normalised part of workplace culture?

I'm in favour of fully legalised prostitution, but I don't want to be personally exposed to it in any capacity. I want the workplace to be about work. I don't want my money wasted arresting people for having sex.

No ones bought it up but to me it seems an issue of of coercion and consent. Even if prostitution was 100% legal it should absolutely be up to the prostitute on a case by case basis when, where, who and how they had paid sex. On that basis your boss who inherently has power over you being able to ask for sex is to close to exploitation and easy to see how it can be abused. We should note this abuse is already all too common in non-sex roles.

I also think this applies to full time sex worker positions if there was an “and you’ve got to fuck your boss” contract clause.

That's a very good point: basically, it's easy to support sexual work as "contractor work", where the "working party" can choose who they work with, without any long-term commitment (or at least, simple way to break off the contract).

An employment contract is significantly different in that employer gets to decide who the work is done for by the employee.

The same protections should be extended to full time employment as well. In the same way your boss cannot compel you to do something dangerous and there are standards around safety and workplace rules.

Not so fast. Can a landlord refuse to rent to someone because they are black, because they have children, because of their political affiliation?

Once sex work becomes legal, then it has to abide by the same rules as everyone else.

They are going to get a lot of customers that many of them would probably not want to touch if they were not getting paid to do so.

... and in many cases that will be exactly why they are getting paid to do so.

This is no brainer. If a job description involves having sex, then people who don't want to have sex will be forced to do so which violates basic human right. On the other hand having sex with boss or any one with consent should not be prohibited legally.

If a job description involves something you object to then you probably shouldn’t apply for the job, whatever it is

The argument can be applied to the number of working hours in a week or minimum wages. Exactly this is the problem. There won't be any jobs for people who don't want to have sex as part of the job

> people who don't want to have sex will be forced to do so

This doesn't make sense. Not everyone wants to weld either.

This is an anecdote from my student life. One of my colleagues told me how all the girls in the class (including her) are going out of their mind for the chubby, average looking teaching assistant and how he's "very sexy". He wasn't even particularly nerdy, nor well-dressed, humorous or well-spoken (since those might be quirky or well-regarded behaviours that can be considered "sexy" too): to me, he was decidedly average in any way I'd look at him. Nothing wrong with girls liking him, it was just curious to hear him being called "very sexy"!

Similarly, male students were going crazy about female teaching assistants who were admittedly very average looking, and didn't have much going for them otherwise either.

Thus, I've always interpreted that to be that "position of power" makes for an unreasonable judgement (of both brain and heart :), but you are free to make of that what you will.

At university, my then-girlfriend confessed that she had had sexual fantasies about her tutor, an unremarkable-looking white-haired man in his mid-fifties at the time.

Some of my university professors and assistants were too nerdy or decrepit to be sexy, but most were smart, interesting people that students listened to attentively for hours and found attractive beyond their moderately plain appearance. There were several couples (and triangles) among faculty, evidence that they made a strong impression on each other too.

I wasn't at all focusing on appearance: thus my mention of "decidedly average in any way I'd look at him" (this includes how smart they appeared to be). Your professors/assistants were obviously "well spoken" if they could keep their students' attention for hours, and I had such professors/assistants too.

That’s a fascinating question!

I think the answer to it might be in assigning some unscientific statistics to the world.

Starting here: perhaps 5% of people are psychologically capable of sex work. The reason behind legalizing (or decriminalizing) sex work is to maximize the liberty of, and reduce the harm to, this 5%.

Concurrently we must account for the 95%.

If we were to normalize sex work in the context other professions, then the volume of jobs requiring sex would quickly outpace the number of people who would choose that profession in lieu of economic necessity, and so you will have people be sexually exploited. Perhaps the free market will solve this in the long term but in the mean time you’ll have many a hurt persons.

So basically the whole thing is a compromise based on what we believe about the economic incentives and workforce, aiming to please multiple outlooks.

Although the “contractor” point another poster made is maybe more compelling.

> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content : John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?

None of those were major studio action blockbusters (Terminator, one might mistake for that because of the resulting franchise, but it was an indie film that hit it big; all the rest are out-of-genre.)

So, if those are really your comparisons, the problem may be that you are comparing fundamentally different kinds of movies. The description of “even when they have sex no one is horny” seems to be pretty typical, over a long time window, of action blockbusters. Horniness is big in comedy, romance, and erotic subgenres of other genres, but it's not big in action (though non-blockbusters might include it because they tend to have more freedom to depart from genre rules.)

I have never understood why nudity and consensual sex - basically harmless activities - are deeply frowned on by the ratings groups, yet stabbing someone in the throat and having their blood gush out everywhere is fine and dandy.

Everyone knows that men have dicks. Why is seeing one such a big deal? Or a butt for that matter: everybody has one! It's no wonder our society is screwed up when it comes to our bodies. We learn shame for them at a very early age.

Most movies and shows have become so violent that I don't even look for new stuff anymore. If I want to waste some time at the TV I just go watch a Star Trek rerun rather than spending 45 minutes trying to find something to watch, then finding out it's gory and turning it off.

Sex and associated shame are used for social control by most major religions. Violence, on the other hand, is used for competition with other societies so it's "good" when people are inoculated against it. It's not about human wellbeing. It's about human resource efficiency.

There is even the effect imo that it creates a gap in development. You never learn the different modes of nudity and that it can be more than sexual. Because what is implied as well, is that a nude body surely MUST mean sex. Which is a gross simplification. The amount of folks who equate nudity with porn is staggering (and unhealthy, as the article reasons as well)

Try some European stuff? These are all excellent and non-violent: - Normal People - Call my agent (Dix pour cent) - Fleabag

Fleabag was fantastic, highly recommended.

Fleabag was brilliant but the first season was a very difficult watch towards the end.

I would recommend it to anyone but don't think it's just a laugh.

Funny, Normal People comes out of Ireland, historically a very sexually repressed nation under the thumb of the Catholic Church. Times are changing rapidly in Ireland though.

My favorite Netflix show set in Paris is "The Eddy".

There are some pretty good articles and videos about the subject; some random points:

Puritans, who believed that sex was sinful and suffering was noble.

The likelihood of something happening in real life. Most people will live their whole life without getting into a violent situation, which keeps it a fictional one, but almost all will be confronted with a sexual one. Violence in media will not beget violence in real life, generally speaking (if it did, given how much violence there is in video games and movies, we'd have a Problem), but sex in media will normalize it. Or that's the theory anyway.

Another one: Sex is always happy, a happy relationship, people looking pleased with themselves after the saxophone-music-pan-out smoking a cigarette (to invoke the 80's trope). Violence is almost always bad, the hero in agony, the bad guy coming to a gruesome end (falling off Nakatomi Plaza, into helicopter blades or a jet turbine, getting roundhouse kicked into defeat, etc), etc. It's a punishment, whereas sex in a film is depicted as a reward. Generally speaking.

are deeply frowned on by the ratings groups, yet stabbing someone in the throat and having their blood gush out everywhere is fine and dandy.

I'm trying to think of a movie where so graphically murdering a real human with a real weapon wouldn't get a frown and an R from the MPAA like nudity would.

Kind of ironically, though, one way to dodge harsher ratings for violence is to kill non-humans (like aliens) with made up weapons (like phasers) and show no gore while doing it. Everyone has viscera, after all (I assume, maybe some aliens in the Star Trek universe don't); is seeing it such a big deal?

Most movies and shows have become so violent that I don't even look for new stuff anymore.

There are a lot of new movies and shows out there (including new Star Trek shows), especially considering how there are so many platforms distributing new content. I'd venture to say most of them are at the violence level of Star Trek or below. It's totally fine if you want to rewatch the same stuff because you know you like it, but to write off decades of new media like you have, without even seeing it, is kinda lazy.

> I'd venture to say most of them are at the violence level of Star Trek or below

You mean the new Star Trek, right? Because the new Star Trek is much more violent than the old, TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT shows. Not just overtly violent, but also psychologically violent. It's disgusting, frankly. And the difference is, while I'd happily show my kid the old Star Trek when they hit 7-10, there's no way in hell I would let them anywhere near close Picard/Discovery at that age.

I used to think the same about gun play, and still do. But I realized what the driver is, having kids.

No one wants to watch people getting it on with their eleven-year-old. An adult rating makes an easy warning.

That's my point: why is it okay to watch people getting killed with your 11 year old, but not okay to watch people naked? I'm not talking about a porn scene of course.

Reminded me of a line in American Beauty, when the two gay neighbours are jogging, and Lester joins them and asks them for tips to get in shape[1]:

- Neighbour: "Do you want to just lose weight, or do you want to have increased strength and flexibility as well?"

- Lester: "I want to look good naked"

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTg7F59WfE

It's interesting, but pretty easily explained, right? Disney. What if you excise their canon from all the points made? I don't know the answer to that, honestly I don't watch movies. I'd be willing to bet their demographic capture strategy weighed children more highly than adults. That's easy memorabilia sales, tickets, dvd's, subscriptions, indoctrination, which will later yield nostalgia. And if you remove child-oriented or family films, the latter of which may even contain sexually suggestive content, from my recent movie/tv experiences there's still a lot of sex. I suppose if you weigh popularity there's an argument to be made. But does sex sell movies when you can watch an infinity of hardcore pornography with not only full blown nudity, but any variety of fantasy?

The really strange part, which seemed to me to be largely overlooked, is the ratio of violence to sex. The US in particular seems possessed by an interesting duality. One being that depictions of extreme violence are fine, but full frontal nudity is somehow verboten. And then another interesting point, the magnitude of which I'm not wholly aware of, is that we're almost certainly the porn capitol. Not in production alone, but in consumption as well, but I'm speculating on the basis of anecdotes.

What does it mean?

I think this is why British crime dramas / police procedurals seem to feel more real (to me, raised in a post-colonial country) - very few people look like temporarily financially embarrassed models slumming it as detectives.

Yes! Although after binging watching 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter. Consequently, the plot lines got a lot more “conventional” (read: American).

Completely off-topic:

I'm actually doing something similar -- watching all of Midsomer Murders. I absolutely love the way John Nettles' Barnaby (haven't seen any with the new actor) is righteous and upstanding without becoming preachy. In particular S01E03 where his partner's homophobia is shut down. The fact that most of the horrible people are high-brow also has a nice feel to it -- very Columbo-esque.

> we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter

Not always.

(mild spoiler)

The resident pathologist Dr Fleur Perkins who appears in series 20 is played by seventy year old Annette Badland, [0] who is much sterner than her predecessor (a much younger Manjinder Virk [1]).

That said, Midsomer Murders does now have a different demographic than the earlier series, which typically involved older, white eccentrics living in quaint English villages, and caricatured a rural society that is now long gone. The cast is now more likely to include Black and Asian characters in various roles as good guys, villains, innocents, suspects and guilty parties. The current Mrs Barnaby is a 50-year old woman, also a stronger character than her predecessor, who was also in her 50s when she first appeared in the series.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Badland

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjinder_Virk

Agreed. British shows have characters that look like what people outside of LA look like.

In fact those people are smoking by British standards.

One of the last television series I watched was The Practice, which not only was notable for having both attractive, average, and ugly cast members, but it is actually a realistic plot point that sometimes comes up with envy between them.

