• Yurt_Owl [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Sex scenes in games and movies are just always awkward. I can’t think of a time when it’s actually added to the narrative. Just makes it uncomfortable to watch with other people.

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Seems like a tool to look more “adult”

      Kinda like a middle schooler who thinks saying “fuck” every other word makes them cool

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I can’t think of a time when it’s actually added to the narrative

      watch a decently made movie then. citing people failing to successfully use a creative tool as a reason it shouldn’t exist is ridiculous

    • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago
      american psycho spoilers

      I think the sex scenes (and also Bateman just doing stuff with the TV playing porn in the background) make the audience understand how utterly fucked he is. They make it explicit that (a) he desires to be seen as someone who’s hot and enjoying sex and whatever, e.g. when he looks at himself flexing in the mirror and how he films everything (b) what he gets off on is absolute domination over women, through sex or torture or murder. Same thing for him. The viewer is supposed to realize that Bateman’s aberrant sexual desires, being as unremarkable to the rest of his society as his murders, are actually something society expects / encourages. I don’t think you could do this nearly as well without showing it.

      You could argue that these aren’t “sex scenes” in the connotative way that prudes use it, since they’re ghastly and not titillating. For my part I think that people having sex is a sex scene.

    • krolden@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Same. I often fast forward through them especially when they’re too long.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      honestly the issue I have with sex scenes isn’t that they exist per se, it’s that there’s almost always insufficient time to really set up the appropriate level of emotional connection that makes it not awkward. a movie of ~2 hours length certainly isn’t enough time; you can put a timeskip saying “1 month later” on the screen but that’s only in-universe, it doesn’t make me feel any better. in games it’s a little better as they can be longer, but not all of a game’s, say, 60-80 hour runtime (in the case of games like Baldur’s Gate 3) is gonna be dialogue and relationship-building, most of it’s gonna be defeating enemies or doing other stuff.

      and also real flirting can be hard to depict in games with approval systems - like, I say something that you agree with enough times in conversations and you suddenly wanna get in my pants? where did that come from? feels very “press correct button X times to receive sex,” though fundamentally a video game cannot be any other way because, well, that’s how code works. I have seen few games (at least ones that aren’t explicitly a romance game as opposed to a game that happens to contain romance) displaying a genuine building of attraction over time as opposed to a sudden shift from “we did a great job saving those guys and defeating the monsters. +1 to Approval” and then 5 seconds later “ohoho I can feel the electricity between us, I’ve never felt this way before…”. those that do have those appropriate arcs tend to already have already very suave, charismatic, handsome men like Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed and his romance with… everybody, but especially Sforza or whatever her name was.

      but again, I am generally pro-sex scene even if the implementations sometimes (often?) aren’t done very well imo

      • Yurt_Owl [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Largely how i feel about it. I’m not against the concept of sex in media its just the implementation generally feels inauthentic and a bit cringe. I can understand that its hard to do right or use effectively but that doesn’t mean I’m some puritanical mormon if I think most of them are just shit and cringe to watch.

        Its not like i have the same reaction if I see people irl making out or expressing love openly its just the fake depiction in media that bothers me somewhat.

        Interesting that some in this thread are coming to great assumptions of people over something like this though i find that odd.

  • CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    ITT: people acting like it’s still the eighties and every single film has tits awkwardly shoved into it.

    Sex is almost completely absent from major motion pictures, and in the smaller films where it still shows up it’s almost never titillating (that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s tasteful or good). Two decades ago there was serious market demand for sex scenes in film, but that was before every single person had an infinite porn tap in their pocket at all times.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Paul Verhoeven movies are exactly the kind of art the scolds in this thread hate. They would never allow Showgirls to be made if they were in charge

      • AlkaliMarxist [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I had a discussion with somebody on this site and they claimed that leftists should never create satire because Starship Troopers was satire and fascists mis-interpreted it.

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          That’s literally what the lanyard dork media class said when they gave Starship Troopers negative reviews on its release, before it became a cult classic. That it was praising fascist ideology despite it being clearly satirical.

          Media literacy, and literacy in general, is going down the toilet. TV was a mistake. The internet was a mistake. Smartphones were a mistake.

      • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        That is the opposite. Showgirls is the perfect example. Fun sexy stuff happens in thst movie and it makes sense. The stuff people don’t like is like objectifing women by default in every action movie. There is a time and a place for sexy fun and it is simply not every single time.

        • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          You just said in another comment that “we have 2 choices, too much sex or none so we should ban it”

          Lmao gtfo here trying to act all buddy buddy with verhoeven and cool and hip. You are a puritanical censor and enemy of art. You are the parents from footloose but with a leftoid anti-life flavor instead of a rightoid one

          • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I belive I said too much bad sex.If they did the sex well it’d be diffrent. Instead it is that four quadrant bullahit that Hollywood has to shoehorn into every movie. There have been action movies where our had hero had rad sex and it was cool. We just don’t make those anymore. It isn’t the sex. It is that it is forced and exploitative that people don’t like. Like for 90% of us against if instead of the given sex scene is was an actress age appropriate for our here being pleasured that would go a long way to fixing things

            • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              You are the arbiter of good and bad sex, you will be the one to decree which movies are allowed and which are forbidden. Your tastes are supreme and should override the artists. You can advocate for more tasteful and better sex in movies, but you cannot just call for blanket bans. But people in here aren’t complaining about the sex being exploitative for the most part, they are complaining about it existing and say no film in history has had a good sex scene. That’s their personal hang ups with sex and nothing to do with what standards should be

              You are a puritan megalomaniac in disguise.

              • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                I want less tasteful sex. I am the opposite. Good sex tends towards messy and weird. The overly clean polished stuff is sex cleaned up for mass market appeal. The artists are all traumatized and on drugs. I know they are into weird shit like me. The studio for reasons of capitlaism is overriding their artistic vision and that is what I don’t like.

                • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  “capitalism is overriding their artistic vision”

                  and prudes who say all sex scenes are bad, artistic censorship of sexual content is a touchy subject for a real historical reason. the opposite force doesn’t really exist beyond individual desires. there’s no concerned catholic mother associations to add sex to movies.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Showgirls is the perfect example. Fun sexy stuff happens in thst movie and it makes sense.

          What? Showgirls is a movie that makes gratuitous nudity tedious and uninteresting, and I thought that was the point, that the whole plot arc is that the commodification and exploitation of women’s bodies is gross and bad with the main character’s growth over the story being that she realizes that even the most “glamorous” form of that sucks and is bad and that literally being a violent lumpen drifter is a better thing than taking part in it?

  • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    obviously there are many movies with pointless sex scenes that should have been cut or changef, but also some movies would work significantly less well without them

    a lot of people have sex, and for many it’s a big part of life and their relationships. anything that important irl should be represented in art

      • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        man that’s tough. fire walk with me for sure, but for sex scenes that aren’t terrifying sexual assault scenes maybe portrait of a lady on fire? i can think of a few others, the handmaiden, moonlight, etc. in general, i think most sex scenes in otherwise good movies don’t bring down the quality of the movie as long as it makes sense for the characters. people fuck! it happens! if done artfully it can enhance your understanding of the characters, and even if not handled perfectly as long as it makes sense it takes a decent amount to get too gratuitous for me

        that’s not to say i’m cool with all horny bullshit in movies or tv, there’s so much anime out there that needs to have tits shoved awkwardly on screen regularly. but when an anime reads like the creators know what sex is then it doesn’t bug me that much. chainsaw man is horny but i don’t mind it. chainsaw man is made better by how it handles its horniness imo. in general as long as sexuality is handled with care it’s no worse than any other element that could show up in a film

        also a lot of people act like there are tons of movies with sex in them, and that just isn’t the case. i mean, not anymore at least. they show up, but the vast majority of hollywood blockbusters are completely sexless

  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    i think people are more interested in seeing, you know, actual functioning and real relationships. not bullshit. sex is a very small part of any real relationship

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netM
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, 10-24 is young enough that a significant portion of the people surveyed believe in cooties and Santa Claus. Many of them haven’t even started puberty. Not exactly a mature enough audience to have a nuanced discussion on sexuality.

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netM
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          It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re consuming common media, it matters whether they’re mature enough to actually understand the content or have a nuanced conversation about anything at all, let alone sexuality. 10 year olds are in grade 5. On average they won’t start puberty for another 1-3 years. You’ll have way more luck talking about Fortnite or Pokemon than The Witcher or Baldur’s Gate 3 til they’re about 16. They’re young enough that many of them will still say “EWWWW!” If they see their parents kiss. Not the age where they’re going to understand human sexuality.

          A 10-15 year old shouldn’t be watching R rated films or playing M rated games in the first place, so shouldn’t even be engaging with the part of common media where they would really see sex on screen. They’re more likely to see the most useless and poorly implemented censored sex scenes that might be shoehorned into PG-13 or T rated content, which could help explain why it feels superfluous to them.

          I think it would be extremely helpful to see the breakdown on this per age year, or even just broken down betwen ages 10-17 and 17-24. A 14 year age gap spanning all the way from pre-pubescent primary schoolkids all the way through kids who have already graduated from university is not a consistent group.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      the volcel meme was always weird.

      It comes from the old sub where it emerged as a way to “jokingly” confrontationally shut down redditors and combat the reddit-logo culture of gross hornyposting whenever a thread was at least tangentially about a woman, which is only a few steps down from unsolicited dickpics and catcalling in the creepy cishet guy arsenal of tools to lash out at and feel like they’re exerting control over women. The sub at the time had only 3 or 4 mods IIRC and an extremely hands-off moderation culture compared to its later purge of stupidpol posters or this site’s repeated struggle sessions and purges that have arrived at the current aggressive crackdowns on reddit-logo style thirstposting, so the community had to rely on bullying to shut the redditors down.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          (suddenly everything with a womens body requires anti horny memes which if you are the only one sexaulizing nin sexual things youre the problem)

          Yeah, I’ve seen that too. I still prefer people being like “haha yeah I sure would be saying something gross right now if not for the standards of this community haha” to them saying something more explicit and thus normalizing that sort of thing, but it’s still gross. It should never be a tongue-in-cheek self report because then it’s just a euphemism, it should be a response to gross comments although now the site culture and moderation level is just that those get slapped with comment removals and/or bans instead so it may have less of a purpose now than when it was just “peer pressure redditors into not being creepy because the mods aren’t doing shit.”

