Sex on Screen Losing Popularity

Carrie Dedrick | Updated: Apr 24, 2014

Sex on Screen Losing Popularity

Sex is losing its prominent place in television and movies. Last Sunday, HBO aired an episode of “Game of Thrones” featuring rape, incest and murder all in one scene. It was enough for critics to call for a stop to the depravity.

Vulture writer Margaret Lyons said, “...rape-as-prop is always distressing, particularly in a show like this, where that disregard echoes the kinds of ideas that foster rape culture in the first place: that women’s feelings don’t matter, that sexual agency isn’t a big deal, that rape is something that just kind of happens and that healthy people simply move on.”

Relevant Magazine refers to this reaction as “the sexploitation backlash.” It seems that the time of blatant sex on the screen is over. People are tired of seeing it, especially the variety that has no point but to put nude women on display.

Relevant writer Tyler Huckabee said, “...women are so frequently stripped down to props while fully dressed men handle the serious business of moving the plot forward.”

Hollywood sex scenes have also lost popularity. Statistically, PG-13 movies make more money at the box than risque, R-rated films so studios “chop their films into relatively tame affairs,” Huckabee says.

According to a New York Film Academy study, women were well over twice as likely to shed their clothes in a top 500 film than men.

With critics calling studios out on objectification of women, the sexploitation backlash might make an impact on what viewers see on the screen.

 

Publication date: April 14, 2014



Sex on Screen Losing Popularity