But yes, European media in general is less focused on physical æsthetic perfection than I find U.S.A, Japanese, Korean, and Indian media to be; I often find a similar result in German, Swedish and Dutch television series that characters seem to look considerably more average.

Eh, kinda. Luther? Sherlock? Global sex-symbol superstars right there. The same forces at play in Hollywood are at work in London, it's just that the best-looking ones move out to California as well.

The main characters in Sherlock, sure. But the ancillary characters are much more normal.

Not sure if it's a taste thing, but I don't find any single character on Sherlock to be particularly attractive, having just binged on the entirely of the show in the past two weeks.

I imagine it amuses Benedict Cumberbatch immensely that he's referred to often as the "Thinking Woman's Crumpet".

Luther, okay, I'll grant you, it's Idris Elba. But everyone else around him (aside from his ex) looks rather, well, normal and British.

Ruth Wilson is a great actress, and, in my opinion, somewhat attractive, but she's not of the "Moved to LA and looking for stardom" mould that a lot of American actors and actresses fall into.

“Somewhat” attractive? Ruth Wilson is very hot, if you excuse my objectifying. She’s had interesting career moves, but would definitely not look out of place in any US movie or tv series...

Ha, I’ve never thought of Benedict Cumberbatch as good looking, just odd looking, like the Snitznoodle from Raggedy Anne & Andy.[0]

The BBC version from the eighties had actors more in keeping, I think.

[0]https://images.app.goo.gl/8XzUfBBE9RduB6Qj7

I also like how much shorter british seasons are

US studios agree with you. Since the late 90's US series have been migrating from ~24/ea toward 6 or so.

We recently watched the entirety of New Tricks. Can't get more average looking than those characters.

The original Office was an outstanding example of portraying normal people. The US version pushed a good bit more to some people being a bit cartoonish.

I love this about British/ Nordic tv. It feels as though every show injects more gritty realism compared to US polish. There is a spectrum though and US is actually on the better end. Most Asian tv shows feature the a tiny pool of the same gorgeous people who may or may not have acting skills.

Just from my own observation recently it's also the case with French, German and Israeli TV. Much more nuanced, realistic etc.

And Russian cinema. Or at least all the Russian cinema that makes it to Australia and I get to see...

I guess the crap gets filtered out.

But I'm curious - what exactly gets to Australia from Russia nowadays?

The ones that have stuck in my head over the years have been Daywatch and Nightwatch, Leviathan, and How I Ended This Summer. I’m sure there’s a few more I can’t remember right now. (I highly recommend all of those...)

Oh, sure, the former two are very nice.

You might like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376968/ The Return and it sequel, The Banishment https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488905/

They are sort of 'harder' than the 'How I Ended This Summer'.

Unfortunately, 2010-s didn't deliver much.

Thanks, I’ll add those to my queue.

I don't know if this is just what they picked for BBC America, but every single British TV comedy I've ever watched has a cast of 90% white haired elderly people sitting around and being sarcastic at each other. Last of the Summer Wine, Dad's Army, Are You Being Served, etc etc.

These were also the only thing my parents watched, so it was a relief when I got to watch normal people TV and saw someone in their 20s.

> Last of the Summer Wine, Dad's Army, Are You Being Served, etc etc.

Those are, depending on taste, some of the worst. And they are also old. There was a lot of good from that era, comedy and other, like fawlty towers, blake's 7 (not comedy), monty python etc. I think gp was referring to modern UK crime shows though? As in the days of dads army and are you being served, american shows also were not like in the article. Or are they showing re-runs of these shows on BBC America now?

Well if you're wondering, I went to visit my family in the UK right before it stopped being possible to travel and they made me watch all these shows again. (I think I got to see Dr Who once.) So someone still likes them.

I was so confused by this when I saw which British TV shows were being broadcast in America, I lived there for a year as a 17 year old. Suddenly dated stereotypes and the general lack of awareness about contemporary British culture, accents, etc. made complete sense.

Even back then (about 17 years ago) the titles mentioned above were equivalent to the lowest tier cable re-runs on one of those retro TV channels that thrives on being cheap.

I'm quite enjoying BBC America's The Watch, rather loosely based on Terry Pratchett's Guards novels.

It has the occasional conventionally attractive actor, but boy howdy, they really roughed up Richard Dormer, who plays Sam Vimes.

> every single British TV comedy I've ever watched has a cast of 90% white haired elderly people

In contrast, every time US studios have to film an actor over 35, they blood-sacrifice a weeping marsupial to the attractiveness pantheon.

There are interesting ideas here. Personally, I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. I think a more likely possibility is that movies started specializing.

In the decades before the Internet, cinema was one place where the average person who didn't buy dirty magazines could glimpse more skin than in everyday life. Then the Internet came along. Suddenly pornography was in everyone's home. Soon it was in everyone's pocket. Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private.

The one-size-fits-all portrayals in movies became gauche by comparison. And unnecessary. The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food, so it suddenly seemed old-fashioned for the cinema to keep peddling stale bread.

Probably this also contributed to the me-too movement and the surrounding fallout over the sexualization of women in spaces where sexuality was now seen as being inappropriate. For example, the controversy over grid girls in racing.

A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public.

I dunno, everything being PG-13 feels like the opposite of specializing. They're trying to get everyone into the theater.

...including the puritans, which means violence is okay but sex is a dealbreaker.

which is true and such deeply weird thing. and ties into the idea (though i think it's not super well supported in the article) that some of this comes from basically anxiety over physical threats.

Its a sign of how messed our society is that we can depict torture but not a naked person.

Violence in media doesn't lead to violence in real life for various reasons. Most people are generally taught not to be violent to others and laws help enforce that social norm.

Sex in media does lead to more sex real life because there's no social norm or law against not having sex and sex leads to STD and unwanted pregnancies.

Hence, there is a logic to violence in media is okay and sex in media is less ok. One has no consequences, the other does.

https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+se...

Does violence in movies lead to more support for foreign intervention, I wonder?

There was a case a few years ago where a US federal judge refused to outlaw torture in case there was a “24 type situation”. (24 was a popular tv show a few years ago in which the main character regularly tortures people for information, to protect America.)

I once read a reader question in a mainstream game magazine (GameInformer I think?) where they asked why it was ok for games to have violence but not sex. The answer was extremely angry they had to explain this, like a parent lecturing a child who'd just embarassed them in public.

But anyway, their answer was the opposite of yours. Violence in games is good because you "shouldn't do it in real life". Sex in video games is bad because you "should do it in real life". The kids currently call this "touching grass" or "getting some bitches".

That sounds like the same answer to me. As an adult you should have "responsible" sex in real life. So, sex in media with a young and irresponsible audience will lead to irresponsible sex and all the repercussions. Hence, the common idea, don't show kids sex.

Violence in media will not (or at least no one has been able to find a connection)

I am sorry this is total BS, now even 10 year olds suddenly have access to porn, and amount of sex in society plummeted.

Secondly, I didn't sign up for catholic church, sex is not a sinfull activity limited to procreation only.

I don't know where you got the idea that I though sex is sinful. I only suggested that as a society "responsible" sex (sex that doesn't cause unwanted pregnancies nor get you sick with an STD) is a desirable outcome for society and people in general. Otherwise have any kind of sex you want with whoever you want.

The point is only that sexual media has an arguably negative influence on society and violent media does not so it's not irrational to find violent media non-problematic and sexual media to be problematic for kids.

The 10 year old can see porn and sex has plummeted does not mean seeing more porn = less sex. The world is complicated and there are plenty of other reasons there is less sex happening (assuming there actually is less sex happening)

As just one example, many people claim the reason there is less sex is people stay home and entertain themselves with the facebook/instragram/tiktok/youtube/twitter/reddit/video-games/netflix vs go out and socialize IRL. That could easily be the major factor in decline in sexual activity even if sexual media by itself influences kids to be more promiscuous.

That's precisely what I mean. It's specialization in mass market genre entertainment.

Action films are more purely about action; fantasy films are more purely about fantasy. There's no need to mix in sexual titillation anymore.

Separation of concerns.

How does Game of Thrones fit into your theory?

It's not a mass market film? Relatively mass market television series, but there's like 40 times as much run time as a full length movie.

What has run time have to do with it?

It's either accepted, liked, whatever. Or not.

> A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public.

This is a disturbing thing if true. It seems a key feature of an oppressive society.

Related: panem et circenses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

The idea is that keeping people occupied and diverted then you can fail as a civil leader but still maintain your control and position. The more people are satisfied (by government or business efforts or other large scale entities) the less likely they are to rebel when those entities are failing them. Even if they aren't properly satisfied, they're still made content.

Separating private and public spheres of life respects consent.

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

I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched.

Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...

I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew.

I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.

The covid relief plan would prove a definitive counter to your hypothetical concern over tax money.

The public clamor for “$2k” checks, which comprise less than 1/4 of the $1.9 trillion dollar package that’s now entering reconciliation proves pretty strongly that the public is not sensitive to the cost of their government “benefits”.

The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government.

I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend.

The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.

Clinton and Obama were the only presidents to lower the deficit in the last 50 years.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/31/fac...

Who controls spending? Especially on transfer programs, which represent the bulk of the deficit? (It’s not the president)

http://goliards.us/adelphi/deficits/index.html is more useful. It shows party control of the presidency, house, and senate and deficits each year, not just at end of term.

Looks like the ideal for deficit control is to have a democratic president and republican control of both houses of Congress. Unified government by either party leads to less constraint on spending.

If Democrats make up half the team that you claim is most effective at limiting deficits, it would seem to me to be difficult to sustain the argument that Democrats don't care about them.

Look at the data on deficits linked above.

This seems to be the pattern:

Republican president: spend on this!

  Republican congress: OK

  Democratic congress: OK, as long as we spend on this, too.

Democratic president: spend on this!

  Democratic congress: OK

  Republican congress: No, deficits are important.

Yeah, but that happened with the other party controlling the purse strings, in both cases, who were voted in as a reaction to those administrations with financial mandates.

Both Clinton and Obama inherited a recession from their Republican predecessors, and were punished for the unforgivable sin of responding appropriately.

By that logic did Bush inherit the dot-com crash from Clinton? I think you'd like to make the world fit neatly into ideological views. The boom-bust cycle of the US economy is pretty nuts when you step back and take it all in. Often the federal policies and bank regulations, to the extent they drive 'irrational exuberance', seldom reach their zenith and nadir all within one administration. The subprime mortgage crisis being a good example.

If you don't think it's possible to make the world fit neatly into ideological views, then I don't understand your former comment where you appear to give credit for the deficit reduction under Clinton and Obama to the Republicans.

Of course you don’t.

> I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.

Don't see this in Canada, where tax dollars pay for it. Stigma only works if there is a majority against a minority. Most people are fat.

My understanding is that a lot of people who join the military now come from military families, so they're kind of already prepared for it. (This is different from AOC's claim which is the military preys on poor students and gamers.)

If you're going in just as a drone pilot, the fitness standards wouldn't be needed for anything, so presumably they expect people to still be doing something up close and physical though?

Running ships with much fewer crew is fine until something breaks and needs to be repaired. The Navy tried that for a while with the LCS and it didn't work.

This has a significant consequence - the military is an almost foolproof path out of the lower and well into the middle class. You can basically do nothing but be mediocre or even marginal and still be financially secure and earn a solid retirement.

