It's worse because they're shoehorning in a romance plot performatively to show off how progressive the showrunners are because every romance plot on TV now has to demonstrate a high degree of intersectionality.
Representation is great but now we're over-representing and alienating the audience.
Just want to add to this -- sometimes the sex is so gratuitous and over the top that it's distracting from the meaning and message of the show. I'm looking at you, Sense8 -- the one show where doing the above actually made sense.
But that hasn't been a thing since before I was alive. We've had a strong run of popular sitcoms depicting black families on all of the major TV networks since the '70s. Many times they've led the ratings.
And I watched them. Maybe you didn't?
Edit: Heck, "I Love Lucy" aired in the early 1950s and the show's entire plot was about an interracial marriage. And that show only started two years after commercial TV in most homes was even a thing. It was the very first sitcom to be a #1 rated show.
The "bad times" scenario you're depicting is largely a fiction. What was that Jennifer Lawrence quote? “I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,”
She was clearly expressing a sentiment that she felt to be true at the time, even though it isn't backed up by the data -- much like this similar scenario.
> She was clearly expressing a sentiment that she felt to be true at the time,
Is that clear? She's a professional actress; if she were reading a line written by some PR hack that she didn't really believe was true, how can you be sure you could tell?
Maybe she believed it, or maybe she was told to say this sort of thing to promote the movie. Since she's a professional actress, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She probably wasn't totally ignorant of her own industry.
I remember watching The Cosby Show as a kid and also a bunch of white family sitcoms. Now I see shows that don't feel so categorized or partitioned as either a black show or a white one, which feels like an improvement.
And yet interracial relationships were a major plot point of both All In The Family and its spinoff The Jeffersons way back in the 1970s. And the topic was treated with some level of seriousness, unlike what you would see today.
My own experiences in a mixed family looks a lot closer to how the topic was discussed back then then it's portrayed on TV now.
Yes both those things happened in the 1970s and they were such rare exceptions that they were a big deal and controversial and you're still citing them 50 years later.
Now it's just a thing that happens and doesn't stand out as rare or controversial or serious/groundbreaking, (to most) which again is an improvement.
But today's portrayal is totally unrealistic and sucks all the oxygen out of the room for having grounded discussions in public around the issue.
I know very few people of mixed background where that isn't a source of family strife somewhere. I am not arguing that anyone should be against it but a) most people don't want their children to suffer, b) mixed children are still unfortunately almost guaranteed to encounter strife in their lives from their background, and c) those mixed children deserve the conversation in public rather than have their lives portrayed on TV as if they should be perfect when they aren't.
Lucy and Ricky were both Caucasian. I don’t believe an interracial marriage would have been permitted on TV in the 1950s. (The idea that your “race” is determined by your accent or place of birth is pretty recent.)
If I understand you correctly, you’ve retreated from your position that the marriage was “interracial”, but maintain that nevertheless there was something controversial about it at the time. What was the controversy? Can you support your claim, other than by asking me to search for octogenarians and trust their memories?
DESI ARNAZ: Nobody wanted me to play Ricky. The network. The sponsors. Nobody. Who the hell believes this Babalu fellow is going to be married to this typical American girl?[1]
I don't know what words people used then. And the public accepted it more than executives feared. But they didn't see him as white like her.
> every romance plot on TV now has to demonstrate a high degree of intersectionality
It's not hard for people to begin noticing how unrealistic many stories end up becoming. It's shoddy writing and story-telling and the artificial nature takes you out of the world that's been created.
> A Milestone: All Of The Walking Dead's Relationships Are Now Interracial Or LGBT
A while back I decided to see a movie in theaters after a night out and it was allegedly the billionth iteration of some horror franchise (Scream I think? Maybe Halloween?). Turned out to not even really be a horror movie, but some dopey drama/romance. Waste of my money, but thankfully it wasn’t much money.
Is this now worse or better? It seems like there were tons on 1970s films that had a sex subplot awkwardly crammed in. For example, the ridiculous and seemingly endless sex scene in "Three Days of the Condor", an otherwise fairly tight 1974 spy film.
It seems like there's a range of better and worse ways to do it. The contemporaneous and comparable film "The Day of the Jackal" has a seduction element that is central to the plot, so it doesn't seem shoehorned in.
For some reason, people (usually but not only men) are way more likely to see romance as shoehorned in to a plot than, say, action or violence. I think it says more about the viewer than the art in question.
One thing I truly appreciated about Dr. Who when David Tennant was in the role, was how awesome the storylines were, despite having no sex scenes whatsoever.
While I don't think it was material for children given some of the topics it dealt with, it was definitely different from typical Hollywood stuff.
I don't know if this is still the case with Dr. Who, and I could be mistaken, but I greatly appreciated that.
Different eras of Dr Who (more dependent on showrunner than which actor is playing the Doctor) have different qualities of story, which was the first part of the praise, before the “despite having no sex scenes whatsoever.”
