Eh, books and movies should be varied enough to tell all kinds of stories in all kinds of ways. The flip side of a gratuitous sex scene that is wedged into a story just to titillate is when an important union of characters is skipped over just because of prudish coyness. What happens in the bedroom can be an extremely important part of how characters' relationships work (or don't). Sex scenes should follow the rules of any other scene: be true to the characters, and advance the plot, and be *interesting* (as opposed to idealized or predictable). I suspect that the scenes people are bothered by fail on at least one of those counts.
I agree that relationships other than romances could use more exploration!
And as for cameras showing more of life than they used to: I really miss the days when characters vomited off-screen. Nowadays, shows are awash in graphic puke scenes that I could do without.
Whoo, boy, is this ever on-topic for me. When I’m watching TV, I find myself muting (and even fast-forwarding) the scenes where it’s obvious the mics are placed so that two people kissing is the sloppiest, loudest sound possible. Stop it, already! Please!
And as for writing.... As the author of gay literature, my intention is to include no more and no less sex than needed to make it a realistic story. After all, good novels with straight characters often include sex, so why not gay ones?
It’s refreshing to hear that younger audiences/readers are tired of being told how and when they should get excited. That said, according to my former agent: “What sells is romance with steamy sex, and erotica. I can’t sell upscale work like yours.”
Sigh. Maybe one day these youngsters will rule the market?
This Boomer agrees with you. I love story and read more than anyone else I know. In the last half century I’ve read 200-500 books every year so I look at this topic specifically in light of novels. Sex is amazing and exciting. Reading about it, not so much, no matter how well crafted the writing. What grabs me in a book the emotions, the feelings, a character experiences not the mechanics of what evoked them.
Reading this, I can't help but wonder what you think of the (now) current miniseries "Fellow Travelers"--which has a fair amount sex. I think the scenes are both sexy and do add to character development. But, I also don't agree with your assessment about most recent sex scenes being gratuitous.
I've lately found, to my own shock, that while I love a good romance, and while I put healthy sex-positivity as one of my top values (and one I think my culture needs to acquire), I'm not actually all that into erotica or other "sex for sex's sake"—gratuitous sex, one might call it. I enjoy a slow burn, where the characters earn their steamy payoff after their long haul of sexual tension, more than I thought I did.
It ties into how someone once described the appeal of fanfiction, to a lot of us: we're not "sexualizing friendship," as critics often claim about steamy fanfic. We're friendship-izing sex: we're taking some well-established, already known and loved and fleshed-out characters, and making their relationship even better (in our opinion) with a sex scene. Which, since it isn't canon, can be ignored by anyone who doesn't want to see it. Win-win! (But the point is that the sex scene is *meaningful* to fans of the couple.)
And agreed: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was delightful and fascinating! I was still thinking about it for days afterward.
My take is that this response (Gen Z) is reflective of a saturation of sex in storytelling and a desire for intimacy - of all kinds, but especially platonic intimacy in friendships. Perhaps because the nature of consuming television shows and films has changed - binging several episodes at once, for example - the episodic fatigue of sex scenes more quickly hits a saturation point in a multi-episode sitting. It can begin to feel formulaic and predictable outside of the plot altogether, which underserves the stories being told.
When watching TV series with friends, they've joked that the network must be demanding sex scenes at specific intervals - down to the minute markers and durations between - because it begins to feel like a commercial break for sex instead of a relevant and realistic connection between characters. It can often feel like pandering; a few friends have gone as far to say it feels insulting to the audience's capacity for characters.
The sex scenes that do involve characters' motivations - or perhaps provide a resolution/challenge/conflict/crisis of them - and have context to the world within the show feel cohesive with the story. When they don't - the spirit of the story suffers. Sex is natural - so the telling of it should be, too.