All that is lost if you can’t even join up.

> The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food

If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing.

I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.

Well there is still plenty of flirting in cinema.

Can't you just go hang out at an expensive bar/lounge. Not every bar is a dive and not every experience is McDonalds.

I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something.

Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.

Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be.

It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence.

I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thing is decent production value in a movie can't be created in home-grown way, it requires serious dollars. Oppositely, there are actors and there are "adult actors" and the two jobs are considered very distinct (in the way that receptionist and sex-workers are segregated and should be segregated, as mentioned on another thread).

But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.

It's a discovery problem. There are existing puritanical rules in society that break discovery in this industry.

Someone solves that safely and they'll do really well imho.

> But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.

Based on another commenter's suggestion that you basically want "sex in movies that aren't about sex", it only took me a few minutes of googling to find sites which seem relevant to your interests:

- r/watchitfortheplot

- mrskin.com

It seems like you want porn which feels more organic and authentic than stereotypical porn. Sure the material in these sites wasn't expressly made to be porn, but it is porn in the way its packaged by these sites and subsequently used. And it's probably better that way, because it gets you what you're looking for in this case.

| I bet there's a cottage industry of porn

There is. But like with all markets, it's more expensive and will always have less mass appeal than the lowest common denominator. That downward pressure is felt in that industry just like in all others.

The Western porn market is a monopoly (the same company owns Pornhub and approximately every studio.) If you want something different, you'd have to train your tastes until you can handle something foreign like JAV[1], or scrounge indies like random onlyfans accounts.

[1] which are all really boring, seriously they're like four hours long and nothing happens, and that's besides the completely different set of morals and expected fetishes

Cookie-cutter western porn is also boring as silicone. And pornhub is shit except for the brief moment when it had gun videos.

Eastern-european is much better, imo.

>I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience.

GP wants sex scenes that happen in a movie not movie that happens for sex scenes.

I mean gourmet by comparison. McDonald's is gourmet compared to sand. Likewise, porn is gourmet compared to cinema from a sexual perspective (at least the kind of cinema the article is about), because cinema had to stop at sanitized teasing where porn can go all the way. For the average viewer, that's fine wine in terms of sexual gratification, even if the execution is the joyless jackhammering that as you rightly point out is typically what hits the front pages of mainstream tube sites.

Then watch something different to mainstream porn :)

You’re attacking a straw man here. Your experience and personal anecdote may be completely true— however, you are skirting OPs very interesting idea so succinctly stated: that “a populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in private.” My immediate hunch is that this is generally true.

What the fallacy for correlation is not causation? Because as far as I agree that porn is so widely accessible now, I’m not sure it’s in itself enough to explain why mainstream movies are so safe.

I would look toward spécialisation : yes. We’re talking exclusively about super hero action movies here. And even if the idea and the article really interested me: other movies exists. Some are horny as fuck; in 2021.

The article author mentioned Disney a few times; for once I think we can’t blame the military industrial complex but a entertainment company that is obsess with being us-white-middle-class family friendly.

So again, because I’m rambly, I would personally blame cultural aplanissement because of fear of loosing markets, than porn or 9/11.

Have a look at Cindy Gallop's Make Love Not Porn https://makelovenotporn.tv/ - it's been going for a few years now.

It's kind of what you describe. It's like pornhub's "home" videos idea but a 1000 times better - actually curated, personal and real. Haven't followed them recently but at the beginning they actually organised camera setups for people who wanted to be featured.

Thank you so much for recommending us! MakeLoveNotPorn is 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.' We're pioneering the whole new category of social sex (what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed us to socially sexually self-express). If porn is the Hollywood movie, we're the real world documentary :) Our mission and manifesto is here: https://socialsexrevolution.com/

Great to see you around here. Love your work!

This just depends on what you search for and think of as porn. I was exposed to a world of more female friendly hardcore porn by a female friend which I had little idea about. Other than that, porn bodies have a range that is far wider than mainstream media, you can find everything from SSBBWs to super skinny women, and lot of variations inbetween.

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

I don't think it's just the parents. I think Hollywood relies on an export market. They don't want any country blocking a film from being shown to teens, in the theatres. Teens have the largest disposable incomes, of any market segment, especially when it comes to watching movies. Comical violence is an easy sell. If you add anything sexual, there is the risk of it being censored.

Game of Thrones has plenty of nudity, including full frontal (ermagerd!). But it doesn't have a whole lot of sex that you'd call erotic, as opposed to just being violent rape, carefully catalogued here:

https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape

It's telling that the closest thing to a loving, normal relationship seems to be the incestuous brother-sister saga of Cersei and Jaime.

The paying audience for blockbusters is now global - and many movies earn more outside the U.S. than in it. As such, movie makers are probably now paying more attention to what is considered appropriate versus obscene elsewhere.

Or just aiming for the lowest common denominator - and taking out anything that might be controversial in any of their global markets. (Take out sexuality for the American market, and take out politics for China).

A $100m+ budget doesn’t have room for risks.

Putting aside parenting choices, the two types of images (sex and violence) are not equivalent.

Sexual images produce a physiological response... you get horny.

Violent images don’t really do much, maybe revulsion. But, other than that, not much at all.

A picture of a bullet-ridden corpse will not make you want to shoot people.

A picture of a naked chick having sex, on the other hand, will elicit a desire to have sex.

Apples and oranges.

To be sure, there are many who blame the ‘violence in video games’ and the like as the cause of crime. Those people are idiots... getting a good headshot in Counter-Strike gives you the exact same kind of thrill as making a basket or a hole in one ... nobody says, “Hell yeah! Now I want to kill someone!”

But, watching porn? That’s exactly what it does... the imagery itself makes you go “Hell yeah! Now I want to fuck someone!” (Which, to most porn watchers, means fucking their hand.)

The important difference between violence and nudity on film is that the violence is completely fake, while the nudity is actually real.

Citation strongly needed.

If anything, a bullet-riddled corpse should evoke sadness, not the desire to shoot more bullets into it or other things.

Maybe you meant that watching one character inflict violence on another triggers audience feelings of aggression or fear, depending on which character we empathize with. What we watch undoubtedly causes all manner of emotions: horniness, elation, shame, fear, revulsion, pride, etc.

You have overlooked that some people can get an arousal from violence. Perhaps not a large enough part of the population to worry about.

Sadly I feel that Hollywood movies are made for 12 year old boys. Parents sent their kids to the movies (before the pandemic), it was a form of independence. One more granted to boys than to girls, unfortunately. Other demographics tend to spend their time/money elsewhere. Girls mature quicker and quickly moved on to other interests than hanging around the movie theatre part of the mall.

In the 1980s parents still tagged along, so the movie couldn't be too comical...and, the kids wouldn't get the mature part anyway.

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

> Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private.

That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.

McDonalds is popular the world over. I wouldn’t take GP to task over their observation. The observation may imply a shallow society, and whether fries or sex, there’s obviously a massive global market for cheap and easy, so something in that observation is pretty accurate. If everything is biological competition, I think society just hasn’t found a way to compete effectively with massively broad and easy access to porn.

I mean, look at some of the posts here about people being disillusioned by the work, expense, and time it takes to even meet eligible people, much less hook up. Maybe the answer is in more meat-space social organizations - all those social (non-government) institutions like church, fraternal organizations, sports leagues, served to build social networks and now all of that is mostly gone for young people. So it’s meeting at work (increasingly taboo), chance encounters, bars maybe (and also often useless or horrible outcomes), or online shopping. Understandably difficult circumstances. What new drivers could compel different preferences?

This topic reminds me of that "The Gang Hits the Slopes" episode of Always Sunny. That episode sort of hits on the idea that it's easy to think that movies back then were more "fun", but often it's just the same kind of pervy joke over and over. I could see how writers may have wanted to avoid having "horniness" as a motivator in scripts if it risked them getting lumped in with low-effort comedies.

> Rita Hayworth underwent an ethnic makeover to appear more Caucasian

Funny how by departing from Europe and landing in the Americas, ‘hispanics’ suddenly turned into a whole separate race.

Hollywood movies are made for an international audience and don't just reflect American culture anymore. Europe has always been more sexually permissive than the US, but other places are often more sexually restrictive than both. I think that's why Hollywood movies have become more prudish. It's also why the characters and dialogue are flat. Nuance is hard to translate; explosions are not.

The elephant in the room is Disney I'd say, basically. Disney owns all blockbuster movies now, and wants to sell them around the entire world, and no Disney property shall have sexuality. Same goes for Apple, who forbids any adult content to even touch an iPhone, barring (through gritted teeth) what you can find in a browser and Reddit. Power is consolidating into fewer and fewer companies, who want to cater to all world powers, some of which say a naked human body is The Ickiest Thing and must be forbidden.

I'm hopeful that in the future though, as costs of producing and distributing high quality movies go lower and lower, more and more indie or low cost films will look as professional as we want today's blockbusters to be, and also be free enough to explore cinema as an art form as they see fit.

> [Julia] was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her.

> Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.

1984, George Orwell, 1949

That guy knew what was up. Does all of this just flow out of the technology that turns high population societies into behaving like low population communities? The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Is that the dynamic that Orwell was able to see?

It’s worth pointing out that Orwell wasn’t so much predicting a future as commenting on current trends. For instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4412199/ or https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673024

My point is not that the above articles are definitive but to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, etc.

Now that's some specialized knowledge. How do the stars even line up so that someone with the insight on British sex practices of the fourties, lands precisely in a random thread mentioning Orwell's writing on the matter?

Welcome to HackerNews

I should have elaborated on this in my other flagged comment, but: the poster has linked two papers, the relevance of which is not obvious, and not explained it at all.

(Also, I feel we've gone somewhat offtopic here; it's not a Party matter, the depiction of sex in American films - unless we're counting the targeting of films at the global market resulting in films being made compliant with Chinese censorship? Could OP and/or the upvoters explain why they think 1984 is relevant?)

The linked papers provide context for the quoted passages by describing British sexual culture during which Orwell wrote 1984.

The party, or rather the government, does influence what's in TV shows and movies. See Carlin's "7 words you can't say on TV" https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0 and Family Guy's FCC song: https://youtu.be/Eeg4J8yNk4g.

I find it ironic that the most timeless sayings are about time itself; "Time is a flat circle" indeed!

> The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority?

Remember that Orwell was writing quite close parodies of Stalinism, based on his encounters with actual Stalinists while fighting for the socialist side in the Spanish civil war. In Animal Farm, Snowball is Trotsky, and so on. So he undoubtedly had something specific in mind when inventing the "anti-sex league", although I'm not quite sure what. But lack of privacy, moralizing, and remote unaccountable central authority? He means Stalinism.

Remember also that it's a front, in which Julia participates cynically for her own safety: ( https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 )

> " ‘Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.’"

> In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

And later on Orwell tells us directly what the Anti-Sex league was intended to achieve:

> She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

> ‘When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’

> That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

(The red sash business reminds me of the "silver ring thing"; US evangelist Christians replicating similar systems of control and moralizing among their young people)

How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person? I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it?

Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

>Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

Yes, that's what several generations had to discover.

Either that or you learn to love everyone equally.

I still think polyamory is O(n!) though.

I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous.

I think you can be sexually open and loving to one partner at a time, but accept that each individual partner may have an unknown time limit.