Looks like we made sex and porn so ubiquitous and accessible to the point that even horny teenagers don't need to look for it and can have it on-demand.
Teenagers just aren't that horny anymore. They're having less sex now than previous generations. It'd make sense that they're bored or sex in film when they're not even interested in sex even with each other.
I want more sex in tv and movies and less violence. There is hardly any sex and eroticism now in tv and movies (or at least the ones I see). My girlfriend and I talk about this all the time. Nudity is even rare at the box office. If you watch movies from the 1980s or so it is so apparent. I'm not Gen Z though. I'm Gen X.
Normalization of violence has been on-going for 50 years in movies and TV. See someone's head get blown off? PG-13. See some boobs? R. See full frontal on a woman? NC-17. See full frontal on a man? X.
“X” and “NC-17” were never ratings at the same time (“NC-17” replaced “X” in what I believe was largely an attempt to make serious films with the rating marketable, given the way “X-rated” had become a popular term for porn.)
(And, yes, plenty of the films released with an NC-17 MPAA rating and not through porn channels with no MPAA rating have full frontal male nudity.)
There's a lot more than was allowed on broadcast TV in the 1980s, and while cable (including premium cable) with different rules existed, it was a much smaller market.
Definitely not less than was allowed in movies in the 1980s; especially on a same-rating basis, where the standards have generally gotten narrower, not looser.
This seems like a weak survey that they are trying to turn into a Social Trend. Specifically, they found that "51.5% expressed a desire for more content centered around friendships and platonic relationships." That doesn't seem strong enough to conclude anything important.
Not only Gen Z, me too (I'm 50). I find it such a waste of time; it so rarely it adds anything outside cheap film minutes. When it does, you don't notice it (which is obviously how it should be; an integral part). Now I often just press forward to get through pointless scenes with wet dildo's etc that are not porn, but something i'm supposed to watch with the (albeit) adult family. If it would add something to the story then sure, but it's just filler.
Same here (Millenial), the scenes are usually just dishonest and uncomfortable padding of runtime, adding nothing to the plot or the vibe. There must be some market research that prompts its inclusion, I can't understand why they do it.
I feel the same way, and I'm in my mid-40's. I always end up wondering why am I watching this stylized sexual encounter (which doesn't match almost anyone's experience almost any time) and often with people I don't really want to watch it with (teenage and adult children). If some light foreplay shows something about the characters, that's fine, or if something actually happened during the act that was important, that's also fine, but otherwise it's just gratuitous and annoying.
If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn, I'm sure as hell not going to opt for some scene in a regular movie. Then again, maybe it's for people that refuse to watch porn for one reason or another and this is as close as they get?
> and often with people I don't really want to watch it with (teenage and adult children)
This is the true reason why violence is allowed on TV, whereas sex is always problematic and often censored. You can watch violence with just about anybody (kids, parents, etc.) and it doesn't feel awkward.
You can watch it with anyone who has been desensitized. That’s a cultural choice: we train our kids to be weird about sex but okay with hardcore violence.
The religious community I grew up in treated them both the same, to the point that kids would be teased in school for reacting to movie violence because they were reacting appropriately to an image of someone being killed or mutilated.
Nothing to do with being disensitized. Most people can handle very violent movies while they would be extremely disturbed to see the same events in real life.
It's typically made very clear to everyone that violence is wrong, and what you are watching on a movie or series is fictional violence. In other words, you are watching something that no one would like to go through.
Sex is fundamentally different. As it is not only desirable in many senses, but it is also a basic human function, but at the same time it is something extremely intimate, not something you share with any random person.
> Sex is fundamentally different. As it is not only desirable in many senses, but it is also a basic human function, but at the same time it is something extremely intimate, not something you share with any random person.
That’s cultural - our reactions to violence are pretty fundamental, too, with roots deep in our brains. It’s natural to feel empathy for someone being hurt, to appreciate the implications of them being hurt or killed, etc. The difference is that our culture says that’s okay to show children, so most of us are at least partially desensitized during childhood.
Broadly speaking (many exceptions), Americans are fine with young teens watching a movie about a man using kung fu fantasy tactics to bloodlessly shoot his way through a building of bad guys, like John Wick, but don't necessarily feel the same way about something that depicts violence in a more brutal and arguably realistic way, like Saving Private Ryan. Is there a little puff of red CGI mist blood coming out of somebody's chest, or does the movie show one of the 'good guys' with half his skull blown away? These are both hardcore violence in a sense, but most people see a large qualitative difference between the two.
I think it basically comes down to how likely a movie is to give people nightmares, which of course is a function of desensitization. The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.
Incidentally, Saving Private Ryan has a lopsided depiction of violence. The deaths of Americans are shown to be gruesome and agonizing, while the deaths of Germans are mostly shown to be relatively quick and clean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FeyONCtfc I re-watched Saving Private Ryan after watching this video and found it to be very apparent, but it wasn't apparent to me the first time I watched it.
