Who wants to watch softcore nonsense involving people doing things that are not how sex actually works? Gen Z is first gen to come of age when porn is prolific. Mainstream film can’t compete with step siblings getting stuck on the interwebs.
You don’t make passionate love to your wife while she’s wearing all her clothes and wake up in the morning with her wearing full makeup?
I think porn gets it more right than Hollywood does. People in porn at least successfully take their pants off.
And no Hollywood, all women don’t have an orgasm in 30 seconds! Movie sex would be extremely disappointing in real life.
As an elder millennial, porn has been prolific longer than you think. Late 90s and early 2000s LAN parties were half playing video games and half copying vast amounts of porn from each other.
And how many people went to LAN parties?
Those were the Nerds, the weirdos that spent halft their free time on a computer and talking about how to get faster internet. For the “cool kids” i think a lot were the magazines or someone stealing a VCR from their dads private collection.
Lolol millennials had online porn from before early puberty for all but the most seniors of them.
Most senior? Gen X here. I got my porn from the Internet too. Just before the web existed. We used Usenet and Gopher.
Millennial here. I’ve always found random sex scenes obnoxious. It completely kills the pacing and pulls me out of the story. If you need sex for character development, you can much more easily allude to it and move on. The only time I can think of when it actually made sense for the story was in the movie Her and it was such a mild scene that didn’t have any visuals.
I think it worked for some early GOT moments too. It showed the monster that Khal Drogo really was, for example
She gave consent in the book, although she was still only like 14 because George RR Martin is a creeper. So not really consent, but not quite like the show.
Even this?
I’m with Gen Z here. They’re absolutely right
Counterpoint:
I’m not Gen Z and I hate the damn sex scenes. There was a minute there where netflix would just add one within 15 mins of every show or movie, even if they never showed another one again. It never added to the plot and seemed like it was just there to reel people in. But, it was obnoxious.
Glad they sort of stopped that, although I still find it happens now and again. Hopefully this puts the nail in the coffin.
Maybe I am a prude. So what!
The issue for me isn’t the sex, it’s that the scene is irrelevant to the plot. If the sex is relevant to the plot I don’t mind, but when it’s obviously just slotted in to show tits, that’s annoying because it breaks immersion for me. It makes me think about the agenda behind adding that scene instead of thinking about the story I’m watching.
Obvious product placement is kind of in the same category for me. Like Will Smith in I, Robot spending 5 minutes of the movie super excited about receiving some “vintage 2004 Converse All Stars”. Like, the movie is set in 2035, but you just had to find a way to plug this year’s model of some shoes. Sure, those shoes have looked the same since forever, but the 2004 ones were just something else, man!
Hmm. I haven’t really thought about it much. Why do I, a porn enjoying man from smack in the middle of the Millennial generation, dislike so many Hollywood sex scenes?
I would be interested in gathering some data, take a large sample of movies and TV shows made during my lifetime, and rate them as to why they’re in a film. What purpose do they serve in the story, what do they tell us about the characters…why is this here?
Am a millennial. Sex scenes in movies should follow a simple formula: don’t do sex scenes, or do real sex scenes.
All that softcore, sex under the sheets while wearing a bra nonsense only serves to make watching it with family a bit awkward. Either make it a movie that stands on its own, or make a movie where I can actually watch celebrity people fuck in full explicitness.
Make it porn or not, both is fine, but don’t try to appeal to both sides. That’s just awkward and frustrating to either
Here’s the twist. We show it. We show all of it.
Not a millennial but broadly agree with you.
It’s also just so … base … like, ok, your characters bonk, we get it, just fade to black. When did a sex scene add anything to a story other than titillation? It’s the equivalent of serving me up another algorithmically targeted TikTok video. I feel like they’re just taking advantage of me.
So, in short, I’d be happy if they leave that shit at the door. If I was searching for porn, I’d know where to look.