Ultimately, I don't see the 'Gen Z response' as a sign of a transition to sex-averse audiences, but rather an opportunity to consider the motivation behind the scenes, their placement in the story, and the saturation of them when considering the formats and consumption patterns of modern-day media. Sex sells, but at what point is the audience overstocked? Do the scenes vary in intensity, purpose, etc.? What did we learn about the characters through the process? Does it standalone as a quality scene, or does it feel like filler? If we stack up all the sex scenes together for a single character, do they show a progression - or a mechanically olympic feat of sex?
OMG, I was just watching the second season of And Just Like That last night -- the Sex In the City reboot -- and...we’ll...just like that, I was reaching for the remote so I could fast-forward. Uncomfortable!
Hard agree! I am longing for stories focussing on friendship, or the bond between siblings. You see flashes of it occasionally but it’s never really explored. These are interesting stories too!
I often find myself quite bored by sex scenes - why are they there? Surely it can’t be to titillate with the easy access to hardcore porn. Maybe some people have become so used to seeing graphic stuff it’s just wallpaper now?
I have been banging on about this for more than a decade now. I'm in my 50's and read and watch a LOT of YA stuff because it's far more story driven than a lot novels that are for adults... I'm not against sex/nudity.. I don't mind reading/watching a bit of porn, but it doesnt' really do much for me compared to the immersion in a story and the tensions between characters. I can remember the absolute joy in the 90's when I found things like the Valdemar series where same sex couples were normalised in a straight world and thinking that would be what reading was going to be like in the future. Little did I know that by the mid 2000's I'd be crying out for the rare story that wasn't ruined by gratuious sex, and at that, mostly written by women in the majority of gay male stories.
This is not to say that there haven't been some amazing non sexualised stories out there, just that you have to consume a huge amount of stuff to get to the stories..
Do you want me to comment on what appears to be the formulaic writing of upwards of 100 plus authors and script writers at the moment? That's another soap box. :)
Just to finish off, there is room for truth in movies and books about sex and how it's not all glamorous and 'hot'. How it is used by people in real life to inflict hurt or control people and just how subtle that can be - it just doesn't need to be overt.
Eh, books and movies should be varied enough to tell all kinds of stories in all kinds of ways. The flip side of a gratuitous sex scene that is wedged into a story just to titillate is when an important union of characters is skipped over just because of prudish coyness. What happens in the bedroom can be an extremely important part of how characters' relationships work (or don't). Sex scenes should follow the rules of any other scene: be true to the characters, and advance the plot, and be *interesting* (as opposed to idealized or predictable). I suspect that the scenes people are bothered by fail on at least one of those counts.
I agree that relationships other than romances could use more exploration!
And as for cameras showing more of life than they used to: I really miss the days when characters vomited off-screen. Nowadays, shows are awash in graphic puke scenes that I could do without.
Whoo, boy, is this ever on-topic for me. When I’m watching TV, I find myself muting (and even fast-forwarding) the scenes where it’s obvious the mics are placed so that two people kissing is the sloppiest, loudest sound possible. Stop it, already! Please!
And as for writing.... As the author of gay literature, my intention is to include no more and no less sex than needed to make it a realistic story. After all, good novels with straight characters often include sex, so why not gay ones?
It’s refreshing to hear that younger audiences/readers are tired of being told how and when they should get excited. That said, according to my former agent: “What sells is romance with steamy sex, and erotica. I can’t sell upscale work like yours.”
Sigh. Maybe one day these youngsters will rule the market?
This Boomer agrees with you. I love story and read more than anyone else I know. In the last half century I’ve read 200-500 books every year so I look at this topic specifically in light of novels. Sex is amazing and exciting. Reading about it, not so much, no matter how well crafted the writing. What grabs me in a book the emotions, the feelings, a character experiences not the mechanics of what evoked them.
Reading this, I can't help but wonder what you think of the (now) current miniseries "Fellow Travelers"--which has a fair amount sex. I think the scenes are both sexy and do add to character development. But, I also don't agree with your assessment about most recent sex scenes being gratuitous.