> The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.
I generally agree with your point but this has changed over time. For example, showing someone getting shot in combat was generally acceptable before torture or maiming since we’re more likely to say that those are never justified. Someone who grew up in a culture with public executions and punishments might have a more situational view based on whether it was “deserved”.
Define "desensitized". I watched plenty of movies that are violent, the only ones that get me are the ones about torture (makes me angry). However if I see some blood or my wife cuts with a knife, I have to lay down a few minutes to avoid fainting.
To me, clearly there is a huge difference between tv and in person. I've never even seen a dead person (except in movies).
That’s basically what I’m referring to. Take a small child and show them the same violent movie scene, and they’ll scream and perhaps have nightmares. Over time we learn that some things are not real and most of us get over that but my point was that this is learned, not innate.
> If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn, I'm sure as hell not going to opt for some scene in a regular movie.
I think you’re on the right track here. In the 90s, teenagers would watch objectively terrible TV and movies for the handful of scenes where someone hot was as close to naked as allowed. Sports Illustrated sold a ton of swimsuit issues to guys who didn’t want to be seen buying Playboy, etc.
Now that anyone looking for that can get unlimited quantities of any type of erotic material they can imagine online, anyone looking for entertainment is going to skip anything which isn’t very good - no more trying to make up for bad writing and concepts by tossing in a gratuitous shower scene or having your heroine inexplicably choosing to fight in a bikini.
The other thing which has been developing for a while, and really ramped up with #MeToo was the realization that a lot of the guys making decisions about what goes into movies were pretty sleazy. It’s not a new observation that there were some pretty screwed up decisions about sexualizing things like rape or other violence, but I think a lot of people decided to stop watching it even if it was in a popular film or show, not to mention some very influential Hollywood types having their careers reconsidered in light of harassment claims, and I’d bet some of that factors into the results of this survey, too.
> Now that anyone looking for that can get unlimited quantities of any type of erotic material they can imagine online
Exactly. Like the OP said, if I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn. If it's important to the story to know that a couple slept together then you can show them going to bed, starting foreplay, and then fade out and cut back in to after the event. There's obvious ways to show the characters had sex together without actually showing the sex. We know they had sex - move the story along! You can still show a titillating butt shot or boob shot if you're trying to juice up your ratings and still not show the actual sex!
Or, maybe you do show it because there’s a scene where they’re also talking through something important and that’s a normal human interaction which is in character, but that’d be like 5% of what we see now. There is a certain percentage of people who don’t want to ever see sex in movies but I think that’s a lot smaller than the group of people who like it where it fits naturally into a well-written story but are turned off when it feels like a contractual obligation.
It wasn't guys who made fifty shades of grey the only modern franchise to compete in sales numbers with Harry Potter, so I don't buy the idea that men were those who sexualized things like rape and violence.
Slow down, I wasn’t saying all guys but referring specifically to a handful of people like Weinstein. There’s always been back and forth about sex in movies but a lot of people reconsidered how much certain things bothered them after learning that actresses were only doing them under duress or that the same guys making decisions about what was included and dismissing criticism as prudery were also harassers or rapists.
There’s another big misconception here: kink isn’t rape. 50 shades had some criticism but it was generally understood that boundaries were being pushed voluntarily. That’s not perfect - there are a million essays on that - but it’s very different from criminal violence.
What I was referring to was the way rape is portrayed as sexy in a way which doesn’t happen for other acts of violence in mainstream media. It’s become a lazy screenwriting trope complete with the soft lighting and prolonged focus on how attractive the victim’s body is in a way you’d never see for, say, a man getting stabbed even though both of them are having the worst days of their lives.
I remember reading an article on how movies and TV today are not quite able to make meaningful and interesting sex scenes that are actually well made and add to the story. I think this was specifically for western movies. But I can't find it now.
One thing my SO noticed first and I could only agree: every comedy MUST have a puke scene. I guess like the sex, some big data guy noticed a slight increase in audience at sex and puking scenes (not together, luckily) so the producers mandate them now everywhere. I also feel the average movie has gotten way bloodier over time but last time I mentioned this it didn't go down well with this crowd.
Also, the puking is always fake as hell. A mouthful of some watery liquid spat out with horrible overacting. Nothing like the real life horror that's a proper five-fold stream of that foul greenish brown mess filled with what was supposed to be your lunch.
Family guy did some hilarious puking scenes back in the day by showing it as horrible as it really is. The Hollywood vomit-lite is just embarrassing at this point.
I find it worse than a waste of time; I find it distracts from the plot.
I'm no prude, and I have no problem with porn. But for the most part, I find the mandatory sex scene is a huge distraction from the plot. Why not hint at it, like they used to?
