Personally I feel like the reason behind the change is obvious. Pornography is everywhere. People don't get their kicks from 1970s movie love scenes anymore because hardcore fetish videos are a few clicks away. The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. But the culture carries this at-will objectification as bleedover into everything else. And I think it's also why the youngest generation right now is fixated on knowing their exact, granular label for sexual identity and orientation, even though young people are having less sex than they've ever had.
Your explanation relies on the idea that any nudity in movies is exclusively for the purpose of gratuitous titillation. I don't think that's true, nor does it explain the decline in portraying the non-physical intimacy in relationships.
>The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.
The Sears catalog wasn't replaced by porn, it was replaced by insta/tiktok thirst traps.
Yup. And there's a similar theory that both big comedy movies and comedy sitcoms have been largely disappearing because people are getting their comedy fixes from YouTube and TikTok now.
So when they go to the movies or pull up Netflix, almost all the new stuff being produced is drama. (Comedies haven't died out completely, but proportionally they're far, far less than they used to be.)
I agree but I also think that comedy is too risky for Netflix. Look at the Chappelle shitshow, and that was over something that was agreed on by ~100% of America 10 years ago.
There's always someone willing to crybully, so why bother? And, counter to that, if there's always someone offended, why not be Sam Hyde? Offend everyone, fuckit.
The elephant in the room might actually be US-American prudery. But to confirm, we'd have to check if prudery became stronger in the last 20 years and if non-US movies have still the same (or more) amount of sex in it.
But it's actually a well-known meme in the rest of the world that entertainment from the US has no problem depicting violence, but god beware you see the nipple of a woman...
Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
I heard a funny clip of the actors who played the Hobbits in LoTR where, precisely, the best place to drop their one-and-only f-bomb; they’d limited themselves to the whole franchise, maybe? Funny stuff.
> Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
Really? My feeling is the other way around - that say HBO shows (made by Americans) always have gratuitous nudity and sex scenes. Even the great ones, like "The Wire" or "Sopranos" had plenty of them. It's as if there's a person at HBO responsible for checking scripts if there's enough sex/nudity in them, because research shows they increase viewership.
CollegeHumor had a famous parody bit where they showed the story of young actors/actresses landing big roles, but when they explain to their peers what is it they do at the job, it sounds like they've been hired by the porn industry. but no, "it's not porn, it's HBO!" Then everyone cheers and is happy for them.
This is a joke, but it's also an important factor: actors and actresses can now push back against being made to film these scenes in ways that range from "uncomfortable" to "actual sexual assault". So there are fewer such scenes, because it's more expensive and requires more planning than just "bully lead actress until she takes her top off".
It's less ambiguous. It's the name of the country. It's not a weird dunk to acknowledge that "America" is two continents (and that one them is in fact not called "Mexico"). What's weird is someone who lives in a country called USA being so insecure about being called USAn.
Europeans love to think when people say America they are referring to the continent, despite everyone knowing they mean the USA. I think it's an inferiority complex/dislike of US thing
Please refer to us with our chosen demonym, it’s just basic manners.
I could dunk on Germans by referring to them as Nazis then acting indignant when they protest, but I won’t, because that would be bizarre and make me look insane
I think it's that and a sort of equal-and-opposite prudishness reaction - those sex scenes no longer fly in mainstream movies, they are generally described as exploitative of the actors (particularly women) and inappropriate in various ways.
To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button.
(That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)
Yeah. I feel like Western cinema right now could use a movement like the Pinky movies of 80's/90's Japan - cheap, titillating, often thoughtful art movies that were also basically softcore pornography.
That's a genre problem, porn is by its definition explosive, too fast to develop anything emotionally, erotica however builds up but it is harder to fund, there is an outlier though, 50 shades, however, for 50 shades to get funding it had to be a best seller for a while, released as an ebook at first. So unless you reach such a level you probably wont be funded, which only exacerbates current puritanical trends.
I find this odd, considering the success of 50 shades and the huge amount of female erotica written in books, there should be a large incentive for pouring money on shows for all of that readily available material. I'm a man and even I find the books more alluring than 99% of what's on TV/Movies.
I don't think those two are connected. Yes, we have access to directly sexual targeted imagery , so there's no need to cram it into everything else. That's good.
But that's not related to today's super specific and fluid sexual identities. People aren't sampling the gullt buffet of sexuality and making their precise choice of their perfect blend. They are making guesses, guessing more wildly now that they have more than 2 options to pick from, and now that it's not taboo to explore, so teens being teens, who are constantly searching for an identity, now can include sexuality in that search.
