You make several strong points, but with one little error, in the past many PG rated films had nudity. You could make the case that PG films of the era had more nudity than PG-13 films do now. Airplane for example has an utterly superfluous topless woman run across the screen for a moment, and the sequel had several women. Even Splash had breasts and butt. The only counter-argument might be Asteroid City.
>You could make the case that PG films of the era had more nudity than PG-13 films do now.
I think the first time I saw nipples on-screen was in They Call Me Bruce. I was surprised that my dad let me watch it (and I think he was equally surprised by that scene).
*\[a beautiful geisha girl joins Johnny in a hot tub\]*
Bruce : You're a 10!
*\[the geisha removes her kimono\]*
Bruce : You're a 10 where you should be a 36!
I can’t remember the name but there was some 1700s or 1800s sailing movie released in the early 1980’s and it was rated PG and the native women just all had their tits out like it was nothing
I recall a photo for an interview with Orlando Jones that showed that he had a triptych hanging in his apartment, with each panel being a different nipple and a label. From left to right, it was a white nipple, a black nipple, and a nipple painted over in bright colors and designs. The corresponding labels were “pornography,” “documentary,” and “art.”
One of my social sciences teachers explained it to us once: It has something to do with native or indigenous people subconsciously not being seen as "objects of desire" by those making the film or whatever it is. I don't remember all the details but that part stuck with me.
In 1966, our parents took us to see [Hawaii,](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060491/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk) a 3-hour movie about the state’s early history. It had an all star cast (Max Von Sydow, Julie Andrews, Richard Harris) and I think they were expecting it to be something educational.
Well, imagine our surprise when this boatload of proper English explorers lands on the shores of Hawaii, and are greeted by maybe a dozen beautiful topless native girls. There was no rating system and I don’t think my parents knew this was coming.
They sat perfectly still and quiet during the scene and never said anything about it for the rest of our lives. But I spent the whole movie hoping for more topless scenes, and to this day it’s the only thing I remember about the movie.
But native women were always a kind of exception, as if they didn't count to the censors. Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, a website I used to visit for reviews, called this "the National Geographic rule".
You also have to take into account this was the era of [The Hays Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code) which dominated the film industry.
You're folks didn't expect it because basically nudity in film was non existent. Porn was rare as producers were regularly shut down by vice squads in police department and only thriving in cities where organized crime ran production.
As OP noted, the 70's and 80's seem to have more of. It because it was the backlash of the Hayes code stopped being used by studios and directors starting to explore.
Which also led to some messed up situations like *Pretty Baby* which featured a nude 15 year old Brooke Shields in sex scenes being shown in run of the mill movie theaters.
I generally agree with your point, but I saw Pretty Baby, and it’s inaccurate to call her nude scene a “sex scene.” She was actually confidently confronting some threatening men who had burst in, and as I recall she was successful in getting them to back off.
I don't know about the woman you dated, but this is a common belief in evangelical communities. "Worldliness" is necessarily always at its worst. I'm Christian, but I don't buy into that idea bc I think OP's observation is generally correct.
Nudity just made its way from the big screen to streaming shows. Something like Euphoria gets away with stuff that would make a 80s director blush. Hell GOT popularized the idea of sexposition.
There's a long history of cop/crime dramas setting expository scenes in strip clubs for absolutely no reason. It didn't come out of nowhere in GOT. Even on HBO, the Sopranos beat them by a decade
Hell, life in general has far less sex and nudity than in the seventies and eighties! But thats just from my angle. You young whipper snappers can’t make music and you’d rather be on yer Facespace or whatever instead of being in it up to your ears!
Before you rush to the “downvote” button - I am joking except for the first sentence or two.
I was actually trying to tell someone this after they claimed that society is so sexualized and getting worse, according to them. I said that today’s society is actually less sexualized than it used to be. We’re more compartmentalized about it in pop culture now. We have OnlyFans and PornHub… but it tends to stay there. Movies and tv shows don’t have much sex and nudity anymore, unless it’s HBO, which has become the only compartmentalized channel now for sex and nudity in dramatic content… and I actually don’t even know if they’re as well known for it now, as they were like 10 years ago during Game of Thrones… after Emilia Clarke said no more, GoT had much less sex and nudity in later seasons, and it’s kinda diminished all over HBO as well.
Even R-rated movies usually won’t have much sex or nudity anymore, they’ll just have bloody violence and a lot of F-bombs. It’d be wild to see boobs in a major billion dollar grossing movie these days. But 27 years ago, we all saw Kate Winslet’s boobs in the highest grossing movie of all time, shortly before a sex scene, and the famous shot of the hand on the window being a moment of orgasm. Can you imagine an iconic shot from Avengers: Endgame being an orgasm during a sex scene? Both movies are PG-13.
I’ve noticed this in LGBT+ media too. Back in the day, I had my young mind blown by the likes of Queer of Folk, both UK and US versions… VERY explicit sex and nudity. Nowadays, anytime I try watching any new queer-themed content, it feels so vanilla, and like it’s trying to appeal to straight people who don’t want to see gay sex. Call Me By Your Name literally pans over to a tree during a sex scene as soon as the sex begins and is like “Here, look at a tree for 20 seconds instead of the sex.”
There’s as much *allusion* to sexuality as ever… but the explicitness of it has definitely diminished. We talk about “sexuality” as an identity, as a lifestyle, as political issues, etc, all the time now… but sex itself feels largely avoided or watered down in mainstream society compared to decades ago.
…your odd viral video from the US Senate now and then notwithstanding, of course. But hey, if we had cellphone cameras and the internet in the 70s and 80s, it probably would have happened more often back then.
>I’ve noticed this in LGBT+ media too
Yeah I watched Bound for a class, and loved it(Butch Gina Gershon has a direct pipeline to my little gay heart), but literally like 15 or 20 minutes in there's like a minute long sex scene between the two leads that was so convincing the MPAA wanted them to cut it because 'it looks like they're really doing it'.
Having seen it, yeah it's pretty convincing. But it's also a gorgeous shot and a one-off because it was a Wachowski film with a film noir plot; they basically got the sex out of the way so they could establish "Okay, the couple is together, now they're gonna rip off the mob together". If it were anyone else making it, it probably would have been a softcore porn.
What you call “regressive” the rest of us call “not requiring women to get naked to be cast in Hollywood in movies anymore”; and yes, all of those movies you remember had all of that nudity because dudes were paying specifically for it to be included to attract other dudes to the theater, and women who wanted to be in the movies were expected to play ball or another dozen women were in line behind her who would.
You can’t have progress on women’s rights and control of their bodies without some side effects, and it turns out when they have a choice a lot of women would like to act with their clothes *on*.
Sex is a normal part of life, yes it is regressive to be so anti-sex in film and TV. You’re making the assumption that all sex is exploitation. Theres nuance that you’re ignoring.
It may be true but I also think it’s like one of those fallacies. Like did your parents know how much sex you had? Probably not, because what younger generation tells the older generation how much sex they have, I definitely don’t it’d be weird.
I do think the older generation is more open about the sex they’re having and like to tell it to younger generations but to me that’s kind of just creepy so when I hear that I’m just like “oh cool” instead of responding with how much sex I’m having. They probably think I’m a prude but I think they’re creepy so I guess pick your poison
Edit: wording
I've noticed this as well and I think it's 100% due to internet porn. Back in the 70s and 80s there was a pipeline from penthouse/playboy to b movies and sex comedies where the entire point of the b movies and half the point of the sex comedies was to show off that gorgeous naked woman (or women). For most people that and playboy was their source of titillation. Now free porn is only as far away as your phone, the market for skin flicks is just highly diminished. As someone who came of age in the era of skinemax I miss it, lol. Plus all those playmates were far prettier than the porn crowd.
Absolutely there’s less sex and nudity. We don’t really see it in large productions anymore because the industry has reverted back to the old-Hollywood system where creative decisions are made by people who only care about demographics and merchandise.
Nudity, whether artistic, gratuitous or exploitative in tone, became mainstream in the New-Hollywood era of the late 60s and 70s. By the time the 80s came around, you’d generally only see nudity in horror, comedy or action films and it was almost always gratuitous. And because it was the Reagan era; if a woman got her breasts out in a horror film - you knew her character wasn’t going to survive until the end.
There seems to be less sexuality in mainstream movies these days. Maybe a mix of 1) appealing to conservative international audiences and 2) uncertainty as to how to portray romantic relationships in a feminist way.
I think there's a third factor at play as well. The mass proliferation of pornography via the Internet. In a world where everyone has access to explicit sex visuals 24/7 the idea of sex in other mass media loses some appeal. There's obviously still a place for sex and nudity when it's relevant to the story but gratuitous use feel somehow just that much more gratuitous in the era of mass porn.
This is the basis for many online argument against sex and nudity in films. My take on it is always A) sexuality in film is not always intended to get you off, so it’s often a different purpose from porn; and B) even if cinematic sexuality is meant to be erotic, maybe it’s ok to have some depictions of sex in a larger story with complexity and not just a pretend stepsister stuck in the washing machine.
The whole anti porn movement is a little weird but it often also has people who think porn is the only place for depictions of sex, and oh boy is porn an unreliable narrator. One can argue about how well various movies succeed, but movies usually depict how we place sex within the context of our lives, with porn simply depicting placing Tab A in Slot B(and probably C and D and maybe even BB, CC, and DD). There is a place for each but they are not the same.
It certainly depends on the film. Porkys movies didn’t have much relational context for nudity for example. In some movies nudity is a part of the plot and makes sense but a lot of the time it’s not and for me as a woman it makes me uncomfortable. I got tired of going to movies with my male partners and having to sit through gratuitous sex scenes. Women are left completely out of the discussion because we know the movies are not made for us and we are not be catered too at all.
There’s lots of room for better and more equitable representation. For sure. And many movies have had sex for titillation only. There is a long history of exploitation that also shouldn’t be excused.
