One of the most tiresome debates in online film discourse is whether there’s too much sex in movies, even as there is demonstrably less sex in movies than there has been in decades. It’s easy to blast as neo-Puritanism, but if it is, it’s a strange kind: people complain about sex scenes as tame as those in Oppenheimer or sexy popstar Sabrina Carpenter being a sexy popstar, but watch hardcore porn on their phones. It’s an odd reconstruction of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and ’90s, simultaneously taking pro- and anti-sex positions by reifying the Madonna/whore complex: sexuality is degrading objectification for certain women, but not others. At least part of it is a reaction to the #MeToo era, which reorientated how we think about actresses taking off their clothes on screen. That squeamishness doesn’t extend to pornstars or OnlyFans models, maybe because “taking off clothes” is a core part of their job description, or because of their pervasive dehumanization. This discourse about the supposed gratuitousness of sex on screen is underpinned, as Madison Huizinga puts it at Café Hysteria, by an “inability to parse sex and sexuality from objectification… resulting in all mentions of sex often collapsing under one clumsily defined umbrella.”

From blog via This RSS Feed.