This understanding that your relationships won't necessarily last forever doesn't require you to give up on emotions, nor to cheapen sex.

> I don't think that being a loving person requires you to be polyamorous.

Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting.

>Certainly not, but I'm pretty sure that, in order to be successfully polyamorous, one would need to be extremely loving and accepting.

If they were that loving, they would have sufficed with less-amorous... It's because they're not that loving to any single person (but instead all about the quick gratification) that they look to expand their variety...

with all due respect, have you ever talked with a poly person or known one?

Yes. And all stories I know ended up badly.

Like I said, it's O(n!).

Just out of interest, how old were the people you spoke with?

Personally, it took me over two decades of learning to make it work, and I agree that it's about O(n!) difficult.

I've had several failures, but kept perservering, and it paid off, so anyone reading this who feels like they're definitely poly but afraid to start the journey, do it!

FWIW, I've known I'm poly since before puberty, and it still was not easy. I think poly acceptance today is where gay acceptance was a couple decades ago, with most people being either dismissive of its validity, saying it's a bad idea in practice, and generally denying its right to exist.

I think we're slowly moving forward, however.

> polyamory is O(n!)

wow, that,s the best explanation i,ve seen yet. the rewards are also up there.

You don't have to think of sex as this deep emotional bond between two people. In one sense, you've been tricked into believing that that is the only way.

So one solution is to accept that sex can be just that: just sex. It can be something that you and a friend do, maybe regularly, maybe only once in a while. Like playing Tennis. You may be happy that you have a friend who you can play Tennis with. But you don't have to fall in love with your Tennis partner and share every other part of your life with them. This solution you can call "Compartmentalizing".

The thing is, even if you had a Tennis partner who said "I don't want to play Tennis with you any more", you'd probably still feel hurt. Having emotional bonds is not limited to just sexual partners, but to anyone that you spend time with. That level of hurt is probably proportional to how often you played Tennis together, and your expectations on how long you expected that relationship to last.

The other method is to not separate emotions from sex, but to just get better at accepting loss and death of relationships as a natural course of life that must be reckoned with. This solution you can call "Acceptance of Grief".

Tennis analogy isn't right. Activities like that don't require to expose yourself in a vulnerable way to other person (multiple persons in a sport) in private space. Making love, as it's called, does not fit your example.

This statement says more about your own attitudes to sex than anything else. There's nothing wrong with that, but you seem incapable of imagining that the two activities can be performed in similar, non emotional, ways. Why must you feel vulnerable to have sex?

Because the intimacy of the act inherently creates conditions for vulnerability.

Tennis is one on one, typically. And there is vulnerability in trying your hardest at anything.

> How do people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners).

Most likely, people who separate emotions from sex can enjoy the pleasure of sex without getting (too) attached to the other person. Some people have a natural inclination toward that separation, others may have developed it out of being hurt in a relationship, or common sense after gaining experience, some people develop intimacy in other ways, etc.

> How do people do it without (emotional) bonding with the other person?

Practice. :)

> I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it?

If you're asking for stats across the population, I'd rankly speculate it is strongly emotional. But that's just a guess-- perhaps someone here who knows the research can report?

> Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

No, because emotional detachment is simply one approach to sexual freedom, and a rather superficial one at that.

Another approach is to gain emotional maturity, introspection, and self-control through time and experience. Part of that is understanding that sex is not the epitome of an emotional bond. E.g., a free and self-aware human can have a perfectly nice emotional sexual encounter, and then decide to leave it at that because they see the evidence that a fuller long-term relationship likely wouldn't work with this person. Or perhaps they have a short- or mid-term relationship that doesn't much past sex for reasons they've learned through their life experience.

For example-- did you ever know any couple in high school who had a completely toxic and nasty relationship but somehow they just couldn't ever break up with each other? Or, they'd break up, then they'd be making out at a party and instantly get back together?

Some older people can optimize out the toxicity from this:

1. They meet, enjoy each other's company, and decide to have sex, enjoying both the emotional and sexual bond from that experience.

2. They reflect on the situation and assess an extremely high likelihood that continuing the relationship would lead to that kind of dysfunctional relationship.

3. They leave it at that.

They even have a protocol-- called mutual respect-- to deal with the problem where one party wants to leave it at that one party wants it to continue. Through the use of a so-called "two-way handshake" the two parties agree to hang up the connection, and the heart-broken party just does the work of breaking down that connection alone.

I feel like this article/author wanted to connect a lot of things when the reality of the situation is far more simple.

People and young people have having less sex and less of everything because of poorer circumstances combined with an inability/reflectance to compromise.

Applied to housing this means that it is economically harder to afford a house so people stay home in their parents mcmansions. It's hard to afford/own a home because people don't want to buy a starter home so no one builds them. Finally it becomes very profitable if you have the cash to flip old houses thus quickly exhausting the supply of cheaper housing.

Speaking of living in places that could be called mcmansions, they are not bad to live in. While you could say a family as a unit is better off with a smaller 70s tri level, the mcmansions has more space so each individual feels like they get what they want. The main rooms remain clean and uncluttered while the messy lives of children are confined to bedrooms. The interior is vast enough to support guests and extended family, etc.

For movies, the consolidation of production means that having many movies is just competing with yourself. Producing a single film for 90% of the demographics is cheaper and makes more money. A decent percentage of America is quite religious and won't take there 3 12 year olds to anything containing sex. Thus most movies now don't contain it. Anything with sex becomes too taboo to view with the family which just reinforces this effect. The current wave of social justice also makes sex an untouchable topic both for movies and in real life.

No one builds starter homes because municipalities don't zone for them.

If you want a 3 bdrm condo most cities don't adequately zone for them, and so the limited stock is obscenely over-priced. The same follows for townhouses and row homes.

My own municipality is, allegedly, progressive and far-left; but even it has locked in a huge chunk of the town as single unit homes in a "heritage conservation area", and insists on building bachelor and 2 bdrm suites when it densifies.

So what's the point? You can rent your parents' basement suite for cheaper than the mortgage on what would be a lateral shift in housing status.

"heritage conservation area"

Now there’s a euphemism for locking in white privilege if I ever saw one.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, because it's absolutely true.

Residents of this neighbourhood regularly campaign against affordable housing, halfway houses, addiction recovery centres, et al; with Poe's Law levels of quotations in the local rag, with such gems like "I support affordable housing, but those people don't belong in this neighbourhood."

Moreover, the area is _mostly_ post-war colonial-style architecture. Post-WW1/WW2, to be clear. It's not exactly dripping with important cultural landmarks and structures.

Now, the local native band? They're still fighting to recover the remains of their grandparents and great grandparents which were buried under the local high school, along with half of a Chinese cemetery. I kid you not, it's like something out of a cheesy 80's B-movie.

"Heritage" _usually_ means one thing: keeping out the undesired people. "Heritage" is a weasel word for classism and racism.

This is in fact one reason why areas get gentrified. You cannot build anything new in many pricier parts of town although the better, often more central location would make it economically very interesting. It's so often zoned as done historic area and thus new development moves to the cheaper areas. I'm not saying it's the only reason, but it certainly makes the problem much worse.

I always wonder if expectations are set correctly for “kids these days”. I bought my first house at about 26, halfsies with a friend, but we were above average income for our age being programmers back in the very early aughts. I don’t think my parents had their first home until they were in their thirties. There are certainly zoning issues in cities, there are legitimate issues with living wages, but the idea that you could step out of your parent’s house at less than 26 years of age and have the capital, credit history, etc., much less maturity, to own a house (and all that entails) seems like a mis-calibrated expectation. Kids need to allow for the idea that most people spend years amassing wealth in order to buy a home, and adults now were just as broke when they were young and starting out. It’s the difference between being level 1 and level 20. You don’t get the same cool stuff at lvl 1. If anything, I see far more economic opportunities (thank you, Internet) for young adults now than at any time in the past. There’s far more money in the United States than there is talent. Disposable income is crazy.

People and young people have having less sex

An observation I've shared before: Some former hippie who was older than me once told me "All the TV stations went off the air at 9pm. There was nothing to do after that if you were still awake other than sex and drugs."

Now we have the internet. You can go down the rabbit hole on YouTube videos, intellectual articles or whatever floats your boat, sexually or otherwise, any time of the day or night if you have an internet connection and even homeless people can manage to get online at least part of the time via the library, a cell phone, etc.

Maybe sex was something of a time filler and it's no longer needed as desperately because we have plenty of other things to do. We also attach less to sex/marriage. At one time, whether or not you married had a huge impact on access to money, medical benefits, etc and that's changing.

Similarly: We have an "autism epidemic" in a world that has gotten a lot noisier and busier than it used to be. We know the world has changed radically and yet we keep looking for ways to blame the individual for behaving differently rather than wondering about how those widespread environmental changes are impacting people and what role they play in widespread trends from vastly huge upticks in certain diagnoses to vastly less sex.

This was a bizarre read. I came in with a negative view and left entertained.

An interesting diversion for sure.

Going one step further I looked up the author and intend to dive into more of her writing. It hasn't happened to be in quite a while.

No discussion of endocrine disruption? Endrocrine distruption could explain a loss in libido. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/02/27/falling-sperm...

So give people zinc and maca supplements.

Isn't it a lot more likely to be increased access to birth control? Which people take for very good reasons, but it disrupts your hormones a lot more than plastic does. That's the point of taking it.

Which would only explain women right? Male sperm counts are down dramatically over the last 20 years.

But is their libido lower? It doesn't seem like lower sperm count necessarily even lowers the birth rate when you only need one to get there. (does it? I've never looked this up.)

I don't really care if there's sex in films, but I just find it so extremely boring.

I've seen it all before 100 times and it does nothing to advance the story (compared to implying that sex just happened), it's not creative, it's not original, it's not interesting, it's not dramatic, it's not funny, and I fast-forward it to avoid wasting 2 minutes of my life.

I've seen a number of pilots that showed-up caked in sex and f-bombs but by the time the series is a few episodes in, it gets traded up for plot and character building.

The worst example of sex in film has to be the sex scene in the Matrix trilogy. Easily the most boring two minutes of the whole thing. They didn't even show it going in so what's the point

My understanding (and it’s been awhile) is that the choice Neo made by going with Trinity and being alone with her instead of the group was a crucial moment which foreshadows his decision to save Trinity instead of fulfill his duty to as “the one” to reboot the matrix.

> Bodybuilders experience this as they go on crash diets to quickly cut fat so that their muscles will show during competitions; though they look like physically perfect specimens of manhood, they don’t dream of women, but of cheeseburgers and fries. Many eating disorder patients lose their sex drive completely and even stop menstruating.

I had to laugh at this. I went on a meal replacement drink (Aussielent) for a while for all meals, and I vividly remember for the first time in my life, I dreamt of eating a juicy hamburger. It was like some oasis in a desert, and that burger was all I thought about the next day

Tiny point: "It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction."

I'm 6' and I've weighted 135-145 pounds for my entire adult life and I'm 50+. Being a guy, I never restricted my calorie intake. I'd expect there are women with a similar metabolism.

Which isn't to say that a lot of skinny celebrities aren't dieting like mad to get this look. But probably some percentage aren't and the rest hate them. Human physiology is weird. Also, and, despite my mythical natural skinny, no one has put me in movies, darn it.