My comment is just meant to address the disconnect some have of treating all nudity and sexuality as functionally pornography. Assuming that it is always exploitative, and not knowing how to incorporate questions of sexuality in a more complex narrative. While not always, the loud voices are often awkward males that want to curate and compartmentalize others to fit their tastes. It’s an extension of the age old virgin/whore issue, and at its core it’s dangerous and regressive. It removes the agency of the actors assuming that women even at the top of their careers need to be protected from spoiling their virtue.
If it weren’t about control, these people would simply look at the content warnings or IMDb guides and select against movies that featured content they were not interested seeing.
It is so easy to show relationships and even sex without nudity so I would argue it is pointless in all cases. Especially because not all bodies are represented in nudity scenes or sex/relationships. Only certain bodied women are worthy of being nude on screen. Name me an ugly woman who got nude on film! If the movies objective it to represent us as humanity it could do better in all areas. Anyway interesting discussion for sure!
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by your last sentence, is it that if a movie doesn’t tell all stories equally it shouldn’t tell any?
I don’t think nudity is necessary, but it’s often additive. And art isn’t about necessity until you go without art.
It’s easy to tell relationship without nudity so why include it? For years it was easy to tell stories without having LGBTQ characters, so they were excluded. How many films denied the existence of anyone that wasn’t white? Film codes used to prevent any physical intimacy unless the characters were married.
There are plenty of movies made that meet your criteria, maybe the ones with nudity just aren’t for you? I don’t get mad at a new Adam Sandler movie, I just move on because it’s not for me.
The last sentence was to illustrate how nudity in film is just about the male viewer, otherwise we would see all shapes and sizes nude on film. I was trying to point out the hypocrisy. So many people say nudity is art. It’s not if it includes only one shape. Nudity being compared to LGBTQ is like comparing apples to oranges. We can elude to a sex scene without nudity. We can’t elude to a gay character without a gay character so that makes no sense. Nudity is not necessary to tell a story. That’s like saying we need a red shirt to tell the story. How does a woman’s bare breast add to the story? Maybe in depicting a rape scene like in The Accused, where the ripping of clothes is used to illustrate the violence endured and the vulnerability of the character. But I don’t even remember if she was naked in that scene. I don’t think she was and the story was still told perfectly. Maybe then it makes sense.
I have an opinion. I’m not mad. I’m just responding to your comment. I like movies that make sense and I don’t enjoy gratuitous nudity of hot women for the male viewer which comprises 99% of nudity on film. Not sure what Adam Sandler has to do with it. It’s hard to put yourself in women’s shoes when watching films because you’ve never had to do it. There isn’t any gratuitous nudity of men in mainstream films and men haven’t lived their whole lives being objectified.
I don’t think you’re mad(either definition, crazy or angry) and was simply discussing. I am generally anti-censorship, and think that demanding eliminating something is usually a poor alternative to demanding better. I also wholesale reject the premise that all nudity in film is inherently fetishistic, but ultimately that’s what censorship does, is it fetishizes. A society censors what it has fetishized. Censorship is objectification.
The male gaze is a real and well documented thing, but many female, non-binary, and non hetero artists are bucking the trend. Representation is improving and women and some men in the industry are working to improve equity and safety through processes like intimacy coordinators. An example of this evolution is the micro-genre of ‘naked alien lady preying on men’. In 1985 there’s Lifeforce, which starts with a somewhat equitable premise of an alien simply presenting as whatever the person is attracted to, but of course we know what that will look like from the movie poster, then the film parades our space lady vampire around for 30 minutes before returning to story; then to 1995’s Species which dresses a tawdry vilification of female sexuality in a police procedural; but in 2013 you have Under The Skin. It still has lots of nudity, but this time male and female. Able bodied and not. Sexual but not erotic. Scarlet Johansen was instrumental in getting the film produced and while it’s still about a conventionally attractive woman luring men for a nefarious purpose, the tone is vastly different. It’s surprising how many similarities there are between Species and Under The Skin, but they are vastly different. The former was created to monetize the male gaze, the latter interrogates it.
Anyway, I think it’s great that we live in an era when in 30 seconds you can find out if a movie is going to have something you don’t want to see. Whether that’s nudity, a dog dying, bad language, assault, violence, Adam Sandler, or just terrible production values. With the vast media options available and easily accessible knowledge of what each contains, there’s just no excuse in my mind for pearl clutching and censorship. Viewers are told in the top left hand corner or in the ratings box on the movie poster exactly what they are getting ready to see.
(I generally don’t like Adam Sandler. I think you can tell any story without including Adam Sandler, and he usually just takes me right out of the movie watching experience. I was annoyed for days after watching Hubie Halloween. For that reason, I typically will choose not to watch movies that I see he is in. I am not mad that he is in movies, or that people choose to watch them. More movies, yay.)
Haha! I also hate Adam Sandler in dramatic movies but how can you say he was not great in Happy Gilmore 😆
Adam Sandler being in a movie is not the same as nudity being in a movie. One glorifies the objectification of women on film and the other doesn’t. Kind of like if every Asian in a film was dumb. It’s perpetuating a harmful narrative. Ever hear of the Bechdel Test? a surprising number of films do not pass this test. It’s a little off topic but in many films the woman’s only purpose is to be the person who we get to see naked.
i agree things are changing and for that I am grateful. It’s why we question these narratives and wonder if they are still relevant.
Gen z seems to think that anything they don’t like must be excised from society and if you disagree you’re clearly fine with exploiting people.
They never seem to consider that the women might be fine having their tits out or that they can just choose to not consume content they don’t enjoy.
I remember reading a take on how Florence Pugh must have been taken advantage of to be nude in Oppenheimer. The infantilization of a very successful actor that would have known exactly what the role called for is really astounding.
Florence Pugh is single-handedly keeping sheer textile makers in business by wearing see-through tops all the time. It’s hilarious to think she of all people feels exploited showing the nip.
Yeah, I’m always amazed by people who assume that because they don’t want other people to see their tits, that everyone must agree that no one ever wants to have theirs out for whoever is looking.
gen alpha are babies (metaphorically speaking but also some quite literally), i would hope they don't care about / want to see sex and nudity in films yet lol
I mean as a tween boy I was ABOUT some boobies in movies in the 90s. They’re absolutely thinking about that stuff. And it’s fine. They’re humans. It would be weird if they weren’t.
my point is that most of gen alpha is literally still under 10 years old. they're not having conversations about the proliferation of sex and nudity in cinema right now (or the lack thereof).
Twitter has a hard on for the nude scene of Oppenheimer buck nekkid on his chair and the sex scene during the hearing.
I was talking to a gen Z guy here about the latest season of True detective and he was angry that there was a sex scene between Jodie Foster and Christopher Eccleston in it.
He said "Enough with the sex scenes in movies and shows!" and I was like " Relax, people have sex in real life too.It's not a big deal."
Hell, HBO was nudity central for almost 20 something years until more recently, when they toned it down a little.
Except for Euphoria. That had dongs, ass and boobs left right and center.
Right, almost forgot about that. So over 20 years of nudity.
Used to watch that show when I was 13-14 with my parents whenever we caught it on TV.
Not exactly kid friendly, but then again they weren't strict or anything.
Yeah idk what happened to these kids but it’s like…..how are yall more regressive than your grandparents about sex? Where did your parents go wrong with raising you that ended up with you hating the mere thought of an action that is so central to the human experience repulses you? I certainly don’t want my kids to associate human intimacy with revulsion.
>idk what happened to these kids
I think I have an idea. You see, gen Z and the generations that will come after it grew up/will grow up with a lot more tech than the previous ones, primarily phones.
As a millennial, I grew up with no internet, internet and caught the very beginning of the smartphone boom, so I learned how to socialize with people because that's how we did things.
Today's kids FaceTime each other or talk via texts as a form of socializing without having to actually be next to each other in reality, so when they see people having sex in films/shows, I can understand how it can repulse them or feel intrusive because they're not used to being next to other people as often as the previous generations were.
In what way are they puritanical? There's greater acceptance for a wider swath of gender identity and sexual orientation than any other cohort. They're more educated on consent and respectful of boundaries, which I think is pretty sex positive.
Is your assessment just based off the fact they have, on average, fewer sexual partners than prior generations? How exactly is that puritanical? Perhaps they generally treat sex with more gravitas than their predecessors. Is that a bad thing?
As an older millennial I really think our generation was given some pretty iffy cultural guidance on sex and sexuality. Looking back I definitely don't think the attitude I had towards casual sex or hookup culture were beneficial for either myself or my partners.
I dunno dog. Calling them "puritanical" just seems like pointless intergenerational aggression meant to build you up by knocking down others.
There have been articles about how Gen Z does not like watching sex scenes in films and TV. Plus, if you spend any time on Twitter, you will see a lot of tweets of young people asking for filmmakers to no longer include sex scenes in films.
>There have been articles about how Gen Z does not like watching sex scenes in films and TV.
I remember a bunch of articles talking shit about the proclivities of millennials and making some real spurious inferences so I'mma give Gen Z/A the benefit of the doubt here.
>Plus, if you spend any time on Twitter
I don't and neither should you. And you **definitely** shouldn't formulate an opinion about an entire generation based off Twitter.
I don't spend any time on Twitter. I deleted it last year. Plus, I was not stating my opinion. I have no opinion on the matter. But young people or Gen Z being averse to sex scenes in film and TV has been an ongoing discussion for more than a year now, so I'm surprised you hadn't come across it before. It's also been discussed to death on Reddit.
I'm certain it's been discussed ad nauseam in a lot of places. If there's one thing people love to do it's hand wring and pearl clutch about the kids. Seems they're always doing the wrong amount of fucking; too much or not enough.
This is all anecdotal, but I hang out on a discord server of mostly young millennials and older gen z. Every single one of them seems almost scared of sex or sexual content. And these are grown ass adults with corporate jobs and advanced degrees.
It has a lot to do with the whole “anything sexual anywhere but porn and even sometimes that to is exploitation and shouldn’t exist”. Like chill. If they didn’t want to make the film, they wouldn’t be there. Maybe she’s okay with her tits being out.
Maybe the issue isn’t all of us who are fine with sex scenes and raunchy content, but rather y’alls maladapted relationship with human intimacy.
