Less Sex In Hollywood Movies? Blame Porn
In the ongoing search for boogeymen on which to heap blame for myriad societal ills (real and imagined), there are certain things on which you can depend. One of those things is that people will accuse various entertainment forms — movies, television programs, video games and disfavored musical genres, in particular — for all manner of bad behavior.
Every so often, perhaps just to mix things up a bit, people will even blame one entertainment form or genre for what they perceive as negative changes in a different form or category of entertainment.
On rare occasions, the same form of entertainment will even be accused of causing contradictory social changes, a bit like certain medicines designed to treat certain conditions can, in some instances, exacerbate the very symptom the drug is designed to treat.
Recently, some critics and film industry observers have noticed a reduction in the number of Hollywood movies that feature sex scenes. Amazingly, one of the theories as to why fewer mainstream films include sex scenes involves a type of entertainment more commonly accused of influencing things in the opposite direction.
Are there fewer sex scenes in Hollywood movies than there used to be? How are we defining “sex scene” (or “sex” for that matter) as we consider that question? If there are fewer sex scenes these days, what are the theories as to why? Get the scoop in Calico’s latest post, “Either Way, Blame Porn.”
– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com
Read On…
About 13 years ago, give or take, I was at an adult industry convention in Florida when I found myself embroiled in a brief (and at times, uncomfortably loud) exchange with a woman who was there to protest the presence of the convention.
While shouting about the porn industry’s exploitation of women and holding a sign that said something like “Porn = Slavery”, she saw me walking by wearing a lanyard that marked me as part of the convention.
Approaching me, she first assumed I was a performer and seemed to be in that condescending “Oh, you poor thing” mode so common among the viciously self-righteous. Informed that in her sign’s analogy, she’d likely consider me more slaver than slave, she was then determined to engage me further.
What ensued was a vigorous debate – I’d even say an angry one on her end at points – wherein she decried not only the adult industry’s exploitation and objectification of women, but porn’s seemingly universal impact on society at large.
A Paranoid Vision of a Pornified World
While the woman touched on a lot of territory, one claim that stood out in my memory was that the growing ubiquity of porn was causing all media to become more “drenched in sex” than ever. Her argument was that as people became more inured to hardcore porn on the internet, the more receptive the public would become to the same thing in mainstream Hollywood movies, TV ads, department store catalogs – hell, who knows, maybe even future issues of Watchtower.
I suppose the theory is intuitive enough. But if the theory is correct, over a decade on from that conversation we ought to be positively drowning in Hollywood movies that present explicit sex scenes, right?
So, are we positively drowning in Hollywood movies that present explicit sex scenes? Opinions vary, of course, as opinions are wont to do.
Some say sex scenes are disappearing, others say sex scenes are merely changing, possibly even getting better. Others, like Kate Hagen, have attempted to impose at least a measure of objectivity into their analysis, by getting quantitative with their assessment.
Hagen’s 2019 research found that according to IMDB’s database, “Only 1.21% of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 contain depictions of sex,” which according to Hagen is the lowest percentage in any decade since the 1960s.
“Sex in cinema peaked in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller, with 1.79% of all films featuring sex scenes,” Hagen wrote. “That half-point decline is massive in relative terms, considering almost four times as many films have been released in the 2010s as in the 1990s.”
The Vanishing (Or Not?) Hollywood Sex Scene
Those who believe the data shows fewer sex scenes coming out of Hollywood offer a lot of theories about why this is the case. Many movies these days are superhero movies and superhero movies are (almost) always sexless, the movie business is sex-shy in the #MeToo era, all the Hollywood-produced sex is found in series on streaming platforms, etc.
Naturally, one of the theories is – you guessed it – the ubiquity of internet porn is leading to less sex being depicted in Hollywood movies, a claim that must come as quite a shock to the woman who confronted me in the Sunshine State all those years ago.
“There are several trends, social and cinematic, that might be held responsible for this shift away from sex on our big screens,” writes Christina Newland for BBC. “The most-cited reason is that since the height of the erotic thriller in the 1990s, online pornography became so widely available that audiences were getting their kicks elsewhere, so to speak.”
As Newland also points out, however, at least one director famous for his controversial, attention-grabbing Hollywood sex scenes thinks that argument is bunk.
“There was pornography all over the place when I was young, if you wanted it,” director Paul Verhoeven said in an interview with Variety. “If there is a change in how we view sexuality in films, I don’t think it has to do with porn on the internet.”
If We Put Football Scenes in Porn, Will People Watch Less Real Football?
I agree with Verhoeven, although not primarily due to his point about the availability of porn when he was young. I agree because the only way the ‘more porn on the internet leads to less sex in Hollywood movies’ theory would make sense to me is if those two types of depictions served the same purpose – and I’m betting Verhoeven, among many other directors, would say they do not.
While there are many exceptions, including the films my friend Angie Rowntree makes for Sssh.com, which are story-driven and incorporate sex as part of driving those stories, a LOT of the porn on the internet is there for one purpose: To serve as fodder for masturbation.
Whatever you might think of the movies that came out of Hollywood in previous decades (my grandfather considered David Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune to be “pornographic”), I submit to you that Verhoeven wasn’t expecting anyone to start masturbating in the theater during the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct.
Now, did some people later buy their own copy of Basic Instinct and watch it at home on VHS and masturbate to it then? I have no doubt the answer is yes. But that doesn’t make the interrogation scene ‘porn’ any more than the fact that some people masturbate to pictures of shoes somehow magically transforms Sophia Webster into a pornographer.
My point is that online porn couldn’t have supplanted or replaced sex scenes in Hollywood movies because the two simply are not ‘competitive’ in that way. Mainstream entertainment and porn may vie for people’s eyeballs in some general sense, but it’s not like the audience who shows up for Halloween Kills expecting to see a gangbang sex scene like the one from Halloween Spills, or whatever the inevitable porn parody will be called. Nor are moviegoers going to exclaim “Oh come on – there’s way better stuff on Pornhub” and storm out of the theater if Halloween Kills does have a sex scene.
In the end though, whether there’s more sex or less sex coming out of Hollywood these days (and whether those depictions are better or worse than they once were) there’s one thing on which we can depend: Porn will be blamed.
Erotic Cinema For Discerning Adults
Anonymous Adult Search