I think she's talking about 6' 205 pro baseball player physique. The kind of person that looks "normal" in a movie but if you met them IRL they are extremely fit with very little fat and perfect definition.

(I'm not putting you down)

She means the average weight, all-muscle physique for men and she means more or less my physique for women. My only serious argument is that some women no doubt have the barely-underweight-for-size physique without dieting.

> no one has put me in movies,

no one has put me in movies, yet.

Julia Child didn't become Julia Child until she was ~60.

I’m not a celebrity, but I can’t sustainably gain weight. I don’t eat much (or at all) less compared to others who have larger bodies. I know this isn’t limited to male population, too. My sister has a similar body type and never had to restrict her caloric intake for this[0] (I just asked to be sure).

It would appear that the article briefly engaged in overgeneralization and propagation of the “you can’t be skinny unless you under-eat” myth.

[0] I’m sure it’s somewhat less of a problem for her than for me, as the weight gain issue applies to muscle mass as well and that stereotypically matters more for males. As a downside that affects us both, though, we sometimes experience an issue where inadvertently not eating enough—and this would still be more than a person on a diet might eat—can result in very unpleasant states with shakes and headache (probably low blood sugar or something like that).

I think people greatly overestimate how much effort is required to have a fit/muscular body type. 3 to 5 hours a week of good intensity weight training goes a really long way.

I'll add to that that you do need to have a relatively low body-fat percentage to look much fitter. Relatively as compared to the majority of the population, but higher than most fitness models, of course.

I've been lifting weights for a few years, but losing a bunch of weight gave me a far better look, including looking more muscular.

How much physical activity do you see in a week? That might be providing balance. The standard American diet + desk job means that 135-145, for many, creeps to 155, 165, 175 etc. It doesn't happen overnight.

> I'm 6' and I've weighted 135-145 pounds for my entire adult life and I'm 50+. Being a guy, I never restricted my calorie intake. I'd expect there are women with a similar metabolism.

I don't think you're contradicting the article. You're simply "naturally" eating a low enough amount of calories to keep the same weight, relative to how many calories you expend in exercise/regular life.

At the end of the day, if you were eating more than maintenance calories for your metabolism, over time, you'd be gaining weight.

> Being a guy, I never restricted my calorie intake.

What's being a guy got to do with it?

There's something I expected the author to say that never came: in order to have sex, first you must choose how to have sex. If a movie has a sex scene, it expresses an opinion about sex: how to have sex, why to have sex, when to have sex, and what kind of person would have sex like that. But opinions are dangerous: people might get mad at you if you have an opinion, but nobody can get mad at you if you don't.

I feel compelled to make the very-adjacent-to-the-article statement that "Starship Troopers" is not an adaptation of the novel, but at best a vacuum-forming of another script into the space of Starship Troopers.

IIRC, the original script was called something like "Bug Hunt at Outpost 9" and someone at the studio said "Hey, we can get the rights to Starship Troopers and this thing will sell better."

I thought this was in response to metrics demonstrating PG movies are more profitable than PG-13 and R. Studios were doing backflips to make sure their big movies could secure a PG or PG-13 rating... which means no sex scenes.

I've been watching some pre-code (before 1934) movies lately. The frank enjoyment of being human in those movies is quite refreshing.

One interesting thing about them is even the beautiful stars often have bad teeth :-) Dentistry in those days wasn't very good.

No need to go to 1934 for that, just look at David Bowie. His teeth were crooked until he got them fixed in his 50s (and supposedly ruined his vocal signature). Or even more recently, Hugh Grant's teeth were pretty bad in 4 Weddings... and Notting Hill.

Just happened to watch The Front page tonight which was made in 1931.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/

The innuendo is pretty strong and the characters are mostly terrible people and the plot pretty dark.

But also very witty, fast paced, and funny. Some really interesting shots, too, with moving and panning cameras, or things happening in both foreground and background.

I wish the title had not been edited from its original: "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny." It captures so much better the essence of this rambling incomprehensible thesis that action movies have many beautiful people not having any sex. Alternate title: "Everyone drives cars in cities and no one is seen parking." To use his example, Starship Trooper is an action movie with satirical subtext, it is not served by having more horny people bang. Every narrative has to be edited to GET TO THE POINT. And then he leans on this faulty premise to criticize a bunch of weirdly unrelated stuff, movies made after the 90s, the cluttered interiors, McMansions, swoles, BMIs and 9/11. What?

There's plenty of beautiful naked people having sex on screen, uncomfortably many. Where has this writer been? The Tudors, anachronistic boobs and asses and fornicating beautiful people since 2007. This formula was so successful it's repeated in Games of Thrones, the trope so commonly employed it earned the moniker of "sexposition", naked people banging + dialogue = sex + exposition. It's also repeated in Versailles, Outlander, and from what I've seen of ep.1 Bridgerton. There's also plenty of beautiful people having sex, or at least demonstrating their horny-ness in RomComs, Sleeping With Other People comes to mind. Somehow I don't think the author was the audience for any of the above. He's complaining that there's not enough horny people in the movies he is watching.

> When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?

- Yes he did, I reckon that’s why this is such an underrated movie. American audiences largely didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

> No one looks at each other. No one flirts. A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

- Not quite true. Rico and Flores do end up shagging

Interesting essay. As a fan of cinema, I've noticed that there is a clinical deadness lately when it comes to representing real people.

I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.

Over the last decade or two, I stopped watching broadcast commercial TV in the U.S. I began to realize that the choice of dramas and advertisers told me a lot more about what the creators thought of their audience and not so much about life and human relations. Cinema has gone to that same place. Now, a common refrain about a classic movie from the past is "They could never make something like that today", and people who say that aren't referring to easy problems with material like racism. It's not the content. The quality has drastically changed. I used to leave a good movie wondering about my own life and the choices I might make. For a really good flick, I could dwell on the issues involved for weeks. Now I leave saying "Wow! Wasn't that really cool?!?" and I've forgotten anything important or meaningful by the time I've gotten to the (metaphorical) parking lot.

There are little flashes. Occasionally big name stars and producers will create a one-of drama that really says something about the human condition. Those movies are getting fewer and the time between them grows. Streaming TV promised a new Golden Age for long-format serial drama. But the glorious days of a thousand Sopranos are not materializing. Instead it's looking a lot like reversion to the mean.

There is a dead, empty, data-driven blandness to modern entertainment. Not pleasant to end up here when we started off with such promise.

Can you give examples of really good films of the past/recent past?

Not OP, but I just recently watched Dances with Wolves a week or so ago and had almost an identical thought to what OP posted. I have some modern favorites of course, but it seems like I enjoy my modern favorites because it is a "mental tease". They don't really illicit emotional connections though. However, it is totally possible I'm just watching the wrong movies. Some modern favorites are the new Blade Runner, Ex Machina.... there is a big list.

There are of course exceptions. I also recently watched 1917 and I thought that was one of the best films I'd ever seen. In addition to being an action film it definitely felt emotional.

Some of my favorites from pre 2000 are Amadeus, Paths of Glory, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Gattaca, Lawrence of Arabia, Citizen Kane, Trainspotting, The Elephant Man, and The Night of the Hunter

Not op but I'll throw in some that I've really enjoyed and that made me go "hmmmm", roughly ordered by year

The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1600-la-double-vie-de-v-ron...

Strange Days (1995) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/281-strange-days

Upstream Color (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/145197-upstream-color

Under the Skin (2013) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/97370-under-the-skin

The One I Love (2014) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/242090-the-one-i-love

Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/413852-welcome-the-stranger

Segfault (2018) (the less you know the better) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/463594-segfault

Possessor (2020) https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/435615-possessor

I agree with your core sentiment on movies - but I couldn't disagree more on the topic of TV having reverted to the mean.

It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.

I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).

I'm curious how you like The Great Beauty / La Grande Bellezza.

How do you feel about Minari?

> As a fan of cinema, I've noticed that there is a clinical deadness lately when it comes to representing real people.

> I don't agree with the conclusions of the essayist, but there's something there. Verisimilitude is gone. Real people are gone. In their place, there's a clinical, sterile plastic automaton put together by marketing departments. Even when there's nudity and sexuality, it feels like a paint-by-the-numbers thing and not storytelling.

Last year I got ahold of The Munsters, the black-and-white TV show from the 1960s, and noticed something odd one day when I watched an episode back-to-back with a modern unrelated show: What you describe with people also applies to props. In the Munsters' dinner scenes, the whole set - including the food - was significantly more interactive than anything modern I've seen possibly ever. It made the modern shows rather suddenly feel much more fake than I was used to.

This is not unexpected. The UK banned gym commercials for daring to suggest that one may be improving the body in order to be "beach ready" (i.e. show off sexiness). No no no, it is not allowed to say that you try to look better for other people.

As for movies, of course we want to look at beautiful people.

I'll just leave that hanging there for a few seconds. It really should be that simple.

So movies need to show the beautiful people, but they can't "objectify" them. But that's not the same thing. A movie will catch shit for one when they've done the other, though.

Which of Lost in Translation and Batman (1989) caught heat for objectifying women? Which one had a 2D damsel in distress, and which showed off more body?

So you make movies with beautiful people (because that's what people want, all else being equal), but you only put the sexiness "on display", and don't acknowledge it in any way what so ever. Because acknowledging that there such a thing as sexy, or sexual attraction, is harassment.

If you acknowledge it, it has to be made a joke, and as nonsexual as possible. E.g. it's only the men who get to compliment Captain America's ass. It can't be sexual, because the men who said it have an established history of not-gays (a female partner).

But again, back to the beautiful sexy people. Should we be surprised that actors have been wearing wigs (or wig-like fillers) since the days of black&white? Should we be surprised that people want to look at post-hairplug Elon Musk instead of pre-hairplug?

"Fetishize" the body? Wat? It's a fetish to be attracted to "beautiful people" now?

I expected a reddit-style article, but this was actually some good media critique

Cute article, but may I.offer a simple alternative? Movie makers want to appeal to viewership in homes where there are children, and younger audiences in general. You can't show much nudity or direct sexual themes to minors. That of course doesn't explain why the house in Poltergeist was more normal looking, but that point isn't really bolstered by too much else.

And honestly, the sex scenes in (some) movies just felt contrived or forced.

How does this explain the historical trends that are the subject of the article? Are you saying that fewer children were trying to watch TV in the 90s?

It's a drift over time. Also 90s is just the beginning of tv ratings. TV-PG was founded in late 90s and not fully enforced / known at the beginning.

The change happened over many years since the time we could get ratings only from box office numbers and the review feedback took months.

I think social media has made us such narcissists that we demand the beauty as an ideal and eschew the vulnerability of sex.

I wonder if the proliferation of easily accessible porn on the internet may also be a factor. People literally have access to porn 24/7 in their pocket if they have a phone.

I don't think porn fulfills the same niche. Movies have room for greater story telling, character development, and a realism that the viewer can connect with or feel emotions from. My armchair take is that the erasure of sexuality is most tied to the fear of appealing to modern audiences who are easily outraged at anything that offends them. And so the movies all tend towards a boring beige, a formulaic re-skinning of the movies that came before them. The MCU is a great example of this.