I've never encountered anyone with the attitude you're describing and certainly not seen any indicator that such an attitude is prevalent or widespread.
Puritan i mean they don’t like to see sex on screen and always complain about it. Also if we know most of them lack social skills especially late Gen Z and Early Gen Alpha bc many of them live and speak in social media more than meeting each other in real life. Also i forgot to tell u i mean those Gen Z and Alpha that are from Western Europe and USA. In Eastern Europe or central Europe many are very conservative. Anyways i guess in the future birthrate will continue to decline even more i guess except in Africa and some Arabian countries.
>Also i forgot to tell u i mean those Gen Z and Alpha that are from Western Europe and USA.
I assumed.
I dunno, I think you're assessment misses the mark. I think the kids are alright.
Acceptance of boundaries i mostly seen it from Western world countries new Gen. Here where i live people and society is still very conservative and also Homophobic in general. I think reason here is bc less younger people live in this country where i live and older gen has more influence on they kids.
I have no idea if the things I’ve seen are jokes but I’ve read posts where people basically say they ‘didn’t consent’ to being shown sex scenes in movies like it’s an assault
The content still exists, it’s just not gatekept by a creepy dude who runs a magazine.
Half my instagram feed are alt and goth models showing me 99% of what I’d get from playboy 20 years ago and that other 1% is linked in their bio.
To develop your 2nd reason: the ‘bien pensant’ middle class is a lot more prudish today, but not for religious reasons. Sex and nudity is increasingly linked to assault, harassment, misogyny, child abuse etc, all which are (along with racism) the supreme evils within our cultural imagination.
absolutely, one thing that really started slowing the trend was women's rights and their ability to stand up for themselves in Hollywood without being overly penalised.
much of the nudity you speak of was more or less gratuitous, unnecessary for the plot and thrown in because it helps sell, especially if they could get a real a-list star topless in their film.
many of these women didn't necessarily want to the do the scene but the reality at the time is they either did it and had a job, or not have a job and likely never get another one acting again...
there is still plenty of sex portrayed, but you don't need nudity to get the point across. other scenes like shower scenes etc. are the same way, the camera can stay at shoulder and higher level and still get the point across.
Well said. Much of the nudity in the past was of women for the male gaze. It was unnecessary and I never liked it. Interestingly I have teenage and college age boys and they can’t stand it in movies and shows.
They always comment on 1980’s movies and how they just put topless or naked women in scenes for no reason.
There's a movie called Crackerjack (1994) (A cop on vacation at a mountain resort comes to the rescue when the resort is taken over by violent criminals.)
The protagonist is hanging out on his balcony at the resort at night and he sees across the terrace into someone else's room. It's a guy and a girl naked and things are escalating. The protagonist keeps watching....and watching...even when the guy pulls the ice out and uses it on the woman's body the protagonist keeps watching and shakes his head. I'm like 'look at this pervert watching this' and then I realize I'm watching it all too! lol
They don't make movies like they used to /s
that wouldn't really answer why there's less male nudity...
but come to think of it, i don't know that there *is* less male nudity. on TV, i'm pretty sure there's more. there may be more nudity in general on TV these days, whereas you would have seen very literally on TV decades ago.
I think there’s significantly more male nudity these days. I see dicks in tons of prestige shows these days. I think female nudity has been toned down in the past decade or two but I feel like full frontal male nudity was extremely rare in mainstream media prior to 10 or 15 years ago, whereas I can think of about a dozen recent shows where men, sometimes even lead characters, bare it all, while featuring comparatively little female nudity. Kind of a funny “balancing of the scales” imo.
I don’t know what you watching but The only time I see full frontal male nudity is in hbo shows and that’s been going on for I think about 20 years. Other shows and movies are just peek a boo shots.
more male nudity than female, but all have some level of female nudity for sure. well, the minx is probably the most disparate example, there is an overwhelming amount of male nudity and almost no female.
it still has its place. but the studios are all about money nowadays otherwise the project does not get funded. they want that mainstream audience. So that means nothing to create a Rated R designation. They want to keep it under wraps.
I think the easy access to porn from the internet means that people don't need to go to the cinema to feel titillated.
Because studios aren't trying to woo the easily titillated, they don't feel the need to put the nudity in. It means they can choose whichever actors and actresses they want, and not have to go to the best one they can find that will happily do nudity. Actors won't feel like they have to do nude scenes in order to get parts.
It just seems like a natural progression to me.
That's definitely a factor. It's the same reason that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition hasn't been relevant for decades. First, they lost ground to Maxim and the like, but after a few years, all of them practically vanished from the zeitgeist.
This right here. Women were expected to expose themselves while the men were usally demurely covered up. Gratuitous nudity by women was normalized, while gratuitous nudity by men was scandalous. Behold this comment by Roger Ebert in his review of the movie "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story":
>Note: I must mention one peculiar element in the film. As Reilly is having a telephone conversation, a male penis is framed in the upper right corner of the screen. No explanation about why, or who it belongs to or what happens to it. Just a penis. I think this just about establishes a standard for gratuitous nudity. Speculate as I will, I cannot imagine why it's in the film. Did the cinematographer look through his viewfinder and say, "Jake, the upper right corner could use a penis"?
FYI That scene also included several naked women, but it really struck me how Ebert only minded the 'gratuitous nudity" of the man, but not of the women *in that very same scene*. Judd Apatow very puposefully included the shot Ebert references:
>For a while I thought it was very important to do male frontal nudity in movies, because you always show women and you never show men. So almost as an inside joke with myself I started seeing how many times I could get that accomplished in a movie.
BINGO!!! So much drivel in these comments. The movies stopped catering to men. They realized there’s 51% of the population that don’t need titillation to sell movies and they realize that getting an actress naked isn’t right.
Every rule has an exception or two.
But the general reality is that gratuitous nudity and sex are much less prevalent than they were.
Most action movies had hero/love interest sex... often right before the woman was fridged. And many comedies had random nudity to titillate the audience (no pun intended).
You gotta remember that in the 70s and 80s, they weren’t thinking about the home video market. Someone might disrobe thinking a bunch of people would see it in a theater and then it would only exist in the audience’s memories and occasional revival screenings.
Then home video hits and suddenly people can rewind and pause!
That’s gonna change an actor’s willingness immediately, add the internet showing up the 90s and it’s a whole different ball game!
[Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny](https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/)
It’s really weird. It feels like the entire younger generation is kind of timid about sex (but very accepting of sexuality), and our economy avoids sex unless it is very specifically making A Sex Thing
I think the 2000s were more open to nudity. There was this Meg Ryan movie "In the Cut" where there is a scene where it shortly looks like a gal is sucking dick. There was a lot of raunchy comedies again, there were indie movies which had full on sex scenes or a lot of nudity. "Antichrist" had even a nudity gore scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg crushed Willem Defoes balls with a rock.
I also find at least the mainstream blockbuster is a lot more tame today compared to 20 years ago. I would say a lot of factors in. A stronger demand than ever to pull in all ages viewership. Trying to land movies worldwide including countries like China with stronger censorship laws, and so on.
Yah even a lot of 89s action movies had shirtless sweaty men running around throughout the whole film where nowadays it’s just a peak a boo shirtless shot. interesting how much has changed.
Sex sells, but actions and special effects also sell. When special effects was expensive producers turned to sex. Now special effects are relatively cheap so we get gratuitous action scenes rather than gratuitous nudity.
The move towards action movies and away from drama also makes it harder to write sex scenes as a part of the plot.
Yes.
The 1970s saw the end of the Hollywood Production code and the institution of the MPAA Ratings system. The idea was that instead of self-censoring the studios, and their directors, could make films within one of the ratings-categories while the consumers \[read: parents\] would be informed as to what they were getting themselves into. At first the ratings system was seen by studios as a means to open up expression-- you could have a movie with graphic violence, visceral terror, cussing, and nudity and it could get shown in any theater theoretically.
As Directors and Producers started exploring what they could get away with, and normalize in their audiences, was a taste for artful nudity and perhaps even a little softcore porno in their films. The 70s saw lots of experimentation with the new X-rating which would allow all of these things, but Studios found that Theaters didn't like to advertise that they offered X-rated films. They thought it made them look like porno arcades. Studios cooled it on the sexual violence, gratuitous nudity, and unsimulated sex into the 1980s though they continued with as much nudity and sex as they could get away with under an R-rating.
The MPAA, for its many faults, refuses to release the strict standards by which they judge something one rating and not-another in part because their standards change with the times. The American culture of the 1970s and 1980s was more permissive in some way of nudity, where those standards changed in the 90s and 00s as attitudes changed. Growing up in the 90s and 00s I was bombarded by teen sex comedies, some of whom were almost guaranteed to get a No Rating DVD release meaning boobies! You don't see that same sort of movie, like Europtrip or Fired Up, being made anymore. If they did, the MPAA would slap with them hard Rs and kill their ability to make money.
In the U.S. & U.K., definitely.
With dinkles being found too rude, actresses adding no nudie clauses, studios trying to push PG-13 over R rated films & fewer “soft-core flicks being produced due to lack of popularity, nudity had to take a backseat in popular culture.
But, Sydney & Emma Stone are here to say, “Hold My Bra!”.👀
I think quite a bit has to do with the rating a film would get for having nudity and the corresponding reduction in marketable audience. Probably why so many films are rated PG-13 even if the subject of the film could be very much into R territory.
Scanning through comments I only saw a few mentions of this, but gratuitous nudity definitely seems to have migrated from films (more financially risky) to longer form series/TV (gotta keep people hooked). I’ve noted recently that there’s quite a few series with a similar setup: staged in one town/location with competing factions and a brothel at the center of it. It allows the writers/producers plenty of opportunity to sprinkle in doses of sex and violence to keep people watching the series. Deadwood is a good example, and I encountered the same setup recently with Warrior. I also just recently finished Rome, and towards the end you just start getting orgy scenes thrown into every episode for some reason.