I re-watched Don't Look Back the other night; the sex scene in that movie is fine, because it really is part of the plot. But chucking in a long, sweaty sex scene just because you've cast a pretty actress is stupid. I treat it like an ad-break - I either fast-forward, or I go to make a cup of tea.
> I find the mandatory sex scene is a huge distraction from the plot.
Then watch some european movies. Unlike Hollywood, the sex scenes have a meaning in the whole construct. ( Meaning of life by Monthy Python for example ;) )
Totally agree. I've been thinking about this a lot for several years, so I pay attention to how often it's actually at all useful to the plot - I'd guess one in a hundred.
My theory is the wide availability of porn makes cheesecake in mainstream movies much less interesting than it was back when porn was heavily suppressed.
An example of how suppressed it was a friend told me her first husband (1960's) was a sleazy truck driver that made extra cash on the side transporting 16mm porn movies. Same way other more sleazy truckers transported drugs.
This is how I feel, but I also find that it’s overused as a device to inject manufactured gravity.
Some stand up comics use something similar. It’s easier to make someone laugh because they’re uncomfortable than it is to make them laugh by being funny, so some comics will be obscene and get their laughs that way.
In the same vein, it’s easier to make a story feel serious by putting in a sex scene than it is to write an engaging plot.
Good, I’m not alone. Even in my youth sex scenes annoyed the hell out of me. It’s essentially dead air and bad clichés, bringing momentum of the movie to a screeching halt. Heavens help us if there are multiple sex scenes in one film.
I don’t have any real data to back this up, and idk how you’d look at this, but I’d be curious if they wanted less sex or if the real issue is the gratuity. We’ve been in a period for a while (perhaps due to streaming services not having the same regulations and standards as TV) where being serious and “real”, being a “mature comedy”, etc is in, and a shortcut to that is to show sex and use curse words, so you see a lot of TV shows especially doing that instead of making sure it fits well in the story. I feel like nearly every Netflix show I've checked out has let the F bombs fly to the degree that it sticks out to me, someone who swears like a sailor
Just to be clear: this is not a comparison with previous generations.
The headline and intro led me to believe this is a dip -- e.g. that young people 5 or 10 or 20 years ago liked the amount of sex, but young people today don't.
But that's not what the survey shows. All it shows is that people aged 13-24 today want less of it.
It may very well be the case that this isn't anything specific to Gen Z at this age, and that this was equally the case of 13-24 year olds 20 and 30 years ago. TV and film has been pretty sexualized for a long time. There is zero evidence in this study to indicate anything new.
I would say though that us Millenials are complete hypocrites who binged on the absolute worst kinds of content (MTV reality/dating shows) in our teens and twenties and now want to police the hell out of everything.
Not sure that's the case. I think this is more a Gen Z thing. Most millennials I know think Gen Z is "not great" in their conservative outlook. (Don't even get me started on Gen Z fashion.)
Hipsters were despised back in my day, even by hipsters themselves, but in the end I think we all had a lot more fun than Gen Z today. I wouldn't change any of it.
> I think we all had a lot more fun than Gen Z today
That's an understatement. Any time I start to go down the hate-spiral on some stupid shit I see a gen-zedder doing, I remember how neurotic and miserable they are, and feel sorry for them again.
It also helps to remember this is exactly how adults felt about the things we did in the 80s and 90s :P
I dont know about you but none of the zoomers that I've ever worked with had any organizational power (they're all still too young) and all of the oppressive horseshit that I've ever had to deal with in my career has come from my peers.
As with the comment above yours, it just rarely adds anything. And by erotic standards most of it is shit in that department. I love and enjoy adult entertainment and if I want to be titillated, I'll go watch some of that. A few minutes of the softest softcore imaginable is basically just filler.
I don't hate it, and when it's part of a plot of course it makes sense, but a number of the ones in Game of Thrones I recall were just pointlessly long, sometimes disturbing excuses to get the pearl clutchers riled up and get hate shares on social media. It's tiresome. If your art can't stand on it's own don't make it.
I mean, I did like it but I'll be the first to admit I cannot judge anything related to that series anymore after the absolute trash fire that the last season was. Don't think I'm alone there either, I have never seen something so rapidly and thoroughly remove itself from pop culture the way Game of Thrones did.
Exactly. I'm not sure how it is in others regions, but here in Central Europe Netflix has lots of good Korean and Japanese TV dramas.
It is funny how some of them have a great first season, then they get lots of money following their success, after which they try to emulate Holywood and make pretty bad season 2 (it is "too American" as my wife says - you know the whole plot after first 5 minutes, and there definitely have to be certain obligatory copy/pasted plot themes, like previously mentioned sex scenes etc).
Of course, it's not just Holywood and American dramas that have bad elements. I find many Japanese dramas focus to much on the "internal conflict" in their characters. But overall both Japanese and Korean productions are light years ahead. I don't remember last time I saw a good American drama.