Maybe it’s just me, but I roll my eyes at anything sexual in TV and movies. They’re usually completely unnecessary to the storyline, and almost feels like a quota (sex scene, check). Even The Simpsons throws in unnecessary sexual plots, and every time I see them, I can’t understand why they added it in.

It's a critical element of the human experience. But I agree the hamfisted non-dynamic insertion of sex is tasteless. Of course sex isn't necessarily a rational behavior all things considered, so spontaneity and hamfisting is almost vaguely appropriate by that virtue.

Yeah been feeling the same lately. That "obligatory" topless shower scene, man, just drop it. If I want to see tits I know where to go.

Showing a couple bonding is fine, but it adds nothing knowing they did it doggy style.

Nudity is fine if it adds something. But too much feels like a checkbox being ticked off.

Most recently I recall being really pleased watching Greenland that they didn't have one of those typical scenes. I was so expecting it, and it was so refreshing that it wasn't included.

Thanks for the article, I like many parts of it.

On the other note, yet slightly related. I still wonder so much why men are still expected to build muscles to look good - at least in the developed Western world. How come females are expected to be skinny, which is slightly changing now with the body-positive movements, but men are still not considered to be attractive when they are skinny. Developed Asian economies see skinny guys are handsome.

Why is it not here yet? Will we completely skip this step and jump to a male body positive look immediately?

For me it does not make sense why skinny guys are not considered attractive, because being skinny (and sufficiently) sporty has significant benefits while the ripped bodies we are being sold in social media and movies require huge effort which can be very harmful to the body.

Pedro Almodovar made a similar point about how Marvel movies lack sex. And yeah, if you compare an Almodovar movie to a Marvel movie, it's astonishing how the Marvel is so bland and sexless in comparison.

I'm not sure if this argument extends to the vast cultural critique that the author makes about weight. Americans are overweight and should probably care more about diet than they do currently. Worrying about fitness isn't some sign that we're preparing to defend ourselves. That said, I've held the theory that diet and weight obsession is extremely class driven. The obsession with thinness is very much an upper class ideal. Good food, personal trainers, sports are all expensive. It's no surprise that Hollywood reflects the rich.

Look at a Ruben painting. The rich used to be fat. Mostly because everyone else was thin and poor. No we live in a calorie wonderland. To be thin is to be virtuous

Hugged: https://web.archive.org/web/20210307172703/https://bloodknif...

Wanted to add this RE the shower scene in Starship Troopers:

"Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."

> A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets.

I see this point a lot and I think it is a good one but I have some theories on it too.

I think that violence (at least to a point) is part of our natural play instincts, think cops and robbers as a kid. We aren’t disturbed when young children mimic violence, we even see it in nature fairly ubiquitously. Animals play fight with each other. When we see violence in a movie we see it as play, not as reality.

As for why Americans are hung up on sex I’m not sure, but I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality.

> I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality.

Then again, America is fairly violent as a country.

Relative to where? Looking up some statistics on violent crime rate by country, it doesn’t seem like the US is particularly an outlier.

Any other first-world nation?

EDIT> It doesn't make sense to lump murder in with generic violent crime. The US is an outlier among developed countries for murder. This is much worse than having comparable levels of generic violent crime.

What point is being made here, exactly? The OP was talking about American culture in general terms, not relative to “first-world nations” specifically, so shouldn’t the US’s murder rate relative to the median of all societies be more germane?

Yes, the US ranks worse on some measures of development than similarly rich countries, including murder rate. This is not news to anyone. I don’t see the relevance to the present discussion and suspect it was just an opportunity to sneer at the US for no reason.

You're wrong. I have great respect for my country and its traditions, and would never sneer at it. I'm also not for any additional gun legislation.

But for a variety of reasons (some of them not "politically correct" by some measures, such as inner-city gang-related crime), the US has a high murder rate vis-a-vis other developed countries. It's a fact. And why wouldn't you compare a country to similar countries? Or OK, we could say, the US has a comparable murder rate to poor countries and war zones. Or compared to the median of all countries? Well, once again, much higher than the median (~3.5 vs ~5.0). Quantitatively, there's a great deal of support for saying we're "fairly violent". Not "really violent", but "fairly violent".

We were discussing sex and violence in American movies, and tieing it to real-life phenomena, so it seems like an appropriate topic.

I understand why you're disdainful of people who hate their own country, but you're picking the wrong target.

Children also play doctor all the time and look at stuff. They're curious about stuff like this and don't get damaged by it.

It seems to be somewhat limited to Americans though. So isn't the obvious explanation the religious, puritan heritage?

WRT sex? Yeah that seems like a reasonable conjecture- but there are counter examples I can’t really figure.

Even atheistic American liberals are totally backwards on sex/bodies. Everything sexual is offensive, or gross. I feel it used to be the religious right in the USA that held those beliefs... now it’s everyone?

I think it has become cultural. It's just what people are used to. We adopt norms from the society around us rather than starting from minimal apriori assumptions or at least questioning every little thing.

> We aren’t disturbed when young children mimic violence

I hope you don't mean "we" globally? There's quite a few people who do find it disturbing.

The 1999 South Park movie (“Bigger, Longer, Uncut”), did a bit of a send up on this point, and several interviews with Stone and Parker get into the topic.

“Just remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is OK, as long as you don't say any naughty words!”

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/08/10/the-time-south-park-...

I really like this article, it has made me question a worldview I had 20 minutes ago. I love things that do that. Make me think, make me change my mind, make me learn.

I feel the same way - it kind of screwed up my brain up a bit. Most of the results of this seem obvious when you look around, but seeing this articulated so simply was a major surprise.

Interesting, because at the same time sex in tv-shows have become much, much more free. In the 7 seasons of Buffy there wasn't a single nude, and even in bed everybody was completely covered up (even as adults, even when they were in long-term relationships) and that is not just one franchise, that is how I remember it in almost all media as a teenager.

I would be easy to compare with Game of Thrones, but almost all new streaming services have nudity now.

Very interesting observation and I like the way the author put it. Everything now is seen as an investment to achieve a personal satisfaction goal. Very true indeed. However the rationale we got here is to be debated. I like the theory the author puts forward but I don’t think we can narrow it down to one theory. Something that takes decades to evolve usually has multiple driving factors.

Fetishizing and Desexualising is a non sequitur.

And the author must have not watched the same wonder woman if they didn't get Steve and Diana's connection.

Oh and the reason they don't show food /eating in kitchens is that filming scenes where the actors are eating is problematic given the number of takes needed.

It's because internet porn has compartmentalized horniness and segregated it from mainstream pop culture.

Currently reading The Master and His Emissary and can't help but feel this is a related problem. In short, more and more of life is being packaged into lifeless utilitarian abstractions, and less and less are we connected to spontaneous, intuitive, and humanistic facets of life.

The title of this thread changed, didn’t it? Pretty sure it was the same as the article (“Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny”). I mean, insomnia had me reading it at 3am so I may be wrong but if so that’s a hilarious commentary on the state of things...

I keep up with the diet and fitness regimen not because of the hollywood ideal body, which I gave up on decades ago, but because I'm entering the years when cognitive decline starts. Diet and fitness are crucial to staving that off.

Modern male action heroes take a lot of steroids. It’s not a trend anyone should encourage, where the price of entry to be a lead on one of those movies is to risk sacrificing your health in such a dramatic way

Wow, did not see the McMansion Hell tie-in coming but my god it’s perfect. I will always be amazed when someone is able to bring such superficially (heh) unrelated topics together so cogently.

This was a really thoughtful article, and I can say I’ve been influenced by this culture as well, even in my late thirties.

> and they still haven’t forgiven Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the batsuit

Haha. Brilliant article.

Watched Top Gun last night and was floored by this. Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis certainly were heartthrobs of the day, and not unattractive by any normal measure, but it was shocking how... “normal” they looked compared to today’s casts. Cruise with a unibrow and those teeth? Never.

It’s tremendously sad how this frog in boiling water came to be.

There was more sexual tension in an episode of the Golden Girls than most movies today.

I'm confused by the two different patreon links on the page.

I think the US ratings' agencies have more to do with it than some sort of cultural shift (and these ratings are more likely driven by boomer sensibilities of "saving the kids"). European movies and TV are clearly less chaste but started from nearly the same places.

Considering how often actresses complain about how sex scenes are unpleasant, and the whole Harvey Weinstein thing, I’d say this is a positive development.

Seriously? Selective sampling and click bait.

Two recent programs come to mind and I'm sure this list is not exhaustive. "The boys" and "Orville". Both chock full of "heroes" who in-between being heroes are preoccupied with banging each other, getting drunk, eating or failing themselves. The last episode of "The Boys" ends with Homelander jerking off while perched on a ledge over the city and raging at the unfairness of life. It's certainly a comment on the blandness of the Marvel universe and Orville is a superior and cutting rip off of Star Trek which has become bland and inoffensive in it's latest incarnations. Orville cuts pretty close to the limit for whatever rating it has. The two "gay" aliens and the holodeck porn episode come to mind. It was done fairly well. Stressed out officer on a star ship gets a holodeck porn addiction and is no longer able to relate to or face his life partners demands for attention. It's not heroic and not glorious but relatively human. Orville's officers like to fuck. They order booze from the matter synthesizers and they get depressed and do stupid things. Of course it is still "star trek" and there are always happy endings and everybody learns a lesson at the end. It doesn't drift too far from the genre.

However the article takes a selective slice of current cinematic culture and tries to pretend there are no other options out there whilst at the same time looking back at 80's and 90's cinema as if it was the age of body positive cinema.

who's being selective? neither of your examples are mainstream. and isn't the Boys based on an old comic series? And it's certainly made to be a comment on the sexless trope we see in todays superheroes

Mainstream? "The boys" is one of the most popular series on Amazon prime. It is certainly not a basement cult series known only to a few nerds. Yes it is based on an old comic. But so what. Most "stories" are recycled or "based on". Shakespeare did this as well.

On Amazon, yes. Not in the cinema. Cinema is what the original article is talking about.

Perhaps the difference is important. Maybe not. Certainly the boundaries between "cinema" and "tv" are blurred with many people consuming most material via streaming. But maybe "series" can take more risk with the material than a "movie" just because the unit cost of a single "failure" can be amortized through the season if the the majority of episodes shine.

I believe it's the market/censorship dynamics driving this; films targeting China and India (which is most really big budget Hollywood films) have much tighter control because the target markets accept less.

Whereas streaming is smaller, cheaper, and targeted at more local audiences.

If we can't count The Boys because it's based on an older comic, what do we say about the MCU movies central to the thesis?

agreed, and The Boys has had success exactly because it stands out against the current normal action film/tv

As others said, I think you're being selective. The article focuses on mainstream action movies.

The boys has had great success but still has orders of mangnitude less cultural impact than the MCU for instance. It's actually making, to some extent, the same point the article is making: super hero movies are bland and childish.

I didn't even know what Orville is, sounds interesting.

I'd say the _slice of current cinematic culture_ selected by the article is broad and impactful, and represents fairly well an important part of the whole. It's not the whole story, and you're right in pointing that out, but I don't agree that that invalidates the article.

> The boys has had great success but still has orders of mangnitude less cultural impact than the MCU for instance. It's actually making, to some extent, the same point the article is making: super hero movies are bland and childish.

