what actually happened to sex scenes in movies

hint: it's not what you think

“The kids these days are RUINING sex scenes in movies!!!”

This is a popular take, and if I wanted lots of clicks, I would endorse it. But in the main, I just don’t think it’s true, or at least not true in a way that matters. For one, it carries the classic stench of a moral panic (fear of the pernicious influence of pop culture, fear of/for the children, etc); for another, the evidence simply doesn’t suggest what the frantic pearl-clutchers claim it does. There is indeed a little less sex in the cinema these days, but for that to represent a meaningful cultural problem, you would expect to see it actually pervade more of the culture than a single art form. But that’s not really happening. There’s still a whole lot of sex, everywhere.

To begin with, there’s still plenty of sex on TV. Not in sitcoms or children’t programming of course, but basically every prestige TV show these days has sex scenes, or at least it’s a lot more challenging to name the ones that don’t than the ones that do. We may be a little past the sleazy peak of mid-2010s HBO, when clips from Game of Thrones were uploaded onto porn sites, but Sam Levinson still has a career, so expect more of that, I guess. The last three shows I’ve started—Foundation, Fallout, Interview with a Vampire—aren’t sleazy at all,¹ but they definitely have sex scenes, and the last even has gay sex scenes, a rarity until very recently. If the puriteens are ruining sex in movies, what with their PHONES and their CANCEL CULTURE, why have they left TV alone?

It’s not just TV, either. When you fire up a new game of Baldur’s Gate III, the first option you’re presented with is toggling nudity on/off for the sex scenes; a bit later, you can choose between multiple penis and vulva styles for your character. I suppose having a choice regarding sex scenes (and penis shape) is an unusual phenomenon; in most other styles of fiction, you don’t get any form of content control. But that’s just the nature of interactive storytelling; few other mediums are set up to accept direct audience input like that. The conditions under which audiences have the least amount of content control is arguably live theater; what the actors choose to perform is what you see, and it’s not necessarily predictable in advance. This past weekend I was lucky enough to see not just one but two Broadway shows—the first was Lempicka, a new musical about the 20th century artist and her complicated bisexual relationships, and the second was the iconic Sweeney Todd. Both were very good;² both had sex scenes, or as much sex as you ever get in stage. Lempicka and her girlfriend undressed to their shifts and rolled around on a bed; Mrs. Lovett leaned back on Sweeney Todd’s lap and tangled her feet in his suspenders. Kink! in public! someone call the puriteens!

It’s the public (and relatively inexpensive/popularly accessible) nature of movies that makes sex scenes on the big screen a more particular and loaded phenomenon. Plenty of new movies do still depict people having sex (even Christopher Nolan finally gave us sex scenes last year, for better or for worse), but nonetheless it’s true that a certain kind of movie—the big blockbuster action flick—has less sex now than it used to. Of course, it’s not like all movies between the loosening of the Hays Code and the superhero boom had sex scenes in them. But action heroes, specifically, used to fuck, and they don’t anymore. Even romance in many big pop culture flicks has become sterile, or excised altogether.³ This is indeed a real—if limited—occurrence and it’s the result, I think, of four major factors:

1. Family-friendliness is capitalism-friendliness

   Disney is of course a family company, less I expect for truly puritanical reasons and more for profit margins. Movies that appeal to big audiences have big box office returns; if a film is for all ages, then people of all ages can purchase tickets. And because Disney owns Marvel and Star Wars, Marvel and Star Wars are sterile child-friendly environments; and because other companies want to cash in on the IP boom and the ticket sales thereof, they imitate as many elements of Disney/Marvel/Star Wars as possible. Barbie was sex scene-free, and not just because Ken lacks a penis—but because it was meant to be an all-ages, all-audiences movie. And it also made a bundle of money. Movies, I hate to tell you, exist to make money. I agree that they should be high and good art instead, but there’s this whole thing called capitalism, and its incentives, which have been a problem for some time, and were not invented by the Walt Disney Corporation in the late 2000s.

2. A case of the not-not-gays

   Action heroes used to fuck…and let’s all be honest with each other, it was often extremely stupid. A lot of the time, a “romantic” plotline in an action movie existed so that the hero—who had genuine homoerotic tension with his buddy or the male villain—could safely prove his heterosexuality. The sex scene (usually just one) existed to ensure the audience that this guy was a man, and it wasn’t gay or anything to watch him constantly penetrate everything in sight with bombs and bullets. Frankly, I’m glad these kinds of scenes are no longer ubiquitous in action movies; they’re basic, they’re boring, and with mainstream gay acceptance, they’re even more unconvincing than they used to be. Just fuck the bad guy already!