> I'm not sure how it is in others regions, but here in Central Europe Netflix has lots of good Korean and Japanese TV dramas.
It's like that everywhere to varying degrees. Early on, a bunch of weird Korean films dropped on Netflix (2009ish), and then disappeared for a while. They started trickling back a few years later.
A few years ago, a glut of Korean and Japanese dramas started dropping as their global popularity increased. You are still going to find more Korean and Japanese stuff if you're viewing Netflix in (say) the Philippines, but there's a lot everywhere. A lot of it has to do with licensing, and where they can get licenses to stream.
As an experiment - try streaming Netflix connected to VPN endpoints in different countries. Sometimes you get the same stuff with different names! Example is a Japanese show called in the US, "Atelier". In Japan, it shows up as "Underwear" (lol).
I can't help but find it interesting that the country with the lowest birthrate has a reputation for having less sex in its media. I wonder if we'd find a relationship in general between some metric of sex on TV with the country's birthrate. But I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this conspiracy theory.
I'm sympathetic to this concern and I sometimes battle it myself - but I do object to the romanticism of "free love". In my opinion - and in the opinion of some brilliant, loving people I know who lived it first-hand - free love was a failed experiment of idealism. It was a great experiment that we are better for having undertaken, but unmistakably and fundamentally incompatible with human psychology when applied on any kind of appreciable scale. Luckily, prudery is far from the only alternative.
There are pockets of it still floating around and continuing in development... the ENM/polyamory communities provide a good framework for going about it in a manageable way. "The Ethical Slut" by Easton and Hardy is a very good book.
I wish more people would be willing to challenge this part of themselves. It really opens up entirely new possibilities for sex and love. Plus, the emotional development that it forces on you is a huge green flag for dating in general.
I am the opposite. I am no prude, but so many things seem to revolve about sex in modern times. There is so much more in the universe.
Maybe I am too satisfied with my partner. The thought of being single, having to date again, and handle people and their insecurities once more is tiresome to day the least.
Agreed. A bit younger but I feel this way too. I group up incredibly religious/politically conserative (think Jesus Camp on Netflix).
Between my immediate family and changes in how the general population has begun to view excessive sex/cursing/violence/etc. I’ve never really experienced a current era of, well, excessiveness.
I love 70s movies for that reason. Utterly unrestrained. It’s not inherently better or worse. But I’ve never experienced a less-prude era while alive.
To be clear. I don’t think wanting less sex is inherently prude though. Sometimes it’s a cheap way to “improve” writing without actually paying for talent.
I would like to see it portrayed more accurately and realistically. But I despair more because I see these attitudes carrying over into everyday people and their sensibilities. Prudishness in entertainment creates more prudishness in the people, who want more prudishness in entertainment, and so on, until the situation becomes so unbearable that an increasing number of people rebel and the trend starts to reverse.
I am NOT saying that R-rated movies should be more pornographic or more like pornography. I agree that sex can be a cheap filler for more substantial writing. But humans can be very sexual creatures and the double standard we impose on ourselves in the name of traditional, "family" values, needs to die.
I mean how the fuck did these families get made in the first place? It certainly wasn't from some stork.
This is especially true given declining birth rates across the first world...
On Netflix (probably other platforms too, but definitely on the latest Netflix shows) just about every episode about high school students is about sex. Shows like “Sex Education” beat kids over the head that sex is almost a requirement and there are some definite Weinstein vibes about how obsessed older producers and directors seem so insistent on having minors talk about anal and other sexual topics under the guise of “wow we are so progressive, look how open and free these 15 year olds talk about sex”
I think it’s great to have open communication but at a certain point it seems like perverted old men getting off to making young actors and actresses obsess over sex and tell other other young people that is the behavior to follow.
Sex Education explores sex positivity, which includes consent, respect, and just not having any. It also deals with the subject of sex crimes and reporting sex crimes. Anathema to Wenstein types. But you say it's "definite".
Assuming adults are watching in general for the purpose of being titillated by teen sexuality or, worse, that its producers have the ulterior motive of "grooming" teens en masse is cynical as shit.
I wouldn't mind the sex in TV and Movies if it wasn't so BAD. Then they wedge it into the plot with zero relationship to the story. It's like "Oh we're learning magic? Oh two fit people are having vanilla sex... More learning magic okay I guess?"
In addition, the number of blatant rape scenes are just so depressing.
I’d prefer less violence. It’s crazy that showing one breast will immediately make something pg13, but showing guns, people dying and all sorts of violence is considered appropriate for all ages
There's no real consistency in any of it. Sometimes breasts are PG-13 (Titanic) but usually any breasts are an automatic R (most other modern movies, except for those with sufficient "art cred"). In movies from the 1980s or earlier, breasts could be in a PG movie (Airplane, Logan's Run.)