I would think the approach would garner a little more sympathy in a forum populated by a lot people who work for companies that exist solely to divine a specific, incremental slice of human desire, and architect vast amounts of human capital to create an app to fulfill it, and make stupid amounts of money in the process. The people behind the MCU laugh at the notion that they have made a "bland" or "sexless" or <insert pejorative here> product, all the way to bank, with TRAIN LOADS of money.

What's more, tv shows are also often adapted from comics or books in a way that satisfy the advertisers.

Take lockes and keys on netflix. The original comics is very violent. The murdered rape the kids mother, and when he escapes jail, he pays his ride by sucking dicks. He has horrible scars because the big brother trashed him with a brick in a blood frenzy that is visually rehashed as a memory regularly in the first tome. Bode sister hurt herself and his little bro while hidding because she is holding so hard.

None of that made it into the tv show despite the fact it makes the story better: the characters make more sense, their reactions are congruent with their tragedy.

It’s so strange and depressing that American society glorifies violence and villainizes sex.

I find that films from the 1950s had more realistic violence. People remembered the war. Even with a small revolver, when someone got shot, they fell down. A few decades latter you get to something like Rambo, with bullets flying, but none hit him.

> maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones

My money’s on this one.

Fuck all that mass-media social programming propaganda. Murder and violence are "okay," while sex and sexuality are "bad."

I'll walk around naked, look at women, and hookup whenever I damn well please. Sex is awesome, bodies are beautiful, and no shame is necessary for either.

Films that cannot be made in modern America:

- Laura, les ombres de l'été (1979)

- Lolita (either)

- Pretty Baby (1978)

- Caligula (1979)

- Rocky Horror Picture Show

- Monty Python and The Holy Grail

- Nymphomaniac I or II

Partially, there is great sanitization of Western films to be accepted by foreign censors.

oh boy, I remember teenage me watching Malena for the first time. such an awakening!

Porky’s!

I agree with the gist of the post expect walking around naked. I don't know if its a right thing to be naked around children. I am too biased to be brought up growing with clothes on, haven't thought or heard the argument of the other side.

What are your concerns about being naked around children?

I can assure you that kids raised around parents who are naked constantly is perfectly normal and healthy. I was raised in the 70s and my parents were constantly naked. We all sat in the backyard hot tub naked. Not a thought was given to it.

I now do the same to my kids. The key is to do it from day one, so there is never that first memory of “when did you first see your parents naked”. There is no first because it’s been always. There is no shock because it’s perfectly normal.

> Not a thought was given to it.

Because you don't look at your family in a sexual way. Similarly in Renaissance, for example, we had some nudity going on in art, but it was done in a tasteful and non-sexual fashion. That's different from outright pornography or erotica, which is what children should not be exposed to.

> you don't look at your family in a sexual way.

Like the parent commentor said, it's probably about experiencing nudity from day one. I grew up in a family where you'd never see someone naked, but then, as a teen, was exposed to a family that's comfortable with being naked around each other. I had some readjusting to do, because for me nakedness had become something super private, dirty and sexual. Now that I think about it it makes me kind of angry that I grew up with such a stupid outlook on the human body.

Growing up in Finland it is also perfectly normal to be with friends and family naked in sauna, and between it while you chill out on the balcony or take a break.

Icelandic communal hot springs. Aren't those nude too?

Cool. I grew up amongst neighbors who were Danish and hippie nudists (12' / 3.5m fencing in their backyard). I only wear clothes or conform to most societal expectations to not shock the 98% of people who are normies and/or uncool.

Kids don’t know if something is good, bad, weird or whatever until they’re told. If you are fine not wearing clothes, and do it in your home, your kids wont think anything of it.

Not true. It’s not uncommon for a toddler to find a private place to defecate without being told. There is an innate sense of a need for privacy for some things.

But isn't this just an instinct not to defecate at the place where he/she plays and spends time? How can you be so sure that it is about privacy?

I will now point you towards mainland China, where kids as old as 90 will shit in the streets. I’m not kidding either (although this is changing in the larger cities.... slowly)

That’s learned behavior.

Yeap. I've seen this. People who pee or poo wherever they're at.

Are you sure that's not learned behaviour? I've only ever seen it in older kids. I'd hypothesise it follows "expert" advise that suggests what I consider very late potty training.

Well consider 1 year olds will do it (my daughter did it when wearing diapers) even though we have no indication it was needed.

I've spent time around more babies & toddlers than most people see in a lifetime (sometimes >50 per day; probably no more than 2000 per year though; for >decade; [working at baby & toddler groups]).

Could you say if this was a fixed behaviour (ie they always sought a private place to poop), had a fixed location (eg always behind the couch), if you used a potty at the time, and exactly which month it appeared at so I can note it with my own observations. Cheers.

A private place is often a good idea, so predators wont eat you when you are so vulnerable. There are many places where nakedness is the norm and the naked people will probably still search for private places when defecating.

Yes. Kids are taught to be ashamed of their bodies by their parents and society. And then teenagers are taught to be ashamed of sex. Some societies inculcate even more shame than others.

It's one tactic to try and avoid them 'accidentally' having sex at a young age (and getting pregnant and everything). I can kind of see everything, I mean on the one side sex ed is important, but if they can avoid attempting it for a few years until they're more well-rounded individuals it'll be a double bonus.

Mind you, I've very much been a late bloomer so my perspective is probably not representative.

You don't know if it's right to be naked around children? How are they supposed to learn about normal bodies?

Here in the Netherlands a new children's TV program started: [0], kids ask naked people questions. I applaud it, finally, a source of naked that is not porn, The kids ask stuff like: "What are you most ashamed of about your body" and things about new hair growth they are about to experience, not even sex so far. And they get to see realistic penises and breasts while they are learning.

I guess I'm finally starting to understand why I like old Dutch movies like "Turks Fruit" [1]. Or modern non-US series for example from Spain, where people have sex (even in their 40's omg!) and go to the toilet, and where women are strong. I like Casa de Papel for example, Raquel is very sensual, intelligent, funny, flirty and strong, and usually fully covered in clothes, perhaps the antithesis of this new asexual trend. It's refreshing and normal and liberating. Of course it helps that she like's the nerdy "Professor" ;). Although this nerdy professor can, in contrast to all stereotypes, flirt quite well ("Intelligence can be very sexy") and knows how to engage with her. Also: refreshing.

[0] https://nos.nl/artikel/2371530-naakt-in-nieuw-kinderprogramm...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight_(1973_film)

Seems that they got the idea from a Danish show which similaryly got "controversy" around it because it was unusual.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/ult...

haven't thought or heard the argument of the other side

I think this is a (the?) fundamental issue here; you're beginning from a place of needing to be told its OK to be naked near a child. That there needs to be a strong reason, a defensible argument just to have no clothes on near a child. There's an assumption in this thinking that by default, it's simply bad to be naked near a child - an assumption that's entirely cultural and learned. Cultures that don't have this hang-up don't have a strong argument for it - they just think it's crazy that your culture is so weird ("WEIRD", one might say) about it for no good reason.

Sex is not harmless. While it is one of the great human joys, it is also the source of some of our deepest despairs, intractable conflicts, and personal tragedies. This free-for-all free love ethic that you celebrate, which erased almost all of the previous social restrictions on sex, inevitably created the discontent that boiled over into the #metoo phenomenon. It is also fueling the growing incel phenomenon.

It is not just out of backward thinking that every single human society has seen it fit to strictly control sex. The last half century, where your attitude largely reigned in Western Europe and almost the same extent in America, is an extreme aberration and it is ending rapidly before our eyes.

Sex is not harmless. While it is one of the great human joys, it is also the source of some of our deepest despairs, intractable conflicts, and personal tragedies.

A grand, sweeping statement that's true for quite a few things (wine, fashion, love, child rearing, freedom, your home). All the while nobody claimed that sex is harmless. Whatever that means.

This free-for-all free love ethic that you celebrate, which erased almost all of the previous social restrictions on sex, inevitably created the discontent that boiled over into the #metoo phenomenon.

You think that Western attitudes towards sexuality of the second half of the 20th century caused sexual harrassment and rape, or you think it empowered women to talk about and fight against it? There's plenty of evidence for the latter; rape within a marriage was legal until the 70s.

It seemed a big jump by the GP to conflate free love with a lack of consent. And what "boiled over?" There is NC/CNC but ultimately that starts from trust and consent.

The idea that large numbers of opposite sex are available for casual sex is a modern idea. Not hard to see how that leads to lots of unwanted and harmful sexual attention.

> This free-for-all free love ethic that you celebrate,

Who said that? Why - no one!

> every single human society has seen it fit to strictly control sex.

A link would be very helpful in proving your dramatic and dubious claim...

Are you... are you blaming victims for being raped and sexually assaulted? Excuse me?

Nope. Nothing in my post said that.

You said that people not being shamed enough about sex and their bodies leads to people speaking up when they are the victims of sexual violence, and that you view that as a problem.

Why not Monty Python?

It got banned by most cinema chains on release, due to blasphemous content, and full frontal male nudity.

Edit:

OMG, despite people voting this comment up I am of course talking about Life of Brian and not Holy Grail...

...I'll see myself out.

It wasn't banned in the United States, which the OP said it would.

No, he said it couldn’t be made there, which seems about right

Well certainly not, you don't have enough castles. (And where would you get the coconuts?)

The Galahad scene about the Castle of Anthrax? The animated butts in the transitions?

Chinese censors don't allow gratuitous sex or sensuality.

American pearl-clutchers can't deal with it either.

Even JoJo: Diamond is Unbreakable might not have been made in the US, since people aren't okay with depictions of child nudity.

Scarcity increases value. We often artificially enforce the scarcity of things in order to preserve its value. That's the reason why patents, IP and copyrights exists, for example. "Marriage" and "fidelity" are a means of artificially enforcing scarcity on sex, in order to increase the value and likelihood of partners bonding for life, which in turn improves the child-rearing situation for society, as single parents fare worse in general. "Marriage", according to anthropologists, is a universal human construct found in all human societies, ancient and modern, and many aim for it as the "ideal" or "perfect" human condition especially in old age. Hence "prudeness" is a well-founded desire to continue enforcing the scarcity of sex to increase its value and enjoyment, not to decrease it.

> "Marriage", according to anthropologists ....

There is a very interesting discussion about that in "Sex at dawn". Shortly put, anthropologists are very biased, and they will use their data selectively.

Today, there are people that live wholesome lives with multiple consensual sexual partners, search for polyamory.

IMHO, there simply is a lot of residual prejudice coming down from old religious dogma.

For good and evil prejudice is a stabilizing factor in a complex society.

Prejudice is inertia. It muffles your decisions. It can be stabilizing and it can drive you off a cliff even though you're flooring the breaks. A truly stable system is flexible and always has inertia under control.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if human sexuality adapted flexibly to the social environment. Both can be true. Marriage might be a natural and ubiquitous response to the pressures of living in settled relatively highly communities, while flexible relationships might be common in societies of small loosely associated nomadic groups.

Show me evidence of this. Blaming all the anthropologists for being prudes and suppressing the data that everybody wants to hear and that would make them famous is just not even remotely believable.

I suspect that it was the advent of agriculture that led to monogamy as we know it. Now that almost nobody works in agriculture any more we are reverting to the relationship styles we evolved with.

>Today, there are people that live wholesome lives with multiple consensual sexual partners, search for polyamory.