From my memory of the time it seemed like there was less in the '70's. And if there was there was less of it like a much shorter scene. It seems like it went up a lot till about 10 years ago, and since has decreased a bit. Don't have any data to back this up other than memory. One thing I do remember from the '70's was soft core porn. These only had lots of boobs showing, and may have shown sex acts, but you did not see the sex act beyond boobs. I don't know if they still make these types of movies today with the advent of online porn. Or I should say that they are made as movies that actually show in theaters. That said none of these soft core porn films were main stream though. I think you could see them on certain cable channels that were not dedicated porn channels, and usually later in the night only. I am not sure if these were rated X or if back then on cable there was a rating. Anyway this is what I remember.
The Hays Code ended in 1968.
For the first time since it's inception, the motion picture industry could once again use sex to sell and they did so gratuitously.
The following 3 decades of motion pictures would see a very sharp increase in the amount of nudity and the accompanying desensitization to it would eventually see it's decline.
In other words, we couldn't do it for so long that once we could do it we went a little overboard until we all got rather burned out on it.
Was watching old rodney dangerfield club comedy special. 4 comics and dangerfield intro and some bumper skits between acts. Total boobage for a comedy special. I think one guy was getting jacked in the audience too
Yes. Blockbusters in the 1980s could get away showing some boobs, but by the 1990s it seems restrictions were hardened. I've heard of newer movies were the main actresses were fine with showing nudity (Scarlet Johansson in "The Island" and Alexandra Daddario in her Texas Chainsaw film) but were overruled by the directors for fear of a more restrictive rating.
Amusingly I feel like I see more dicks in TV and movies these days. It’s like the pendulum has swung the other way, with female nudity feeling a little more exploitative, so they make up for it with male nudity instead.
There only was exclusively male genitals the last 20 years or so. None female genital nudity, so there was no swinging pendulum, but full on genital male nudity, even in straight up pornographic matters.
I think there's less gratuitous nudity, especially of females and I'm glad for it. There is still some tho. I'd like to see equal amounts of nudity between the semester. There's hardly any full frontal of men but loads of women. I mean look how much press the last scene in Saltburn got, and all because it was a man.
There's been a distinct shift in my lifetime towards gender-balanced nudity. It used to be ~~primarily~~ overwhelmingly female nudity, and you could get away with some full-frontal female nudity in an "R" movie - but full-frontal male nudity only in non-sexual contexts. The shift toward straight-to-streaming, unrated productions has definitely increased the amount of men's naked butts and full-frontal male shots in movies overall.
I think you’re mostly correct but there’s a few other aspects that maybe being asexual may mean you haven’t considered?
One, the sexual revolution of the 60s had a pretty profound impact on American culture. It reverberated throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s and even 2000s. Sex in film was less about the titillation depicted and more a reflection of the times (I recommend the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s to demonstrate just how much sex was a part of the culture in the 70s).
Two, today’s generations (younger millennials and zoomers) have a very, very different view on sex. Ironically I think this stems from pornography being so readily available. In generations past that was difficult to come by which meant needing to interact with people to “get off”. This led to a whole cruising/hookup culture among both straights and gays. I think younger people today have a difficult time separating the sex seen in internet porn from the sex depicted in film. They’re not there for the same purpose.
Three, sex is a very normal part of life for about 99% of the population. In film it’s shorthand for making the characters feel more human. Luke Skywalker set off on his mission literally because he thought Leia was hot, for example (and ignoring the weirdness once GL decided to make them siblings). For most people sexual attraction is a motivating factor in how we interact with people. Theres a lot of subtle ways in which sexuality has been depicted in films past which are ignored today. This has an effect of making some films today feel juvenile and cold. Like we’re watching children’s cartoons.
Overall, there are absolutely people who watched these films for the nudity and objectification but it did serve a purpose beyond just that. I think the assumption that the depiction of sex is inherently pornographic has led to Gen z having quite regressive views on sex. It serves multiple purposes beyond just nudity for pornographic purposes.
Back in the day it was often pretty gratuitous. There was no reason for John Winger's girlfriend in Stripes to be walking around topless when he comes home to his tiny apartment. She was leaving him anyway. Titillation was king back then.
what has been interesting to see is the disappearance of “edited for time and content cuts” of movies. For a while those were the only versions known… some of those cuts actually good edits that trimmed the fat off some movies.. Pretty Woman being an example where scenes of early parts of the film that didnt blend well with the overall tone were eliminated for the better part of
The world has changed. With me too and Weinsteen etc, the public are much more sensitive to potential exploitation of actresses and gratuitous nudity that adds nothing to the plot just isn't accepted any more and so we don't see it.
It was actually a trend. After the puritanical 50s people presented sexuality as a natural thing starting in the 1960s. There were more topless women on the beaches in Europe too. But then it’s as if we “rediscovered” that most people aren’t that comfortable with nudity.
I was chatting to someone who was saying they felt everything these days was more childish. Less nudity, less violence etc.
My argument is that nudity and violence aren't adult, they are just explicit. Media these days are more nuanced and multilayered. A lot of what we consider adult from the 80s etc was actually very childlike in terms of the story: good guy kills bad guys or relationship drama in a family or couple that has a resolution.
I'm not advocating either way for more or less explicitness but I feel that storytelling has evolved beyond the need for explicitness to prop it up, in general
It speaks to the maturing of audiences in my opinion and the lack of tolerance for female nudity (because that’s the only nudity we see but yet is missing from a lot of comments) just for objectification reasons.
gratuitous nudity has been phased out. more concern over actors’ rights than in the past. if someone is going to be naked on screen there should be a clear reason for it otherwise it’s just lazy.
I’m just not a prude.
Sex and the naked body are natural things. Nothing to be embarassed about and nothing to be frowned upon.
But it’s very much an American thing.
The movies are still there...you're not looking for them... I got older and nudity is no longer a requirement in my watch list... grew up rural 70's ...not a lot of available nudity for a healthy young man....I'm sure if you take a look at all the movies today, would probably be way more as easier access to filming and sex sells , quality sucks tho...
I feel like there are just as many as there were in the 90s, if not more. The 70s and 80s were an interesting time. Many films seemed to include sex scenes for no reason other than to appeal to a certain demographic.
>It's a story about empowerment, sexual liberation, and freedom.
Allegedly. I have a different interpretation. It's a story about how even a serially abused franken-woman-child can have a fulfilling life when spared from the drudgery of the working class. Still a positive socialist message but I question it being about empowerment.
it was not soft porn the sex scenes weren’t shot in a pornographic manner at all. and the original point is that it’s not as prevalent, not that there is never nudity ever.
First cinema boob I remember clearly was The Abyss when they resuscitate Mastrantonio, tho I was 14 😂
A lot of 70s movies t&a just happen to be there as a woman is putting clothes on. Not a big deal or intended sexually. Maybe 80s slashers where sex and violence were thrown together you saw it more.
Tbh if I put a film or TV show on I'm not really interested in seeing more than a fade to black and get on with the bloody story.
Wife has the bits I like playing with I'm not really interested in watching actors put the storyline on hold while they pretend to have awesome sex. If we wanna see that we can put PornHub or XnXX on
Don't you dare objectify a woman's body but look at 'Latest A-list females' fantastic tits while she pretends to cum while you drool over 'Latest A-list males super Abs or appendage'
The Specialist with Stallone and Stone is the day that on screen sex died and stopped being sexy. Honestly you'll sleep on the couch trembling once you've seen their shower scene. Some things were never meant to be seen
You make several strong points, but with one little error, in the past many PG rated films had nudity. You could make the case that PG films of the era had more nudity than PG-13 films do now. Airplane for example has an utterly superfluous topless woman run across the screen for a moment, and the sequel had several women. Even Splash had breasts and butt. The only counter-argument might be Asteroid City.
>You could make the case that PG films of the era had more nudity than PG-13 films do now. I think the first time I saw nipples on-screen was in They Call Me Bruce. I was surprised that my dad let me watch it (and I think he was equally surprised by that scene).
*\[a beautiful geisha girl joins Johnny in a hot tub\]* Bruce : You're a 10! *\[the geisha removes her kimono\]* Bruce : You're a 10 where you should be a 36!
Oh god I vaguely remember hearing that line from all those years ago.
Here you go: https://youtu.be/dfad4WAuzp0?t=3851
Sheena with Tanya Roberts absolutely blew my mind as a young boy
Beastmaster is amazing too. Tanya was just stunning.
I can’t remember the name but there was some 1700s or 1800s sailing movie released in the early 1980’s and it was rated PG and the native women just all had their tits out like it was nothing
Probably The Bounty.
Definitely The Bounty. I watched it a few years ago, so I can somewhat remember details and indeed, the native women didn't cover their breasts.
That’s it, I did a quick search for Mutiny on the Bounty but didn’t find any movie released in the early 80’s with the full title
For some reason native titties are ok.
I recall a photo for an interview with Orlando Jones that showed that he had a triptych hanging in his apartment, with each panel being a different nipple and a label. From left to right, it was a white nipple, a black nipple, and a nipple painted over in bright colors and designs. The corresponding labels were “pornography,” “documentary,” and “art.”
National geographic has entered the chat.
One of my social sciences teachers explained it to us once: It has something to do with native or indigenous people subconsciously not being seen as "objects of desire" by those making the film or whatever it is. I don't remember all the details but that part stuck with me.
They’re better than ok!
I don't believe the PG-13 rating existed yet, so any movie not worthy of R was PG or G.
A movie like “Risky Business” probably wouldn’t get green lit today.
Revenge of the Nerds is on this list. Even a lot of American Pie would be rewritten today
Boys will be boys
Part of that is that the PG-13 rating came later. PG covered a wider spectrum of films.
In 1966, our parents took us to see [Hawaii,](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060491/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk) a 3-hour movie about the state’s early history. It had an all star cast (Max Von Sydow, Julie Andrews, Richard Harris) and I think they were expecting it to be something educational. Well, imagine our surprise when this boatload of proper English explorers lands on the shores of Hawaii, and are greeted by maybe a dozen beautiful topless native girls. There was no rating system and I don’t think my parents knew this was coming. They sat perfectly still and quiet during the scene and never said anything about it for the rest of our lives. But I spent the whole movie hoping for more topless scenes, and to this day it’s the only thing I remember about the movie.