The PG-13 rating was created in response to violence in PG movies (somebody getting their heart ripped out in Temple of Doom), not nudity.
or worse, showing people getting shot/stabbed and keep going like they only stepped on a lego. That contributes to people having cavalier attitudes towards guns, instead of deadly weapons that can make you turn limp before you even hit the ground.
That's actually somewhat accurate, shoot someone with a single 9mm and there's a good chance they'll keep coming like they only stepped on a lego. Depends on if you hit something vital or not, but a whole lot of the human body isn't that immediately vital.
But really this is why guns are only for killing people and why you'd empty the magazine if you do it. You can't rely on crippling someone by shooting their leg like in a video game (or sometimes in the movies).
I don't see "good chance" on my scientific calculator, or wolfram alpha, or any of my math textbooks. Care to enlighten me on its definition?
I have seen hundreds of videos (in the seedy corners of the net) of people being shot, and I can't recall a single one where the victim kept approaching after being fired upon.
so "good chance" == 1? That's a meaningless argument. If the value = 1, then we're talking about a value less than the number of people who have been hit by falling space rocks. People don't change the way they act based on 1 incident.
You said you hadn't seen one and I quickly found you one.
No, I don't know how to quantify it, but if you'd like to continue to disagree with me I think you'll have to do the research on it, since you seem to be very engaged with the problem, and I have other things to do.
I certainly don't endorse a cavalier attitude towards firearms safely, but the reality is that the majority of people who are shot do survive. It is extremely rare for people to "turn limp" and fall to the ground. Real life isn't like a James Bond movie.
Adam Conover did a great talk about this [0]. It was entitled "Millenials Don't Exist". In it he humorously but also seriously asserts that lumping people together as generations is useless at best and harmful at worst.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadRepresentation is great but now we're over-representing and alienating the audience.
Plus it feels so hacky.
And I watched them. Maybe you didn't?
Edit: Heck, "I Love Lucy" aired in the early 1950s and the show's entire plot was about an interracial marriage. And that show only started two years after commercial TV in most homes was even a thing. It was the very first sitcom to be a #1 rated show.
The "bad times" scenario you're depicting is largely a fiction. What was that Jennifer Lawrence quote? “I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work — we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,”
What dude didn't want to kick ass like Ripley in aliens.
As the age old saying goes...
She protec, she attack,.but most important of all she uses large mechanised exoskeleton to fight aliens.
Is that clear? She's a professional actress; if she were reading a line written by some PR hack that she didn't really believe was true, how can you be sure you could tell?
Maybe she believed it, or maybe she was told to say this sort of thing to promote the movie. Since she's a professional actress, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She probably wasn't totally ignorant of her own industry.
My own experiences in a mixed family looks a lot closer to how the topic was discussed back then then it's portrayed on TV now.
Now it's just a thing that happens and doesn't stand out as rare or controversial or serious/groundbreaking, (to most) which again is an improvement.
I know very few people of mixed background where that isn't a source of family strife somewhere. I am not arguing that anyone should be against it but a) most people don't want their children to suffer, b) mixed children are still unfortunately almost guaranteed to encounter strife in their lives from their background, and c) those mixed children deserve the conversation in public rather than have their lives portrayed on TV as if they should be perfect when they aren't.
Maybe under makeup and the right lighting. Many pictures show not.
I don't know what words people used then. And the public accepted it more than executives feared. But they didn't see him as white like her.
[1] https://theplotthickens.tcm.com/content/uploads/2021/11/TPT0...
It's not hard for people to begin noticing how unrealistic many stories end up becoming. It's shoddy writing and story-telling and the artificial nature takes you out of the world that's been created.
> A Milestone: All Of The Walking Dead's Relationships Are Now Interracial Or LGBT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/11/14/a-milesto...
That was a large part of the appeal of the genre. You're talking about a movie released a decade and a half after fans had been ogling Emma Peel.
Not Encino Man though, that film never existed.
https://youtu.be/AecBtibhNoI
While I don't think it was material for children given some of the topics it dealt with, it was definitely different from typical Hollywood stuff.
I don't know if this is still the case with Dr. Who, and I could be mistaken, but I greatly appreciated that.
(And, yes, plenty of the films released with an NC-17 MPAA rating and not through porn channels with no MPAA rating have full frontal male nudity.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084522/
Definitely not less than was allowed in movies in the 1980s; especially on a same-rating basis, where the standards have generally gotten narrower, not looser.
After multiple layers of press releases, I think the underlying study (which is more of an infographic) is https://www.scholarsandstorytellers.com/css-teens-and-screen...
I tend to lean towards this whenever I see an [insert generation] [insert social trend] article.
If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn, I'm sure as hell not going to opt for some scene in a regular movie. Then again, maybe it's for people that refuse to watch porn for one reason or another and this is as close as they get?
This is the true reason why violence is allowed on TV, whereas sex is always problematic and often censored. You can watch violence with just about anybody (kids, parents, etc.) and it doesn't feel awkward.