"Wholesome" as self-reported in their merry period.

And getting that to work as random pockets of individuals here and there is different as having it be a stable basis for society.

> "Marriage", according to anthropologists, is a universal human construct found in all human societies, ancient and modern

I'd be wary of an antropologist claiming knowledge of all human societies, ancient and modern.

From written record. We know for sure, since Old Egypt/bronze era, marriage was almost universal.

Heck, we even have tablets of workers that built the pyramid that were writing about how they think they made a mistake marrying their wife, as she is miserable and complains all the time, and suspicion of her cheating.

It is a story that could have been written today, but it was written 4800 years ago

I'm not implying you don't find marriage in ancient times that resembles modern marriage. I'm pointing out the bold generalizations.

> We know for sure, since Old Egypt/bronze era, marriage was almost universal.

For sure almost. Earth's experienced a larger number and variety of cultures than some people give it credit for. Let's not make generalizations about human nature based on someone else's generalizations about human past. Noone owes a justification for acting the way they do. When you introduce justifications, you enter the realms of dogma.

There's a decent argument that marriage came about as a consequence of agriculture, where paternity suddenly mattered when it came to inheriting property. Of course, this predates writing, making it hard to definitively prove one way or another.

It's possible, but pair bonding is also common in other species such as Puffins where inheriting property is unlikely to be a factor.

I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit. Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom.

I think there is also another mechanism at work in why many modern societies seem at the same time oversexualized and prude: By raising and restricting sexual desire you end up with some very effective carrots and sticks to control behaviour: You can sell the promise of sexual fulfillment directly (porn), you can link it to completely unrelated products through advertising (scantily-clad women that advertise cars, mattresses or mortgage contracts). You can also use it as a stick by either presenting unrealistic beauty standards ("You look unattractive! What is wrong with you?! Buy product X to fix that!") or by declaring the very desire that was raised before as immoral and therefore shaming people into compliance.

>Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom

What does that mean?

If you make sex too difficult to attain you get frustrated people who give up and stop participanting and become vulnerable to things like the propaganda of certain ideological cults that provide promises of controlling women, for example.

> I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit.

Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years. But after just two generations of “progressive literature” western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

Meanwhile, literature piles up about the “epidemic of loneliness” and deterioration in quality of life since the 1960s. Suicides increase, etc. Many people seem unhappy. They eagerly blame anything we changed in the areas of economic or welfare policy. We need to go back to 1960s top tax rates! But the “progressive literature” is supposed to be beyond question. All that had to be a good idea. It couldn’t be that any of those changes was misguided overreach in the same way as trickle down economics or financial deregulation.

> Those ideas served civilization for thousands of years.

Civilisation also had wars and famines for thousands of years to manage population and "cull off the weak". Do you want to go back to that?

> western countries have literally ceased to be self-sustaining, becoming reliant on importing the next generation from conservative Latin (in North America) and Muslim (in Europe) countries. Victory!

And yet the same people who argue like that are also usually worried about overpopulation of the planet.

> those changes

What do you mean by that? Allowing people to be in charge of their own sexuality?

It has also become almost prohibitively expensive to raise children (in the US).

Was it not always prohibitively expensive to raise children? Seems to me that the main thing that has changed is the invention of (modern) contraception, making not having children but still having sex an option in a way that it wasn't in the past.

I don't get it. You're saying now that without no-fault divorces, free love, nudity in movies etc, we would have more war and famine?

I have never understood how people separate emotions from sex (i.e. changing/leaving partners). I always thought the act itself is strongly emotional, isn't it? Will it be correct to say that cost of sexual freedom is emotional detachment from it?

And decades of progressive values in action that argue why it is not in fact bullshit.

It is indeed the best argument for conservative social values.

But we also have xhamster, xvideos, pornhub and so much more. It doesn't make sense to have fake, sterilized characters in one show, and then have fake sexualized characters in another if you care about the effects on society.

At that point it makes more sense to show how sex can be integrated healthily into a normal human life - neither fucking step-sis because she is stuck in a washing machine nor being superbuff and not even looking a women seems the ideal for society.

Disease management.

Think about AIDS of other STDs without modern medicine.

Forcing one partner for life is way to deal with it.

Other customs involving the “unclean” are equivalent to days social distancing.

Not universally-true. Contrived scarcity is bullshit and reduces enjoyment for me.

I don't subscribe to monogamy or closed relationships. Regularlly, I'm with 3 bi/pan females who would all eagerly have my children whenever I wanted. They sleep around primarily with women, as do I. It's way more enjoyable than the "waiting until marriage"-types and virgins who I actively avoid because they're dull.

Yikes. Is this 2004-era Tucker Max speaking?

Civilization cannot exist without promoted monogamy.

Q. Do you believe polygamy in the Middle East hurts women or men more?

A. Men. Young, poor, men. You have tens of thousands of young, poor men with zero prospects of having a mate. That translates into a thousand suicide bombers. To a man that desperate, that 60-odd virgin fantasy starts to hold far more meaning.

Scarcity mindset, fear, adds undue pressure onto natural mechanisms - adding the whole pressure of the Disney Princess story to find your "one true love;" which eventually you do but that won't be until you've figured out yourself, the more you've figured out yourself, the better you'll match with someone and grow old together.

Monogamy should actually decrease sexual scarcity. There are a lot of sexual topologies out there, but let's compare two historically common ones: monogamy and polygamy.

Boys and girls are born in equal proportion, and monogamy pairs them up. If nobody died before old age and everyone were adequately paired up, monogamy would mean that every couple that wants sex could have it, a certain shade of zero scarcity.

Historically, polygamy meant that attractive or powerful men could have multiple wives. So again, given our sexes' equal birth rates and assuming nobody died before old age, a polygamous society must leave some men without a committed partner for sex.

Monogamy increases sexual scarcity for the highest value males, while decreasing it for almost everyone else. I would argue that's actually an ideal situation for everyone, a progressive tax.

I'm always skeptical about claims that $MOVIE couldn't be made today that was made in a past decade. Lolita's title character was 3-4 years older than the character in the book in both films. Pretty Baby was very controversial when it came out. (ADDED: And I'd entertain the thought that it might be even harder to make today/be even more controversial.Might be more like HBO material.) Nymphomaniac is a European art film. Whether or not Rocky Horror and Holy Grail would be appealing to modern audiences I don't know but I see no reason they couldn't be made.

In another vein, I've also seen the claim made that Heathers couldn't be made today because of school shootings, yet it was made into a Broadway musical within the past decade.

And most of Nymphomaniac is very very boring

I did say it was a European art house film :-) I'm pretty sure I never got all the way through the first one.

More to the point, it's a movie that doesn't seem to have anything positive to say about sexuality. So it's a weird film to bring up in this context.

It's not a sexy movie. Yes, there's sex and nudity. It seems to hate both.

Nymphomaniac was also barely made in a past decade. Lars von Trier is such a troll he could absolutely make it today.

Rocky Horror Picture Show was remade in 2016 and premiered on Fox.

I don't watch TV. Was it anywhere nearly as good as the original? Has it been seen since the acquisition?

> Films that cannot be made in modern America: > - Monty Python and The Holy Grail

I mean, it was filmed in Scotland to begin with...

> hookup whenever I damn well please

Hopefully it's implied, but it should be whenever all involved "damn well please."

> Partially, there is great sanitization of Western films to be accepted by foreign censors.

It's min/maxing, optimizing for the biggest revenue, and it's paying massive dividends. Film projects produce record breaking amounts of revenue. If a blockbuster film passes the Chinese censors (and/or is made with Chinese cooperation), it will produce hundreds of millions more in revenue.

But that's the blockbusters. At the same time, the movie industry is booming with independent and original films. Joker is one example, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it's not 'sexy', there's no overblown action scenes, it's not targeting a PG-13 audience (it's an R rated film), and yet it still broke all records, earning over a billion in revenue with at a 55-70 million budget.

A live remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show aired on Fox in 2016 during normal viewing hours with Frank N Furter played by a trans actress. I disagree with your general point, but also, you're explicitly wrong on that front.

some of us are ugly and horny though maybe not as many

it's actually pretty much pro-ugly&horny if it's not loading for you.

Anyone who doesn't realize how many ugly+horny people are out there definitely did not participate in marching band in high school.

It's media critique, it's not saying that everyone in the world is beautiful and unaroused, just that the way the world has changed has led to media showing beautiful people that aren't horny, and how that affects our view of the world (and vice versa)

I wonder how much of it has to do with leftists and SJWs who would scream if sexual attraction between objectively beautiful people was shown on the big screen.

Body positivity, "Whiteness", and other deranged ideas are just not worth Hollywood fighting against.

It looks like you're misunderstanding those ideas. And it seems maybe the point of the article as well, since in a way it argues that both sexuality and body positivity (less perfection, more attraction) was better in older movies.

If you really have such strong opinions about this, can I tempt you to read what "body positivity" is actually about? And why "objectively beautiful"... is pretty subjective?

>Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it.

The simple truth for the reasoning behind this is the same as why the average TV show is written at the fifth grade Kincaid reading level. In late-stage American capitalism delivering a product with consistent and maximized returns has become a critical priority.

Sex in cinema isnt used to tantalize moviegoers to buy the ticket anymore as its now a foregone conclusion you will consume the product. Marketing knows precicely how many of you will watch. The challenge is to maximize consumption.

the average Bollywood flick is hypercapitalism. Each piece taylor crafted to appeal to an entire family, their demographic spans 60 years in age. Theres romance, dancing, action, mystery, and comedy all rolled into every single production because its guaranteed to cast the widest net.

creating a one-size-fits-all product with set limits in 2021 is only running into concerns or difficulties when actors themselves break their eternal character with audiences as a role model and post something online thats in poor taste that outs them as a human being.

I feel like this article pretended like the excellent love, romance and sex scenes in the first Deadpool movie weren't there.

To me the desexualization of mainstream movies is a wonderful trend. If I want to be sexually stimulated I'll watch porn. The "sex" in older movies has no payoff. Its like if they stopped Avengers to spend ten minutes showing Tony Stark filling out insurance forms for damage to Stark Tower. Sure it's in the story but why the hell would I want to look at it?

It's a fake desexualization though. They're not showing anyone doing taxes, but they're also not showing extremely good accountants around the place or joke about the huge tax returns. That bare chest, preferably wet after the shower though, spotted by a woman across the room - obligatory.

It's in other aspects of Marvel too. I actually really enjoyed it with Thor Ragnarok when they seemed to stop pretending it's not a stupid comedy with cartoon violence flavouring. Previous ones were "No, no, we're totally serious. Ignore that half the characters are here for comedy value."

The key difference is ignorability. If you're not attracted to men you may not even notice that the camera lingers on his chest or she looks down before looking at his face. It also doesn't go on for minutes at a time. Maybe a woman is showing more cleavage that is normal, but the camera doesn't spend five straight minutes panning up and down her body. What exactly does five minutes of looking at grasping hands and contorted expressions contribute to the experience of a film, besides a convenient time to take a bathroom break?

>Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them.

The violence like street fights is also down. The way of progress. Civilization naturally tames the primary instincts by directly dampening them (observed decrease of testosterone) while simultaneously providing ample channels for redirection and sublimation.

This is absurd, there are societues with more sex and less violence

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