   
   At the same time, however, there’s less romance, even of the tame holding-hands sort, in any kind of big pop culture event, including and maybe especially in Disney movies. There’s a joke somewhere—I can’t find it now—about how you can tell Disney writers are getting different kinds of therapy these days because their movies are less interested in romantic love and more interested in fixing relationships with difficult and disapproving parents. I’m not particularly interested in children’s movies, but I watched Moana with my godson recently (three times in one week, he is obsessed) and I noticed that, for all that the movie is about relationships, none are romantic. And I actually liked that, in part because it’s such a departure from the Disney movies I grew up with, with their mandatory romance between two gorgeous heterosexuals which is ever-threatened by an ugly bisexual villain who subtly or not so subtly wants to fuck them both. Do I enjoy Claude Frollo’s creepy rape song in Hunchback of Notre Dame? Yes. Does it establish a particular repressed Catholic sexual psychosis that’s perfect for the setting and the themes? Also yes. Do we need this in every film? Maybe not. A little variety—even in Disney!!!—is awfully nice.

3. The rest of the world exists

   Along with trying to make movies family-friendly in order to sell more tickets to mass audiences, the producers of Hollywood blockbusters are also trying to market their wares to international audiences, especially in Asia. This why we so many action movies have an obligatory adventure sequence set in a glamorous East Asian city, even if it doesn’t quite fit the story. And it’s also why there are fewer sex scenes. China and India are particularly censorious about sex on screen, and also about queer content, which is why Disney especially has become so famous for blink-and-you-miss-it chaste gay kisses. This kind of thing is easy for foreign censors to cut, which makes it more likely that movies will be accepted and shown in those markets. This once again isn’t really about puritanism, or at least, the only god that Disney really fears offending is the dollar.
   
   At the same time, Chinese and Indian cinema and television have coped with sexual censorship in some really remarkable ways, which Hollywood could benefit from studying. Censorship can be weirdly fruitful sometimes, especially when it comes to eroticism. The gay heroes of the Chinese TV show The Untamed—adapted from an explicitly gay webnovel—never kiss on screen, and they’re never openly described as lovers (though the story only makes sense if they are). At a certain point their lack of explicitness becomes explicit, almost more so than if it had been explicit. When Lan Zhan sweeps Wei Ying into his arms midway through a fifty-episode arc about their love and loss…do they need to actually take off those beautiful robes for it to be sex? I know less about Bollywood, but many of the movies I’ve seen take a similar approach to the display of gorgeous costumes and the eroticism of not openly fucking. Yes, I’ve never seen Hrithik Roshan take his dick out on screen, but is he still a walking, dancing, singing erection at all times? Yes. Yes he is.

4. Small screen, big [ ]

   Discussion of sex scenes and eroticism always raises the question of what actually is or qualifies as erotic. Is eroticism just “when I see a boob”? Is a sex scene defined by full penetration, and if so, how many thrusts do we need to see before the fade-to-black? If simply looking at people having sex is all I’m after, I can watch porn, which is even more ubiquitous than sex on TV. I think when people complain about the lack of sex scenes in movies now, they’re nostalgically re-imagining a time—maybe the 1970s—where people gathered in public theaters to watch sexually uninhibited, possibly European, usually misogynistic, displays of (women’s) bodies on enormous screens. But that kind of public eroticism, to the extent that it ever existed, just isn’t as much of a thing anymore. With easier access to porn online, to sex on TV and in video games and wherever else, many people seem to tend to prefer their eroticism experienced at home and in private.

   This change in attitudes toward the public nature of sex may be puritanical to the extent that it also tends to overlap with public displays of sexuality (i.e. the endless “kink at pride” discourse, which is its own kind of circlejerk) but I think it’s mainly just a difference. Sometimes things are just different than other things. Sometimes technological changes and new mediums lead to cultural shifts, and then new changes and new mediums lead to even newer shifts, etc. Sometimes audiences get tired of the usual displays, and want new ones, and then they’ll get tired of those displays, and want something new again, entirely. Anything can get boring. Even (gasp) boobs.

1. I’m not that far into Foundation but so far I think it would have benefited from being at least a little sleazy.

2. Okay so I thought Lempicka had gorgeous production design, dancing, and costumes. Amber Iman—who played Lempicka’s girlfriend Rafaela—is an absolute superstar and I’m really excited to see what she does next. But aside from Rafaela’s first number and an absolute wild setpiece about Italian futurist art starring Marinetti (yeah that Marinetti, the fascist!) the music itself was kinda flat and unmemorable. It contrasted poorly against Sweeney Todd the next day for sure, and yes nobody sounds good next to Sondheim but I do expect people to try. Sweeney Todd also had great production design and Sutton Foster has basically perfected the role of Mrs. Lovett, but I thought Aaron Tveit’s Sweeney Todd was too subdued in comparison, not quite menacing and unhinged enough except during “A Little Priest” which was a barnburner. ANYWAY.

3. Sometimes I think the complaints about the lack of sex in movies—or about the pernicious influence of Disney/Marvel etc altogether—has to do with people failing to actually watch anything else, even as they complain about the kinds of people who don’t enjoy “serious” art such as [file quite often not found]. There are plenty of movies without a single superhero in them. Go watch one.