It's typically made very clear to everyone that violence is wrong, and what you are watching on a movie or series is fictional violence. In other words, you are watching something that no one would like to go through.
Sex is fundamentally different. As it is not only desirable in many senses, but it is also a basic human function, but at the same time it is something extremely intimate, not something you share with any random person.
That’s cultural - our reactions to violence are pretty fundamental, too, with roots deep in our brains. It’s natural to feel empathy for someone being hurt, to appreciate the implications of them being hurt or killed, etc. The difference is that our culture says that’s okay to show children, so most of us are at least partially desensitized during childhood.
Broadly speaking (many exceptions), Americans are fine with young teens watching a movie about a man using kung fu fantasy tactics to bloodlessly shoot his way through a building of bad guys, like John Wick, but don't necessarily feel the same way about something that depicts violence in a more brutal and arguably realistic way, like Saving Private Ryan. Is there a little puff of red CGI mist blood coming out of somebody's chest, or does the movie show one of the 'good guys' with half his skull blown away? These are both hardcore violence in a sense, but most people see a large qualitative difference between the two.
I think it basically comes down to how likely a movie is to give people nightmares, which of course is a function of desensitization. The American public is broadly desensitized to unrealistic violence, but most aren't desensitized to realistic violence.
Incidentally, Saving Private Ryan has a lopsided depiction of violence. The deaths of Americans are shown to be gruesome and agonizing, while the deaths of Germans are mostly shown to be relatively quick and clean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FeyONCtfc I re-watched Saving Private Ryan after watching this video and found it to be very apparent, but it wasn't apparent to me the first time I watched it.
I generally agree with your point but this has changed over time. For example, showing someone getting shot in combat was generally acceptable before torture or maiming since we’re more likely to say that those are never justified. Someone who grew up in a culture with public executions and punishments might have a more situational view based on whether it was “deserved”.
To me, clearly there is a huge difference between tv and in person. I've never even seen a dead person (except in movies).
Usually this has a bad connotation, that's why I interpreted what you said the way I did.
I think you’re on the right track here. In the 90s, teenagers would watch objectively terrible TV and movies for the handful of scenes where someone hot was as close to naked as allowed. Sports Illustrated sold a ton of swimsuit issues to guys who didn’t want to be seen buying Playboy, etc.
Now that anyone looking for that can get unlimited quantities of any type of erotic material they can imagine online, anyone looking for entertainment is going to skip anything which isn’t very good - no more trying to make up for bad writing and concepts by tossing in a gratuitous shower scene or having your heroine inexplicably choosing to fight in a bikini.
The other thing which has been developing for a while, and really ramped up with #MeToo was the realization that a lot of the guys making decisions about what goes into movies were pretty sleazy. It’s not a new observation that there were some pretty screwed up decisions about sexualizing things like rape or other violence, but I think a lot of people decided to stop watching it even if it was in a popular film or show, not to mention some very influential Hollywood types having their careers reconsidered in light of harassment claims, and I’d bet some of that factors into the results of this survey, too.
Exactly. Like the OP said, if I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn. If it's important to the story to know that a couple slept together then you can show them going to bed, starting foreplay, and then fade out and cut back in to after the event. There's obvious ways to show the characters had sex together without actually showing the sex. We know they had sex - move the story along! You can still show a titillating butt shot or boob shot if you're trying to juice up your ratings and still not show the actual sex!
There’s another big misconception here: kink isn’t rape. 50 shades had some criticism but it was generally understood that boundaries were being pushed voluntarily. That’s not perfect - there are a million essays on that - but it’s very different from criminal violence.
What I was referring to was the way rape is portrayed as sexy in a way which doesn’t happen for other acts of violence in mainstream media. It’s become a lazy screenwriting trope complete with the soft lighting and prolonged focus on how attractive the victim’s body is in a way you’d never see for, say, a man getting stabbed even though both of them are having the worst days of their lives.
Family guy did some hilarious puking scenes back in the day by showing it as horrible as it really is. The Hollywood vomit-lite is just embarrassing at this point.
I'm no prude, and I have no problem with porn. But for the most part, I find the mandatory sex scene is a huge distraction from the plot. Why not hint at it, like they used to?
I re-watched Don't Look Back the other night; the sex scene in that movie is fine, because it really is part of the plot. But chucking in a long, sweaty sex scene just because you've cast a pretty actress is stupid. I treat it like an ad-break - I either fast-forward, or I go to make a cup of tea.
Then watch some european movies. Unlike Hollywood, the sex scenes have a meaning in the whole construct. ( Meaning of life by Monthy Python for example ;) )
An example of how suppressed it was a friend told me her first husband (1960's) was a sleazy truck driver that made extra cash on the side transporting 16mm porn movies. Same way other more sleazy truckers transported drugs.
Some stand up comics use something similar. It’s easier to make someone laugh because they’re uncomfortable than it is to make them laugh by being funny, so some comics will be obscene and get their laughs that way.