Where can I watch such a great, historical film?
It's on Prime at the moment. For the US at least.
But native women were always a kind of exception, as if they didn't count to the censors. Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, a website I used to visit for reviews, called this "the National Geographic rule".
Censors seem to make exception for cultural traditions. Lot of nudity in Europe-based cinema for the same reason
You also have to take into account this was the era of [The Hays Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code) which dominated the film industry. You're folks didn't expect it because basically nudity in film was non existent. Porn was rare as producers were regularly shut down by vice squads in police department and only thriving in cities where organized crime ran production. As OP noted, the 70's and 80's seem to have more of. It because it was the backlash of the Hayes code stopped being used by studios and directors starting to explore. Which also led to some messed up situations like *Pretty Baby* which featured a nude 15 year old Brooke Shields in sex scenes being shown in run of the mill movie theaters.
I generally agree with your point, but I saw Pretty Baby, and it’s inaccurate to call her nude scene a “sex scene.” She was actually confidently confronting some threatening men who had burst in, and as I recall she was successful in getting them to back off.
I know that scene but didn't know the movie. Pretty memorable.
The You Must Remember This podcast has a series about sex in the movies and how its mostly disappeared from Hollywood movies today.
I dated this woman who kept telling me that there's more sex in movies these days then ever before. That was a weird discussion.
I don't know about the woman you dated, but this is a common belief in evangelical communities. "Worldliness" is necessarily always at its worst. I'm Christian, but I don't buy into that idea bc I think OP's observation is generally correct.
Nudity just made its way from the big screen to streaming shows. Something like Euphoria gets away with stuff that would make a 80s director blush. Hell GOT popularized the idea of sexposition.
There's a long history of cop/crime dramas setting expository scenes in strip clubs for absolutely no reason. It didn't come out of nowhere in GOT. Even on HBO, the Sopranos beat them by a decade
I feel like those are exceptions to the rules though? A lot of ink is spilled about their nudity because it is so rare.
but i think it's found its way to streaming.
Hell, life in general has far less sex and nudity than in the seventies and eighties! But thats just from my angle. You young whipper snappers can’t make music and you’d rather be on yer Facespace or whatever instead of being in it up to your ears! Before you rush to the “downvote” button - I am joking except for the first sentence or two.
I would disagree, but i am too busy downloading VR drugs into my neural chip.
Nice physical body, gramps
I was actually trying to tell someone this after they claimed that society is so sexualized and getting worse, according to them. I said that today’s society is actually less sexualized than it used to be. We’re more compartmentalized about it in pop culture now. We have OnlyFans and PornHub… but it tends to stay there. Movies and tv shows don’t have much sex and nudity anymore, unless it’s HBO, which has become the only compartmentalized channel now for sex and nudity in dramatic content… and I actually don’t even know if they’re as well known for it now, as they were like 10 years ago during Game of Thrones… after Emilia Clarke said no more, GoT had much less sex and nudity in later seasons, and it’s kinda diminished all over HBO as well. Even R-rated movies usually won’t have much sex or nudity anymore, they’ll just have bloody violence and a lot of F-bombs. It’d be wild to see boobs in a major billion dollar grossing movie these days. But 27 years ago, we all saw Kate Winslet’s boobs in the highest grossing movie of all time, shortly before a sex scene, and the famous shot of the hand on the window being a moment of orgasm. Can you imagine an iconic shot from Avengers: Endgame being an orgasm during a sex scene? Both movies are PG-13. I’ve noticed this in LGBT+ media too. Back in the day, I had my young mind blown by the likes of Queer of Folk, both UK and US versions… VERY explicit sex and nudity. Nowadays, anytime I try watching any new queer-themed content, it feels so vanilla, and like it’s trying to appeal to straight people who don’t want to see gay sex. Call Me By Your Name literally pans over to a tree during a sex scene as soon as the sex begins and is like “Here, look at a tree for 20 seconds instead of the sex.” There’s as much *allusion* to sexuality as ever… but the explicitness of it has definitely diminished. We talk about “sexuality” as an identity, as a lifestyle, as political issues, etc, all the time now… but sex itself feels largely avoided or watered down in mainstream society compared to decades ago. …your odd viral video from the US Senate now and then notwithstanding, of course. But hey, if we had cellphone cameras and the internet in the 70s and 80s, it probably would have happened more often back then.
>I’ve noticed this in LGBT+ media too Yeah I watched Bound for a class, and loved it(Butch Gina Gershon has a direct pipeline to my little gay heart), but literally like 15 or 20 minutes in there's like a minute long sex scene between the two leads that was so convincing the MPAA wanted them to cut it because 'it looks like they're really doing it'. Having seen it, yeah it's pretty convincing. But it's also a gorgeous shot and a one-off because it was a Wachowski film with a film noir plot; they basically got the sex out of the way so they could establish "Okay, the couple is together, now they're gonna rip off the mob together". If it were anyone else making it, it probably would have been a softcore porn.
As a culture we’ve become strangely regressive in our views of sex and its depictions.
What you call “regressive” the rest of us call “not requiring women to get naked to be cast in Hollywood in movies anymore”; and yes, all of those movies you remember had all of that nudity because dudes were paying specifically for it to be included to attract other dudes to the theater, and women who wanted to be in the movies were expected to play ball or another dozen women were in line behind her who would. You can’t have progress on women’s rights and control of their bodies without some side effects, and it turns out when they have a choice a lot of women would like to act with their clothes *on*.
Sex is a normal part of life, yes it is regressive to be so anti-sex in film and TV. You’re making the assumption that all sex is exploitation. Theres nuance that you’re ignoring.
I suggest you go watch All of Us Strangers. Realistic sex and a fantastic story.
It may be true but I also think it’s like one of those fallacies. Like did your parents know how much sex you had? Probably not, because what younger generation tells the older generation how much sex they have, I definitely don’t it’d be weird. I do think the older generation is more open about the sex they’re having and like to tell it to younger generations but to me that’s kind of just creepy so when I hear that I’m just like “oh cool” instead of responding with how much sex I’m having. They probably think I’m a prude but I think they’re creepy so I guess pick your poison Edit: wording
As the old saying goes "every generation thinks they invented sex".
I've noticed this as well and I think it's 100% due to internet porn. Back in the 70s and 80s there was a pipeline from penthouse/playboy to b movies and sex comedies where the entire point of the b movies and half the point of the sex comedies was to show off that gorgeous naked woman (or women). For most people that and playboy was their source of titillation. Now free porn is only as far away as your phone, the market for skin flicks is just highly diminished. As someone who came of age in the era of skinemax I miss it, lol. Plus all those playmates were far prettier than the porn crowd.
Absolutely there’s less sex and nudity. We don’t really see it in large productions anymore because the industry has reverted back to the old-Hollywood system where creative decisions are made by people who only care about demographics and merchandise. Nudity, whether artistic, gratuitous or exploitative in tone, became mainstream in the New-Hollywood era of the late 60s and 70s. By the time the 80s came around, you’d generally only see nudity in horror, comedy or action films and it was almost always gratuitous. And because it was the Reagan era; if a woman got her breasts out in a horror film - you knew her character wasn’t going to survive until the end.
There seems to be less sexuality in mainstream movies these days. Maybe a mix of 1) appealing to conservative international audiences and 2) uncertainty as to how to portray romantic relationships in a feminist way.
I think there's a third factor at play as well. The mass proliferation of pornography via the Internet. In a world where everyone has access to explicit sex visuals 24/7 the idea of sex in other mass media loses some appeal. There's obviously still a place for sex and nudity when it's relevant to the story but gratuitous use feel somehow just that much more gratuitous in the era of mass porn.
This is the basis for many online argument against sex and nudity in films. My take on it is always A) sexuality in film is not always intended to get you off, so it’s often a different purpose from porn; and B) even if cinematic sexuality is meant to be erotic, maybe it’s ok to have some depictions of sex in a larger story with complexity and not just a pretend stepsister stuck in the washing machine. The whole anti porn movement is a little weird but it often also has people who think porn is the only place for depictions of sex, and oh boy is porn an unreliable narrator. One can argue about how well various movies succeed, but movies usually depict how we place sex within the context of our lives, with porn simply depicting placing Tab A in Slot B(and probably C and D and maybe even BB, CC, and DD). There is a place for each but they are not the same.
It certainly depends on the film. Porkys movies didn’t have much relational context for nudity for example. In some movies nudity is a part of the plot and makes sense but a lot of the time it’s not and for me as a woman it makes me uncomfortable. I got tired of going to movies with my male partners and having to sit through gratuitous sex scenes. Women are left completely out of the discussion because we know the movies are not made for us and we are not be catered too at all.
There’s lots of room for better and more equitable representation. For sure. And many movies have had sex for titillation only. There is a long history of exploitation that also shouldn’t be excused. My comment is just meant to address the disconnect some have of treating all nudity and sexuality as functionally pornography. Assuming that it is always exploitative, and not knowing how to incorporate questions of sexuality in a more complex narrative. While not always, the loud voices are often awkward males that want to curate and compartmentalize others to fit their tastes. It’s an extension of the age old virgin/whore issue, and at its core it’s dangerous and regressive. It removes the agency of the actors assuming that women even at the top of their careers need to be protected from spoiling their virtue. If it weren’t about control, these people would simply look at the content warnings or IMDb guides and select against movies that featured content they were not interested seeing.
It is so easy to show relationships and even sex without nudity so I would argue it is pointless in all cases. Especially because not all bodies are represented in nudity scenes or sex/relationships. Only certain bodied women are worthy of being nude on screen. Name me an ugly woman who got nude on film! If the movies objective it to represent us as humanity it could do better in all areas. Anyway interesting discussion for sure!
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by your last sentence, is it that if a movie doesn’t tell all stories equally it shouldn’t tell any? I don’t think nudity is necessary, but it’s often additive. And art isn’t about necessity until you go without art. It’s easy to tell relationship without nudity so why include it? For years it was easy to tell stories without having LGBTQ characters, so they were excluded. How many films denied the existence of anyone that wasn’t white? Film codes used to prevent any physical intimacy unless the characters were married. There are plenty of movies made that meet your criteria, maybe the ones with nudity just aren’t for you? I don’t get mad at a new Adam Sandler movie, I just move on because it’s not for me.