I've lately found, to my own shock, that while I love a good romance, and while I put healthy sex-positivity as one of my top values (and one I think my culture needs to acquire), I'm not actually all that into erotica or other "sex for sex's sake"—gratuitous sex, one might call it. I enjoy a slow burn, where the characters earn their steamy payoff after their long haul of sexual tension, more than I thought I did.
It ties into how someone once described the appeal of fanfiction, to a lot of us: we're not "sexualizing friendship," as critics often claim about steamy fanfic. We're friendship-izing sex: we're taking some well-established, already known and loved and fleshed-out characters, and making their relationship even better (in our opinion) with a sex scene. Which, since it isn't canon, can be ignored by anyone who doesn't want to see it. Win-win! (But the point is that the sex scene is *meaningful* to fans of the couple.)
And agreed: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was delightful and fascinating! I was still thinking about it for days afterward.
My take is that this response (Gen Z) is reflective of a saturation of sex in storytelling and a desire for intimacy - of all kinds, but especially platonic intimacy in friendships. Perhaps because the nature of consuming television shows and films has changed - binging several episodes at once, for example - the episodic fatigue of sex scenes more quickly hits a saturation point in a multi-episode sitting. It can begin to feel formulaic and predictable outside of the plot altogether, which underserves the stories being told.
When watching TV series with friends, they've joked that the network must be demanding sex scenes at specific intervals - down to the minute markers and durations between - because it begins to feel like a commercial break for sex instead of a relevant and realistic connection between characters. It can often feel like pandering; a few friends have gone as far to say it feels insulting to the audience's capacity for characters.
The sex scenes that do involve characters' motivations - or perhaps provide a resolution/challenge/conflict/crisis of them - and have context to the world within the show feel cohesive with the story. When they don't - the spirit of the story suffers. Sex is natural - so the telling of it should be, too.
Ultimately, I don't see the 'Gen Z response' as a sign of a transition to sex-averse audiences, but rather an opportunity to consider the motivation behind the scenes, their placement in the story, and the saturation of them when considering the formats and consumption patterns of modern-day media. Sex sells, but at what point is the audience overstocked? Do the scenes vary in intensity, purpose, etc.? What did we learn about the characters through the process? Does it standalone as a quality scene, or does it feel like filler? If we stack up all the sex scenes together for a single character, do they show a progression - or a mechanically olympic feat of sex?
OMG, I was just watching the second season of And Just Like That last night -- the Sex In the City reboot -- and...we’ll...just like that, I was reaching for the remote so I could fast-forward. Uncomfortable!
Hard agree! I am longing for stories focussing on friendship, or the bond between siblings. You see flashes of it occasionally but it’s never really explored. These are interesting stories too!
I often find myself quite bored by sex scenes - why are they there? Surely it can’t be to titillate with the easy access to hardcore porn. Maybe some people have become so used to seeing graphic stuff it’s just wallpaper now?
I have been banging on about this for more than a decade now. I'm in my 50's and read and watch a LOT of YA stuff because it's far more story driven than a lot novels that are for adults... I'm not against sex/nudity.. I don't mind reading/watching a bit of porn, but it doesnt' really do much for me compared to the immersion in a story and the tensions between characters. I can remember the absolute joy in the 90's when I found things like the Valdemar series where same sex couples were normalised in a straight world and thinking that would be what reading was going to be like in the future. Little did I know that by the mid 2000's I'd be crying out for the rare story that wasn't ruined by gratuious sex, and at that, mostly written by women in the majority of gay male stories.
This is not to say that there haven't been some amazing non sexualised stories out there, just that you have to consume a huge amount of stuff to get to the stories..
Do you want me to comment on what appears to be the formulaic writing of upwards of 100 plus authors and script writers at the moment? That's another soap box. :)
Just to finish off, there is room for truth in movies and books about sex and how it's not all glamorous and 'hot'. How it is used by people in real life to inflict hurt or control people and just how subtle that can be - it just doesn't need to be overt.