In the same vein, it’s easier to make a story feel serious by putting in a sex scene than it is to write an engaging plot.
is literally just gratuitous clickbait.
May have been titillating before PornHub existed, but now it's just a hassle to watch.
The headline and intro led me to believe this is a dip -- e.g. that young people 5 or 10 or 20 years ago liked the amount of sex, but young people today don't.
But that's not what the survey shows. All it shows is that people aged 13-24 today want less of it.
It may very well be the case that this isn't anything specific to Gen Z at this age, and that this was equally the case of 13-24 year olds 20 and 30 years ago. TV and film has been pretty sexualized for a long time. There is zero evidence in this study to indicate anything new.
Hipsters were despised back in my day, even by hipsters themselves, but in the end I think we all had a lot more fun than Gen Z today. I wouldn't change any of it.
That's an understatement. Any time I start to go down the hate-spiral on some stupid shit I see a gen-zedder doing, I remember how neurotic and miserable they are, and feel sorry for them again.
It also helps to remember this is exactly how adults felt about the things we did in the 80s and 90s :P
I don't hate it, and when it's part of a plot of course it makes sense, but a number of the ones in Game of Thrones I recall were just pointlessly long, sometimes disturbing excuses to get the pearl clutchers riled up and get hate shares on social media. It's tiresome. If your art can't stand on it's own don't make it.
She has literally said that making American adaptations would make it much more sex focused, and ruin the premise of these shows.
It is funny how some of them have a great first season, then they get lots of money following their success, after which they try to emulate Holywood and make pretty bad season 2 (it is "too American" as my wife says - you know the whole plot after first 5 minutes, and there definitely have to be certain obligatory copy/pasted plot themes, like previously mentioned sex scenes etc).
Of course, it's not just Holywood and American dramas that have bad elements. I find many Japanese dramas focus to much on the "internal conflict" in their characters. But overall both Japanese and Korean productions are light years ahead. I don't remember last time I saw a good American drama.
It's like that everywhere to varying degrees. Early on, a bunch of weird Korean films dropped on Netflix (2009ish), and then disappeared for a while. They started trickling back a few years later.
A few years ago, a glut of Korean and Japanese dramas started dropping as their global popularity increased. You are still going to find more Korean and Japanese stuff if you're viewing Netflix in (say) the Philippines, but there's a lot everywhere. A lot of it has to do with licensing, and where they can get licenses to stream.
As an experiment - try streaming Netflix connected to VPN endpoints in different countries. Sometimes you get the same stuff with different names! Example is a Japanese show called in the US, "Atelier". In Japan, it shows up as "Underwear" (lol).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm gonna be 70 before we get free love again :(
I wish more people would be willing to challenge this part of themselves. It really opens up entirely new possibilities for sex and love. Plus, the emotional development that it forces on you is a huge green flag for dating in general.
Maybe I am too satisfied with my partner. The thought of being single, having to date again, and handle people and their insecurities once more is tiresome to day the least.
Between my immediate family and changes in how the general population has begun to view excessive sex/cursing/violence/etc. I’ve never really experienced a current era of, well, excessiveness.
I love 70s movies for that reason. Utterly unrestrained. It’s not inherently better or worse. But I’ve never experienced a less-prude era while alive.
To be clear. I don’t think wanting less sex is inherently prude though. Sometimes it’s a cheap way to “improve” writing without actually paying for talent.
I am NOT saying that R-rated movies should be more pornographic or more like pornography. I agree that sex can be a cheap filler for more substantial writing. But humans can be very sexual creatures and the double standard we impose on ourselves in the name of traditional, "family" values, needs to die.
I mean how the fuck did these families get made in the first place? It certainly wasn't from some stork.
This is especially true given declining birth rates across the first world...
I think it’s great to have open communication but at a certain point it seems like perverted old men getting off to making young actors and actresses obsess over sex and tell other other young people that is the behavior to follow.
Assuming adults are watching in general for the purpose of being titillated by teen sexuality or, worse, that its producers have the ulterior motive of "grooming" teens en masse is cynical as shit.
In addition, the number of blatant rape scenes are just so depressing.
The PG-13 rating was created in response to violence in PG movies (somebody getting their heart ripped out in Temple of Doom), not nudity.
But really this is why guns are only for killing people and why you'd empty the magazine if you do it. You can't rely on crippling someone by shooting their leg like in a video game (or sometimes in the movies).
I don't see "good chance" on my scientific calculator, or wolfram alpha, or any of my math textbooks. Care to enlighten me on its definition?
I have seen hundreds of videos (in the seedy corners of the net) of people being shot, and I can't recall a single one where the victim kept approaching after being fired upon.
No, I don't know how to quantify it, but if you'd like to continue to disagree with me I think you'll have to do the research on it, since you seem to be very engaged with the problem, and I have other things to do.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