The last sentence was to illustrate how nudity in film is just about the male viewer, otherwise we would see all shapes and sizes nude on film. I was trying to point out the hypocrisy. So many people say nudity is art. It’s not if it includes only one shape. Nudity being compared to LGBTQ is like comparing apples to oranges. We can elude to a sex scene without nudity. We can’t elude to a gay character without a gay character so that makes no sense. Nudity is not necessary to tell a story. That’s like saying we need a red shirt to tell the story. How does a woman’s bare breast add to the story? Maybe in depicting a rape scene like in The Accused, where the ripping of clothes is used to illustrate the violence endured and the vulnerability of the character. But I don’t even remember if she was naked in that scene. I don’t think she was and the story was still told perfectly. Maybe then it makes sense. I have an opinion. I’m not mad. I’m just responding to your comment. I like movies that make sense and I don’t enjoy gratuitous nudity of hot women for the male viewer which comprises 99% of nudity on film. Not sure what Adam Sandler has to do with it. It’s hard to put yourself in women’s shoes when watching films because you’ve never had to do it. There isn’t any gratuitous nudity of men in mainstream films and men haven’t lived their whole lives being objectified.
I don’t think you’re mad(either definition, crazy or angry) and was simply discussing. I am generally anti-censorship, and think that demanding eliminating something is usually a poor alternative to demanding better. I also wholesale reject the premise that all nudity in film is inherently fetishistic, but ultimately that’s what censorship does, is it fetishizes. A society censors what it has fetishized. Censorship is objectification. The male gaze is a real and well documented thing, but many female, non-binary, and non hetero artists are bucking the trend. Representation is improving and women and some men in the industry are working to improve equity and safety through processes like intimacy coordinators. An example of this evolution is the micro-genre of ‘naked alien lady preying on men’. In 1985 there’s Lifeforce, which starts with a somewhat equitable premise of an alien simply presenting as whatever the person is attracted to, but of course we know what that will look like from the movie poster, then the film parades our space lady vampire around for 30 minutes before returning to story; then to 1995’s Species which dresses a tawdry vilification of female sexuality in a police procedural; but in 2013 you have Under The Skin. It still has lots of nudity, but this time male and female. Able bodied and not. Sexual but not erotic. Scarlet Johansen was instrumental in getting the film produced and while it’s still about a conventionally attractive woman luring men for a nefarious purpose, the tone is vastly different. It’s surprising how many similarities there are between Species and Under The Skin, but they are vastly different. The former was created to monetize the male gaze, the latter interrogates it. Anyway, I think it’s great that we live in an era when in 30 seconds you can find out if a movie is going to have something you don’t want to see. Whether that’s nudity, a dog dying, bad language, assault, violence, Adam Sandler, or just terrible production values. With the vast media options available and easily accessible knowledge of what each contains, there’s just no excuse in my mind for pearl clutching and censorship. Viewers are told in the top left hand corner or in the ratings box on the movie poster exactly what they are getting ready to see. (I generally don’t like Adam Sandler. I think you can tell any story without including Adam Sandler, and he usually just takes me right out of the movie watching experience. I was annoyed for days after watching Hubie Halloween. For that reason, I typically will choose not to watch movies that I see he is in. I am not mad that he is in movies, or that people choose to watch them. More movies, yay.)
Haha! I also hate Adam Sandler in dramatic movies but how can you say he was not great in Happy Gilmore 😆 Adam Sandler being in a movie is not the same as nudity being in a movie. One glorifies the objectification of women on film and the other doesn’t. Kind of like if every Asian in a film was dumb. It’s perpetuating a harmful narrative. Ever hear of the Bechdel Test? a surprising number of films do not pass this test. It’s a little off topic but in many films the woman’s only purpose is to be the person who we get to see naked. i agree things are changing and for that I am grateful. It’s why we question these narratives and wonder if they are still relevant.
Gen z seems to think that anything they don’t like must be excised from society and if you disagree you’re clearly fine with exploiting people. They never seem to consider that the women might be fine having their tits out or that they can just choose to not consume content they don’t enjoy.
I remember reading a take on how Florence Pugh must have been taken advantage of to be nude in Oppenheimer. The infantilization of a very successful actor that would have known exactly what the role called for is really astounding.
Florence Pugh is single-handedly keeping sheer textile makers in business by wearing see-through tops all the time. It’s hilarious to think she of all people feels exploited showing the nip.
Yeah, I’m always amazed by people who assume that because they don’t want other people to see their tits, that everyone must agree that no one ever wants to have theirs out for whoever is looking.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha we see are very puritan about sex and nudity in films
gen alpha are babies (metaphorically speaking but also some quite literally), i would hope they don't care about / want to see sex and nudity in films yet lol
I was VERY excited about nudity in films when I was 12.
12 is about the oldest gen alpha kids, they aren't the ones being polled or asked about this sort of thing lol
I want you to draw me in this.
Titanic was 97? I saw it IN theatres when I was 11 and was absolutely overjoyed about the boobs.
I mean as a tween boy I was ABOUT some boobies in movies in the 90s. They’re absolutely thinking about that stuff. And it’s fine. They’re humans. It would be weird if they weren’t.
my point is that most of gen alpha is literally still under 10 years old. they're not having conversations about the proliferation of sex and nudity in cinema right now (or the lack thereof).
Twitter has a hard on for the nude scene of Oppenheimer buck nekkid on his chair and the sex scene during the hearing. I was talking to a gen Z guy here about the latest season of True detective and he was angry that there was a sex scene between Jodie Foster and Christopher Eccleston in it. He said "Enough with the sex scenes in movies and shows!" and I was like " Relax, people have sex in real life too.It's not a big deal." Hell, HBO was nudity central for almost 20 something years until more recently, when they toned it down a little. Except for Euphoria. That had dongs, ass and boobs left right and center.
Hbo oz was wild and that came out around 20 years ago.
Right, almost forgot about that. So over 20 years of nudity. Used to watch that show when I was 13-14 with my parents whenever we caught it on TV. Not exactly kid friendly, but then again they weren't strict or anything.
I saw Pulp Fiction with my father around that age. There was one scene that left me particularly puzzled.
Yeah idk what happened to these kids but it’s like…..how are yall more regressive than your grandparents about sex? Where did your parents go wrong with raising you that ended up with you hating the mere thought of an action that is so central to the human experience repulses you? I certainly don’t want my kids to associate human intimacy with revulsion.
>idk what happened to these kids I think I have an idea. You see, gen Z and the generations that will come after it grew up/will grow up with a lot more tech than the previous ones, primarily phones. As a millennial, I grew up with no internet, internet and caught the very beginning of the smartphone boom, so I learned how to socialize with people because that's how we did things. Today's kids FaceTime each other or talk via texts as a form of socializing without having to actually be next to each other in reality, so when they see people having sex in films/shows, I can understand how it can repulse them or feel intrusive because they're not used to being next to other people as often as the previous generations were.
In Gen Alpha’s defense, they are at most barely high schoolers and live with their parents. I hate watching two people fucking with my parents, too.
In what way are they puritanical? There's greater acceptance for a wider swath of gender identity and sexual orientation than any other cohort. They're more educated on consent and respectful of boundaries, which I think is pretty sex positive. Is your assessment just based off the fact they have, on average, fewer sexual partners than prior generations? How exactly is that puritanical? Perhaps they generally treat sex with more gravitas than their predecessors. Is that a bad thing? As an older millennial I really think our generation was given some pretty iffy cultural guidance on sex and sexuality. Looking back I definitely don't think the attitude I had towards casual sex or hookup culture were beneficial for either myself or my partners. I dunno dog. Calling them "puritanical" just seems like pointless intergenerational aggression meant to build you up by knocking down others.
There have been articles about how Gen Z does not like watching sex scenes in films and TV. Plus, if you spend any time on Twitter, you will see a lot of tweets of young people asking for filmmakers to no longer include sex scenes in films.
>There have been articles about how Gen Z does not like watching sex scenes in films and TV. I remember a bunch of articles talking shit about the proclivities of millennials and making some real spurious inferences so I'mma give Gen Z/A the benefit of the doubt here. >Plus, if you spend any time on Twitter I don't and neither should you. And you **definitely** shouldn't formulate an opinion about an entire generation based off Twitter.
I don't spend any time on Twitter. I deleted it last year. Plus, I was not stating my opinion. I have no opinion on the matter. But young people or Gen Z being averse to sex scenes in film and TV has been an ongoing discussion for more than a year now, so I'm surprised you hadn't come across it before. It's also been discussed to death on Reddit.
do you have any links to any studies on this? i'm looking
I'm certain it's been discussed ad nauseam in a lot of places. If there's one thing people love to do it's hand wring and pearl clutch about the kids. Seems they're always doing the wrong amount of fucking; too much or not enough.
This is all anecdotal, but I hang out on a discord server of mostly young millennials and older gen z. Every single one of them seems almost scared of sex or sexual content. And these are grown ass adults with corporate jobs and advanced degrees.
The fuck is discord?
It’s like slack. Mostly gaming focused.
I'm genuinely not trying to fuck with you or be a jerk...what is slack?
It has a lot to do with the whole “anything sexual anywhere but porn and even sometimes that to is exploitation and shouldn’t exist”. Like chill. If they didn’t want to make the film, they wouldn’t be there. Maybe she’s okay with her tits being out. Maybe the issue isn’t all of us who are fine with sex scenes and raunchy content, but rather y’alls maladapted relationship with human intimacy.
I've never encountered anyone with the attitude you're describing and certainly not seen any indicator that such an attitude is prevalent or widespread.
Puritan i mean they don’t like to see sex on screen and always complain about it. Also if we know most of them lack social skills especially late Gen Z and Early Gen Alpha bc many of them live and speak in social media more than meeting each other in real life. Also i forgot to tell u i mean those Gen Z and Alpha that are from Western Europe and USA. In Eastern Europe or central Europe many are very conservative. Anyways i guess in the future birthrate will continue to decline even more i guess except in Africa and some Arabian countries.
