Why Hollywood is shunning sex
AlamyWhile society becomes more sexually open, there are fewer sex scenes in mainstream cinema than ever. Has film really entered a newly Puritan age, asks Christina Newland.
Fred MacMurray obsesses over the way an anklet digs into Barbara Stanwyck's leg in Double Indemnity. Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello melt from a marital fight into lustful, aggressive sex on a staircase in A History of Violence. Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke engage in a kitchen-floor dalliance in 9½ Weeks.
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Just three examples of red-hot desire on the big screen, out of the many throughout the whole of cinema history. Whether sexy exchanged glances or heavy petting, carefully framed in the sheets or full-frontal nudity, sexuality is an inherent part of the cinematic experience – because sex is an inherent part of our lives. To deny sex and sexuality in the cinema is to deny our own fully-fledged humanity. But are filmmakers increasingly shunning the erotic nonetheless?
AlamyThis summer, ahead of his movie Benedetta premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, veteran filmmaker Paul Verhoeven did an interview with Variety. Asked why films like his 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct weren't being made in Hollywood anymore, he said, "There's been a general shift towards Puritanism. I think there's a misunderstanding about sexuality in the United States. Sexuality is the most essential element of nature. I'm always amazed people are shocked by sex in movies."
For some film critics, who have been lamenting what they perceive to be Hollywood's new Puritanism for some time, hearing this from Verhoeven seemed to feel like vindication. After all, Verhoeven helped define the 90s erotic thriller, and has been a filmmaker interested in outré sexuality from the word go. Although he began making movies in his native Netherlands in the late 1970s, his move to the Hollywood mainstream maintained the same taste-and boundary-pushing flavour, from Basic Instinct's notorious interrogation scene to the vulgarity of the maligned Showgirls (1995), all the way up to his recent drama about sexual consent, Elle (2017). Verhoeven clearly hasn't lost his transgressive touch, either: at this year's New York Film Festival, a Catholic group came to protest his depiction of 17th-Century lesbian nuns in Benedetta. Suffice to say, the man knows something about depicting sex in the movies.
What the statistics show
So is Verhoeven right? Is Hollywood really taking a turn toward sexlessness? According to research done in 2019 by writer Kate Hagen, the answer is: yes. Using data from IMDB, she found that statistically, there are fewer sex scenes in mainstream motion pictures currently than there have been at any point in the past 50 years. As Hagen writes: "Only 1.21% of the 148,012 feature-length films released since 2010 [according to the IMDB database] contain depictions of sex. That percentage is the lowest [of any decade] since the 1960s. Sex in cinema peaked in the 1990s, the heyday of the erotic thriller, with 1.79% of all films featuring sex scenes. That half-point decline is massive in relative , considering almost four times as many films have been released in the 2010s as in the 1990s."
To be sure, there will always be movies like the recent madcap musical Annette, the first film in English by French auteur Leos Carax, in which his stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard sing while performing oral sex. Or Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner, whose gender-fluid sexual hijinks have made it an arthouse sensation. But that's arguably the crux of the problem: while depictions of sex may be flourishing within European-minded art cinema, the mainstream US and British film industries have become less sexually-charged. What happened to softcore, to porno-chic, to erotic thrillers? Even outside of any of those specifically "sexy" genres, what happened to romantic comedies and coming-of-age tales and propulsive action movies that had – even just a sprinkle of – genuine sexual frisson?
There are several trends, social and cinematic, that might be held responsible for this shift away from sex on our big screens. The most-cited reason is that since the height of the erotic thriller in the 1990s, online pornography became so widely available that audiences were getting their kicks elsewhere, so to speak. For his part, though, Paul Verhoeven disagrees with this reading, telling Variety, "There was pornography all over the place when I was young, if you wanted it. If there is a change in how we view sexuality in films, I don't think it has to do with porn on the internet."
Writer and cultural commentator Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, thinks the flourishing of TV as an art form known for its sexual frankness has had an effect on the way audiences view sex on the big screen. "We are comparing films to programmes made for streaming services, and maybe finding them a bit tame. In television, HBO was the pioneer of a model that said: you bought a subscription, so we will assume you're an adult. That allowed it to show programmes like, say, Sex and The City and The Deuce," she says.
Netflix, too, seems keen to wade into this sexed-up territory, treading where movie studios daren't. One of their biggest ever hits has been period romance Bridgerton, whose mass audience appeal seems not to have been solely located in its frivolous romantic larks, but in its tantalising, several-episode build-up to its steamy sex scenes. They've followed suit with the low-production value but incredibly successful softcore series Sex/Life, focused on a married woman's sexual fantasies.
AlamyWhat's been happening on the small screen aside, though, many have suggested that a real spirit of asexuality has infused much Hollywood product. In her piece Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny, writer Raquel S Benedict offers a particular theory about why this is, to do with the muscle-bound and gym-perfected Hollywood bodies we see in the superhero and action films, particularly those in the Marvel and DC universes, that now dominate the multiplexes. Scathing of this shift, she writes that these hyper-sculpted characters embody a new piousness, physical, sexual and otherwise, their implicit message being that "to have fun is to become weak, to let your team down and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in [Avengers] Endgame". (Compare and contrast the Thors and Batmans of today with the oiled-up sexuality of a young Sylvester Stallone or Jean-Claude Van Damme, for example, who were ultra-buff but enjoyed themselves with it, winking at female and gay male viewers in overtly saucy scenes.
How expectations have changed
Benedict points out that this desexualised aesthetic has gone hand in hand with a sea change around how much sex audiences actually expect in mainstream cinema. When we look at the 80s and 90s, she argues, even the films from that era we may recall as family-friendly have more sex in them, either literal or inferred, than the majority of today's big-screen output. "Millennial and Gen Z viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content: John Connor's conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis's toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters," she writes. "These scenes didn't shock us when we first saw them. [We thought:] of course there's sex in a movie. Isn't there always":[]}