Teens Want Less Sex in Movies and TV Shows, Study Finds
Teens Want Less Sex in Movies and TV Shows, Study Finds
Teens prefer movies and shows about friendship and don't feel that entertainment needs so much sex, according to a UCLA report.
I am not a teen.
I'm not a teen (far from it), but I'm with the kids on this one. The vast majority of sex scenes in movies are awful. They're awkward and totally unrealistic. It completely takes you out of the movie. Most sex scenes are not engrossing or engaging, they don't immerse you in the story, they push you out of it.
Most every sex scene feels like it was made by someone who's never had sex. Every angle is the right angle, every thrust is ecstasy, it's nonsense. It's like someone who thinks the covers of romance novels are depictions of real life.
There are a lot of intimate moments that can be portrayed convincingly enough on film, but sex is rarely one of them. And it's just not necessary. Let the audience infer, let us use our imaginations.
It's the stupid toxic "romance" that I want rid of. It gets so boring and tedious to watch. If it's important to the story, then fine. But otherwise can we just normalize friendship between opposite gendered people without the need for bad relationship drama, jealousy, and normalizing the idea that when someone says no, they're actually just "playing hard to get".
If there's a 1 minute sex scene in a 90 minute movie, you're guaranteed to have your parents walk in during that one sex scene.
Watching softcore porn with your friends and family is kind of undesirable.
Most of the (supposed) younger generation people I interact with online seem even more prudish and conservative about sex than my very religious parents were growing up. It's super weird to be the older person who's ok with sexual content. I don't really get it.
And yes, I know people will claim it's because it's only when it's not done right or when it feels shoved in, but honestly from the way they talk about anything dealing with sex, it feels like that's just an acceptable excuse and they really just don't want the content to exist at all, even if 'done right'. It's like a huge chunk of the generation is asexual or something.
The kids are right.
Here is the actual study if anyone is interested.
My issue is that it's almost always gratuitous now. I so rarely see a sex scene in a TV show or movie and think that it could have easily been skipped, but they felt the need to show an actress' breasts and have her simulate an orgasm.
I don't get titillated by it. I have porn if I need that.
I didn't get past the first episode of Game of Thrones because I found all the sex and nudity too gratuitous for my tastes.
I don't think I'm a prude. I have no problem with sex scenes and nudity in films where they make sense. Basic Instinct wouldn't make sense without them. Last Tango in Paris wouldn't make sense without them. They're both movies worth watching.
The number of sex scenes are down since 2000 of the movies coming out of Hollywood. But if you're willing to read subtitles, there's still a lot of horny videos coming out of Western Europe.
For me, make the sex relevant to the plot and make the sex they have congruent with the characters.
More confirmation the world is right to see us as backwards. (US study)
So many sexual hangups. Makes sense considering we were founded by Puritans escaping to the new world to be more backwards and repressed.
Sex is a part of life. A massive part of the human condition. A part to be celebrated, not mourned or minimized. That's how we get pedophile priests and sexual education summed up in "do not do it because it does not exist and you're dirty for asking." It's not Gen Zs fault though, social media is designed to emphasize the darkest possible side of everything as it gets clicks, so sex as a concept is just a vector of potential trauma to them.
If only we had the same hangups about our violence boners our media gluts us on with abandon. Sports concussions, gory explosion movies, and our most celebrated exports tools of mass murder 😎👍. People giving one another physical pleasure 😱👎.
It's because kids are staying home with mom and dad much later and you know how uncomfortable everyone in the room gets when there's a bang scene.
*The preceding statement was a joke, albeit a bad one. Any similarities to true events are purely coincidental and the author bears no responsibility for any implied or actual hurt feelings.
So I've noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:
- IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
- IP is billed as "adult" with "mature themes"
- Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to "Game of Thrones" a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
- Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
- IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
- IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
- Writing ends up being terrible
- Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
- Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
- VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
- Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
- There's a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it's comical instead of jarring
- There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
- Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
- If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
- In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
- A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.
In that context it's no surprise younger people don't like sex scenes. It's basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.
I've been saying this for so long. Don't get me wrong, some films do make sense to have sex scenes. But there are so many that either have hardcore (for TV) sex scenes or just random full nudity that makes it nearly impossible to watch with anyone other than my partner or close friends.
Like if I recommend a film or show to someone and completely forget that it had sex or even just nudity in it, it usually wasn't important to the story. On the other hand, it may have made sense to include in the film but it was so terribly done that I promptly blocked it out.
The other issue is that it has become increasingly difficult to find any shows that either don't include sex scenes, or don't have ridiculous levels of violence, or whatever else is difficult for me to deal with when I just want something easy to watch that's not a kid's movie (although kid's movies have their own set of issues).
Streaming services don't even make it easy to find something to watch - they show you the same stuff over and over, or they pretend that everything is in English when they include so many other languages in the selections. If I am unable to pay attention to the captions then I would prefer to have something in English without trying a bunch of different shows first. I mean I guess this is partly (mainly?) my fault since I've failed to learn another language despite years of studying. But I think it just irritates me that they lie about it more than anything.
Idk I am off topic now and this has turned into a really long comment that probably doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said in this thread.
The issue here isn't sex, its censorship. Texas already requires age verification for adult sites. They got that win. Fine. Now they want to go after TV and movies. Ok.
So then what's next?
They will then start going after anything "they" deem unfit. It's a slippery slope. Just look at them already banning books.
It makes sense. Sex scenes were interesting when we didn't have on-hand porn streaming because it was something you didn't see often. Nudity and sex are now so readily available that they aren't exciting. As someone else said, just infer it.
“Social media is the most authentic?”
GenZ is fucked. Although not literally
No need for it as the internet is full of it….and whatever you want for free
I absolutely despise media that relies on sex for the plot. It just ruins it for me. I'm also not a teen.
Not a teen here but the amount of sex that show characters have seems crazy to me and I genuinely think it affected me because I couldn't keep up as an impressionable child. It's ok to have lots of sex but do we have to act like that's normal and that I should be suffering when I go more than a month without sex?
The Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS), based in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, designed Teens and Screens to investigate American adolescents’ perspective about the media they engage with and consume. This yearly study aims to elevate the voices of adolescents, hoping to have an impact on the media landscape that’s a part of their daily lives. We are grateful to the Funders of Adolescent Science Translation (FAST), the Walt Disney Company, and Roblox for their support of this independent research.
Specifically, American teenagers.
In other news, the entertainment industry is run by soulless ghouls that will do anything they believe is necessary to increase revenue, including adding sex and violence that requires no language or subtlety to understand.
It always hit me kind of weird that getting a sci-fi novel without sex required me to read YA
ITT I found out that Satan was right.