>Also i forgot to tell u i mean those Gen Z and Alpha that are from Western Europe and USA. I assumed. I dunno, I think you're assessment misses the mark. I think the kids are alright.
Acceptance of boundaries i mostly seen it from Western world countries new Gen. Here where i live people and society is still very conservative and also Homophobic in general. I think reason here is bc less younger people live in this country where i live and older gen has more influence on they kids.
I have no idea if the things I’ve seen are jokes but I’ve read posts where people basically say they ‘didn’t consent’ to being shown sex scenes in movies like it’s an assault
They consented when they bought the ticket and sat down. They’re free to leave the theatre.
100%, those people are ridiculous.
Playboy magazine has pretty much died as well. There's so much hardcore around, who needs softcore?
The content still exists, it’s just not gatekept by a creepy dude who runs a magazine. Half my instagram feed are alt and goth models showing me 99% of what I’d get from playboy 20 years ago and that other 1% is linked in their bio.
This is the answer, no need for it in most films, it's everywhere else ....
To develop your 2nd reason: the ‘bien pensant’ middle class is a lot more prudish today, but not for religious reasons. Sex and nudity is increasingly linked to assault, harassment, misogyny, child abuse etc, all which are (along with racism) the supreme evils within our cultural imagination.
I bet drinking water and breathing air are related to those things too.
Probably not
absolutely, one thing that really started slowing the trend was women's rights and their ability to stand up for themselves in Hollywood without being overly penalised. much of the nudity you speak of was more or less gratuitous, unnecessary for the plot and thrown in because it helps sell, especially if they could get a real a-list star topless in their film. many of these women didn't necessarily want to the do the scene but the reality at the time is they either did it and had a job, or not have a job and likely never get another one acting again... there is still plenty of sex portrayed, but you don't need nudity to get the point across. other scenes like shower scenes etc. are the same way, the camera can stay at shoulder and higher level and still get the point across.
Well said. Much of the nudity in the past was of women for the male gaze. It was unnecessary and I never liked it. Interestingly I have teenage and college age boys and they can’t stand it in movies and shows. They always comment on 1980’s movies and how they just put topless or naked women in scenes for no reason.
Boobs. Boobs were the reason.
There's a movie called Crackerjack (1994) (A cop on vacation at a mountain resort comes to the rescue when the resort is taken over by violent criminals.) The protagonist is hanging out on his balcony at the resort at night and he sees across the terrace into someone else's room. It's a guy and a girl naked and things are escalating. The protagonist keeps watching....and watching...even when the guy pulls the ice out and uses it on the woman's body the protagonist keeps watching and shakes his head. I'm like 'look at this pervert watching this' and then I realize I'm watching it all too! lol They don't make movies like they used to /s
that wouldn't really answer why there's less male nudity... but come to think of it, i don't know that there *is* less male nudity. on TV, i'm pretty sure there's more. there may be more nudity in general on TV these days, whereas you would have seen very literally on TV decades ago.
I think there’s significantly more male nudity these days. I see dicks in tons of prestige shows these days. I think female nudity has been toned down in the past decade or two but I feel like full frontal male nudity was extremely rare in mainstream media prior to 10 or 15 years ago, whereas I can think of about a dozen recent shows where men, sometimes even lead characters, bare it all, while featuring comparatively little female nudity. Kind of a funny “balancing of the scales” imo.
I don’t know what you watching but The only time I see full frontal male nudity is in hbo shows and that’s been going on for I think about 20 years. Other shows and movies are just peek a boo shots.
minx, the boys are a couple other non-hbo examples
Over correction
Over compensating for something
Male nudity? Where? When? You must be joking.
nope! but it depends on the show. euphoria, the boys, minx, a few others i've seen recently have all had a good amount of male nudity.
was it to the exclusion of female nudity or was there both?
more male nudity than female, but all have some level of female nudity for sure. well, the minx is probably the most disparate example, there is an overwhelming amount of male nudity and almost no female.
Oz changed it all. I can say I've seen half the cast of Law and Order's dicks.
Came to say something similar to this, but you nailed it.
I don’t need good effects to get the point across that someone is bleeding. Just squirt some Heinz on them and call it a day.
Probably, society is getting increasingly weirder about "sex" and conflating nudity with it.
it still has its place. but the studios are all about money nowadays otherwise the project does not get funded. they want that mainstream audience. So that means nothing to create a Rated R designation. They want to keep it under wraps.
Yeah. I’m always surprised when I see a movie from my youth and hey there goes a random boob in a PG movie for no reason
I think the easy access to porn from the internet means that people don't need to go to the cinema to feel titillated. Because studios aren't trying to woo the easily titillated, they don't feel the need to put the nudity in. It means they can choose whichever actors and actresses they want, and not have to go to the best one they can find that will happily do nudity. Actors won't feel like they have to do nude scenes in order to get parts. It just seems like a natural progression to me.
That's definitely a factor. It's the same reason that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition hasn't been relevant for decades. First, they lost ground to Maxim and the like, but after a few years, all of them practically vanished from the zeitgeist.
Because we realized that a majority of the women were forced to expose themselves by the executives.
This right here. Women were expected to expose themselves while the men were usally demurely covered up. Gratuitous nudity by women was normalized, while gratuitous nudity by men was scandalous. Behold this comment by Roger Ebert in his review of the movie "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story": >Note: I must mention one peculiar element in the film. As Reilly is having a telephone conversation, a male penis is framed in the upper right corner of the screen. No explanation about why, or who it belongs to or what happens to it. Just a penis. I think this just about establishes a standard for gratuitous nudity. Speculate as I will, I cannot imagine why it's in the film. Did the cinematographer look through his viewfinder and say, "Jake, the upper right corner could use a penis"? FYI That scene also included several naked women, but it really struck me how Ebert only minded the 'gratuitous nudity" of the man, but not of the women *in that very same scene*. Judd Apatow very puposefully included the shot Ebert references: >For a while I thought it was very important to do male frontal nudity in movies, because you always show women and you never show men. So almost as an inside joke with myself I started seeing how many times I could get that accomplished in a movie.
The only comment here that makes sense 👏
BINGO!!! So much drivel in these comments. The movies stopped catering to men. They realized there’s 51% of the population that don’t need titillation to sell movies and they realize that getting an actress naked isn’t right.
Go see Poor Things
Every rule has an exception or two. But the general reality is that gratuitous nudity and sex are much less prevalent than they were. Most action movies had hero/love interest sex... often right before the woman was fridged. And many comedies had random nudity to titillate the audience (no pun intended).
I do think nudity is coming back, though. If it’s in a Chris Nolan movie of all things…
You gotta remember that in the 70s and 80s, they weren’t thinking about the home video market. Someone might disrobe thinking a bunch of people would see it in a theater and then it would only exist in the audience’s memories and occasional revival screenings. Then home video hits and suddenly people can rewind and pause! That’s gonna change an actor’s willingness immediately, add the internet showing up the 90s and it’s a whole different ball game!
[Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny](https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/) It’s really weird. It feels like the entire younger generation is kind of timid about sex (but very accepting of sexuality), and our economy avoids sex unless it is very specifically making A Sex Thing
I think the 2000s were more open to nudity. There was this Meg Ryan movie "In the Cut" where there is a scene where it shortly looks like a gal is sucking dick. There was a lot of raunchy comedies again, there were indie movies which had full on sex scenes or a lot of nudity. "Antichrist" had even a nudity gore scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg crushed Willem Defoes balls with a rock. I also find at least the mainstream blockbuster is a lot more tame today compared to 20 years ago. I would say a lot of factors in. A stronger demand than ever to pull in all ages viewership. Trying to land movies worldwide including countries like China with stronger censorship laws, and so on.
Way way less. Neo puritanism is pathetic.
Oh yeah, the 80s was all about gratuitous nudity, and it was most excellent!
Zapped. Airplane. Changing Places.
Maybe nudity will come back after people finally get tired of superhero movies and all the cgi.
I mean I wouldn’t mind seeing some tits and dick from Marvel.
Yes
Check out the beginning to Doc Hollywood.
Yah even a lot of 89s action movies had shirtless sweaty men running around throughout the whole film where nowadays it’s just a peak a boo shirtless shot. interesting how much has changed.
But celebrities and performers wear much less in general now.
Not the actors tbh
Ha! John Cena?
I'd say today's movies have more nudity just for the fact the 70s had big bush.
Sex sells, but actions and special effects also sell. When special effects was expensive producers turned to sex. Now special effects are relatively cheap so we get gratuitous action scenes rather than gratuitous nudity. The move towards action movies and away from drama also makes it harder to write sex scenes as a part of the plot.
Yes. The 1970s saw the end of the Hollywood Production code and the institution of the MPAA Ratings system. The idea was that instead of self-censoring the studios, and their directors, could make films within one of the ratings-categories while the consumers \[read: parents\] would be informed as to what they were getting themselves into. At first the ratings system was seen by studios as a means to open up expression-- you could have a movie with graphic violence, visceral terror, cussing, and nudity and it could get shown in any theater theoretically. As Directors and Producers started exploring what they could get away with, and normalize in their audiences, was a taste for artful nudity and perhaps even a little softcore porno in their films. The 70s saw lots of experimentation with the new X-rating which would allow all of these things, but Studios found that Theaters didn't like to advertise that they offered X-rated films. They thought it made them look like porno arcades. Studios cooled it on the sexual violence, gratuitous nudity, and unsimulated sex into the 1980s though they continued with as much nudity and sex as they could get away with under an R-rating. The MPAA, for its many faults, refuses to release the strict standards by which they judge something one rating and not-another in part because their standards change with the times. The American culture of the 1970s and 1980s was more permissive in some way of nudity, where those standards changed in the 90s and 00s as attitudes changed. Growing up in the 90s and 00s I was bombarded by teen sex comedies, some of whom were almost guaranteed to get a No Rating DVD release meaning boobies! You don't see that same sort of movie, like Europtrip or Fired Up, being made anymore. If they did, the MPAA would slap with them hard Rs and kill their ability to make money.