          And sorry, I do always feel compelled to chime in about the history of weird site culture things to try to keep the institutional knowledge alive and preempt the telephone game of new users who just heard about it somewhere trying to fill it in. I can see how that would feel patronizing and I apologize for that.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      People like to fuck. This is mostly true even for asexual people (the main difference is that non-sex-repulsed asexual people aren’t driven by a desire to fuck but the actual sexual act itself can still be fun to them). And people can get very creative in where and when they fuck. Art should reflect this reality on some level.

      I feel like the same creepy people would be shocked to learn teleworkers are using their time WFH to fuck on the company clock. Like, people already hook up on company time before Covid for a quickie. WFH makes it much easier lmao

  • charlie [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I’ll be okay with sex scenes in media when it’s well intentioned and comes from a place that isn’t saturated by western ideals of misogyny and body shaming. Not to mention the rampant sexual abuse and misogyny present in Hollywood.

    Shit like Geralt seeing how many women he can bang for cool cards is objectifying af. Shit like bond banging the main woman of the movie every movie is objectifying af. Making the next bond a woman will not change that.

    Also on a personal note I have misophonia and the sound of kissing is a big trigger.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Worth noting Geralt hasn’t done that in close to 2 decades now. Witcher 3 sex scenes are actually pretty good in how they’re used to deepen or contextualize character relationships

      • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Gotta admit that while vidya sex scenes generally bounce off of me, I did enjoy the way they were done in the witcher 3. They were often treated correctly like something that Geralt, a character who does have and enjoy sex, would do as a part of a larger story.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          There’s also the fact that most of the women he can hook up with are sorceresses who are decades older than him despite looking like they’re in their twenties and who individually are some of the most powerful humans alive, and as a result are every bit as alienated and detached from the world as he is. Like he’s basically just a casual hookup they see once a decade or so and one of the only people they can actually relate to. Really gives it a better dynamic than how most handle that sort of thing.

          • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            The fact that the first reintroduction of Yennefer in 3 involves her mentioning in a letter that she misses boinking Geralt was more charming to me than I expected

  • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think all physical intimacy should be wiped from media. I don’t think we should act like breasts should be shielded at all costs because it makes people feel awkward due to being raised in a society that makes breasts naughty.

    I think there’s room for nude scenes and physical intimacy in movies, but the way its done sucks. Like you don’t need to show the penetration, but a short sex scene and a segue to a couple cuddling and the occasional nip popping out is just real life.

    When I was a kid my grandma took me to see the dukes of hazard movie. There’s a scene where the duke boys are running through a dorm to get away from the sheriff and they run into a room of a bunch of college girls doing a topless pillow fight. My grandma didn’t cover my eyes and gasp, she started cracking up because it was funny and silly and they’re just breasts at the end of the day. I watched plenty of movies with my parents with a random nude scene and sure it was a little awkward but we laughed it off and if it was egregiously long we’d fast forward.

    I understand people being tired of shitty hollywood sex scenes, but I don’t think its good enough reason to do a 180 and never see a stray nip in a movie ever again. That just feels like a marvel capeshit attitude.

    • christian [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think all physical intimacy should be wiped from media. I don’t think we should act like breasts should be shielded at all costs because it makes people feel awkward due to being raised in a society that makes breasts naughty.

      I understand people being tired of shitty hollywood sex scenes, but I don’t think its good enough reason to do a 180 and never see a stray nip in a movie ever again.

      I’m confused about who you’re arguing against, neither the headline nor the article give me the impression that anyone is suggesting that.

  • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    47.5% of young people say that sex isn’t necessary for the plot of most TV shows and movies

    10-24 is a pretty wide ass range for this. Curious if tweens, early teens, late teens, and early 20s differ in any major way. Honestly they should’ve just polled adults only from every generation, who cares what 12 year olds think

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      Is that really the argument? Imagine if this is taking to it’s logical conclusion and everything “not necessary for the plot” is removed from TV shows and movies. What’s the point then? There would be zero point in watching the show or movie, reading the plot summary would serve the exact same purpose.

      Movies and TV series are supposed to be a form of entertainment and even art on occassion, that takes you on a journey, makes you feel something. That involves many things that don’t necessarily advance the plot, but get the audience emotionally invested into the characters, the fictional world, the narratives, the motives. Without that, what is the point? The plot can’t exist on its own as a standalone entity. In many cases it even works in an inverse. The plot is used and chosen to make the audience feel a certain way about something. The plot becomes secondary to the same emotions the authors or producers want to convey.

      • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        No, this is people just getting tired of studios mandating thst every movie must be a “four quadrant film” and include a romance subplot. This is people being mad at capitalism

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There are people who would rather read Wikipedias of fictional settings like WH40k, and I don’t fucking get it. You might as well just read real-life Wikipedia because at least you’re learning something that’s tangentially connected to your present situation by virtue of it being information about real life.