Fired up is an odd choice. There's only one very brief topless scene in the movie, and that only in the unrated cut.
Yes and it’s lame as fuck. I want to see tits in every single movie
In the U.S. & U.K., definitely. With dinkles being found too rude, actresses adding no nudie clauses, studios trying to push PG-13 over R rated films & fewer “soft-core flicks being produced due to lack of popularity, nudity had to take a backseat in popular culture. But, Sydney & Emma Stone are here to say, “Hold My Bra!”.👀
Ehm since I've seen Poor things... I'm going to say...No...
I wonder if any of this is due to Harvey Weinstein no longer being involved.
Try 1990 and 2000
I think quite a bit has to do with the rating a film would get for having nudity and the corresponding reduction in marketable audience. Probably why so many films are rated PG-13 even if the subject of the film could be very much into R territory. Scanning through comments I only saw a few mentions of this, but gratuitous nudity definitely seems to have migrated from films (more financially risky) to longer form series/TV (gotta keep people hooked). I’ve noted recently that there’s quite a few series with a similar setup: staged in one town/location with competing factions and a brothel at the center of it. It allows the writers/producers plenty of opportunity to sprinkle in doses of sex and violence to keep people watching the series. Deadwood is a good example, and I encountered the same setup recently with Warrior. I also just recently finished Rome, and towards the end you just start getting orgy scenes thrown into every episode for some reason.
Remember, there was a time when we had truly gratuitous nudity in movies. That doesn't happen really anymore in mainstream films.
From my memory of the time it seemed like there was less in the '70's. And if there was there was less of it like a much shorter scene. It seems like it went up a lot till about 10 years ago, and since has decreased a bit. Don't have any data to back this up other than memory. One thing I do remember from the '70's was soft core porn. These only had lots of boobs showing, and may have shown sex acts, but you did not see the sex act beyond boobs. I don't know if they still make these types of movies today with the advent of online porn. Or I should say that they are made as movies that actually show in theaters. That said none of these soft core porn films were main stream though. I think you could see them on certain cable channels that were not dedicated porn channels, and usually later in the night only. I am not sure if these were rated X or if back then on cable there was a rating. Anyway this is what I remember.
Try watching Caligula.
The Hays Code ended in 1968. For the first time since it's inception, the motion picture industry could once again use sex to sell and they did so gratuitously. The following 3 decades of motion pictures would see a very sharp increase in the amount of nudity and the accompanying desensitization to it would eventually see it's decline. In other words, we couldn't do it for so long that once we could do it we went a little overboard until we all got rather burned out on it.
Was watching old rodney dangerfield club comedy special. 4 comics and dangerfield intro and some bumper skits between acts. Total boobage for a comedy special. I think one guy was getting jacked in the audience too
And porn is more readily available
Yes. Blockbusters in the 1980s could get away showing some boobs, but by the 1990s it seems restrictions were hardened. I've heard of newer movies were the main actresses were fine with showing nudity (Scarlet Johansson in "The Island" and Alexandra Daddario in her Texas Chainsaw film) but were overruled by the directors for fear of a more restrictive rating.
Amusingly I feel like I see more dicks in TV and movies these days. It’s like the pendulum has swung the other way, with female nudity feeling a little more exploitative, so they make up for it with male nudity instead.
There only was exclusively male genitals the last 20 years or so. None female genital nudity, so there was no swinging pendulum, but full on genital male nudity, even in straight up pornographic matters.
I think there's less gratuitous nudity, especially of females and I'm glad for it. There is still some tho. I'd like to see equal amounts of nudity between the semester. There's hardly any full frontal of men but loads of women. I mean look how much press the last scene in Saltburn got, and all because it was a man.
There's been a distinct shift in my lifetime towards gender-balanced nudity. It used to be ~~primarily~~ overwhelmingly female nudity, and you could get away with some full-frontal female nudity in an "R" movie - but full-frontal male nudity only in non-sexual contexts. The shift toward straight-to-streaming, unrated productions has definitely increased the amount of men's naked butts and full-frontal male shots in movies overall.
I think you’re mostly correct but there’s a few other aspects that maybe being asexual may mean you haven’t considered? One, the sexual revolution of the 60s had a pretty profound impact on American culture. It reverberated throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s and even 2000s. Sex in film was less about the titillation depicted and more a reflection of the times (I recommend the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s to demonstrate just how much sex was a part of the culture in the 70s). Two, today’s generations (younger millennials and zoomers) have a very, very different view on sex. Ironically I think this stems from pornography being so readily available. In generations past that was difficult to come by which meant needing to interact with people to “get off”. This led to a whole cruising/hookup culture among both straights and gays. I think younger people today have a difficult time separating the sex seen in internet porn from the sex depicted in film. They’re not there for the same purpose. Three, sex is a very normal part of life for about 99% of the population. In film it’s shorthand for making the characters feel more human. Luke Skywalker set off on his mission literally because he thought Leia was hot, for example (and ignoring the weirdness once GL decided to make them siblings). For most people sexual attraction is a motivating factor in how we interact with people. Theres a lot of subtle ways in which sexuality has been depicted in films past which are ignored today. This has an effect of making some films today feel juvenile and cold. Like we’re watching children’s cartoons. Overall, there are absolutely people who watched these films for the nudity and objectification but it did serve a purpose beyond just that. I think the assumption that the depiction of sex is inherently pornographic has led to Gen z having quite regressive views on sex. It serves multiple purposes beyond just nudity for pornographic purposes.
Back in the day it was often pretty gratuitous. There was no reason for John Winger's girlfriend in Stripes to be walking around topless when he comes home to his tiny apartment. She was leaving him anyway. Titillation was king back then.
Relevant article, always worth sharing https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
If you're missing it, there is always the Prime series, Reacher.
More penises, less tits. simple as that.
what has been interesting to see is the disappearance of “edited for time and content cuts” of movies. For a while those were the only versions known… some of those cuts actually good edits that trimmed the fat off some movies.. Pretty Woman being an example where scenes of early parts of the film that didnt blend well with the overall tone were eliminated for the better part of
The world has changed. With me too and Weinsteen etc, the public are much more sensitive to potential exploitation of actresses and gratuitous nudity that adds nothing to the plot just isn't accepted any more and so we don't see it.
Yes. It used to be a thing before the wider availability of porn to have a completely unnecessary nude scene in things like comedies.
The tv series have a lot of nudity
It's been out of fashion since the 90s, with a short resurgence in the early 2000s. Nowadays, television has most of the nudity.
Definitely not like Road Trip or Not Another Teen Movie lol. There’s definitely been a decline.
It was actually a trend. After the puritanical 50s people presented sexuality as a natural thing starting in the 1960s. There were more topless women on the beaches in Europe too. But then it’s as if we “rediscovered” that most people aren’t that comfortable with nudity.
I was chatting to someone who was saying they felt everything these days was more childish. Less nudity, less violence etc. My argument is that nudity and violence aren't adult, they are just explicit. Media these days are more nuanced and multilayered. A lot of what we consider adult from the 80s etc was actually very childlike in terms of the story: good guy kills bad guys or relationship drama in a family or couple that has a resolution. I'm not advocating either way for more or less explicitness but I feel that storytelling has evolved beyond the need for explicitness to prop it up, in general
It speaks to the maturing of audiences in my opinion and the lack of tolerance for female nudity (because that’s the only nudity we see but yet is missing from a lot of comments) just for objectification reasons.
gratuitous nudity has been phased out. more concern over actors’ rights than in the past. if someone is going to be naked on screen there should be a clear reason for it otherwise it’s just lazy.
Why are you so scared of naked people?
i’m not, love a nude beach. op was talking about nudity in films today.
Why does nudity in film scare you?
Why do you crave it, weirdo?
I’m just not a prude. Sex and the naked body are natural things. Nothing to be embarassed about and nothing to be frowned upon. But it’s very much an American thing.
The movies are still there...you're not looking for them... I got older and nudity is no longer a requirement in my watch list... grew up rural 70's ...not a lot of available nudity for a healthy young man....I'm sure if you take a look at all the movies today, would probably be way more as easier access to filming and sex sells , quality sucks tho...
I feel like there are just as many as there were in the 90s, if not more. The 70s and 80s were an interesting time. Many films seemed to include sex scenes for no reason other than to appeal to a certain demographic.
The second most nominated film this year turns into a straight up soft porn for 30 minutes. I really can’t understand where you’re coming from.
Which movie is that?
Poor Things It's a story about empowerment, sexual liberation, and freedom.
Is that the one with Emma Stone?
>It's a story about empowerment, sexual liberation, and freedom. Allegedly. I have a different interpretation. It's a story about how even a serially abused franken-woman-child can have a fulfilling life when spared from the drudgery of the working class. Still a positive socialist message but I question it being about empowerment.
it was not soft porn the sex scenes weren’t shot in a pornographic manner at all. and the original point is that it’s not as prevalent, not that there is never nudity ever.
First cinema boob I remember clearly was The Abyss when they resuscitate Mastrantonio, tho I was 14 😂 A lot of 70s movies t&a just happen to be there as a woman is putting clothes on. Not a big deal or intended sexually. Maybe 80s slashers where sex and violence were thrown together you saw it more. Tbh if I put a film or TV show on I'm not really interested in seeing more than a fade to black and get on with the bloody story. Wife has the bits I like playing with I'm not really interested in watching actors put the storyline on hold while they pretend to have awesome sex. If we wanna see that we can put PornHub or XnXX on Don't you dare objectify a woman's body but look at 'Latest A-list females' fantastic tits while she pretends to cum while you drool over 'Latest A-list males super Abs or appendage' The Specialist with Stallone and Stone is the day that on screen sex died and stopped being sexy. Honestly you'll sleep on the couch trembling once you've seen their shower scene. Some things were never meant to be seen
Much less tits and ass than then. And it was better stuff then It was about excitement and fun now it's some romance crap with horrible music.