Art raffle prize I did for my friend ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ gotta say it was one of the most ambitious drawings I’ve done recently but I am in love with the results 😻
Yeah we should do this for action scenes too. Have Aragorn draw his sword and fade to black and the fellowship have killed all the Uruk Hai.
This is the weird wave of purity culture that I mentioned a day or two ago. If you really are *an adult* then you can decide whether or not to watch films and tv shows with sex scenes.
Exactly! You could say this about literally anything! Why bother with movies at all? Just sit in a dark room and vividly imagine an epic story of good vs evil or something. We don’t need to see scenes.
sorry but i love sex scenes. i love seeing the characters connect, i love seeing how the cinematography is handled, i love hearing what music they pick, i love seeing how the actors interact. and tbh i’m kinda tired of sexuality and erotica being banished to the shadows of society lest poor innocent bystanders be assaulted by the very mention of fucking. sorry but sex is part of the human experience for a lot of people, and it is absolutely purity culture to demand that it be sanitized from daily life bc some ppl find it icky.
Wait a minute, people actually LIKE sex scenes? Like actually enoy them, other than somehow being turned on by them? I always thought it was a combination of obnoxious filler/trying to be controversial (in some cases)/trying to get straight men to watch movies they otherwise wouldn’t.
Gonna preface this with: I am demisexual. Specifically, I tend to be bored by sex that involves me personally, but I absolutely love watching fave characters get it on, and I enjoy them as scenes, not bc I am turned on.
Like, the scene in The Terminator where Kyle Reese, after spending the whole movie being a stoic, emotionless, lifelong soldier against a hunk of hateful machinery, finally breaks and tells Sarah Connor that he loves her, then tries to backtrack from that moment of vulnerability and pretend it didnt just change everything between them, change what they can be to each other, and she kisses him, and then they fall together into a raw, hard sex scene, hands gripping and sweat shining as they make love for the first and only time?
Fuck yeah I love that scene. It’s gorgeously shot, the music is amazing. From a character standpoint its the only moment they get to be together like that which enhances the tragedy of their doomed romance. It’s also where her son comes from which is literally a whole plot point. It would not have the same impact if Cameron just faded to suede after they started kissing.
If one doesn’t like sex scenes that’s completely fine and you should absolutely have the option to avoid them. But acting like sex shouldn’t be depicted in fiction is absolutely part of purity culture.
@elamarth-calmagol sex is something lots of humans place enormous weight on. Even if you find sex gross or boring, that can’t be news.
And anything that a character might find to be super important is an excellent vehicle for characterization. The particular way they interact at all, or the particular way they interact with this partner can tell the audience immense amounts about the relationship without a single line of dialogue.
The main reason people think movie/tv sex scenes are extraneous—aside from puritanical nonsense or disliking sex—is that lots of mainstream Hollywood scenes are poorly directed and poorly shot.
Try watching something like Lucía y el sexo or Secretary or Cronenberg’s Crash.
Lucía is your classic Euro art film. All the sex is shot in a way that feels very personal to these characters. The camera is only a voyeur when that’s the overt point of the scene—unlike a lot of badly-shot sex where we’re supposed to be with the heroine, but a dumb cinematographer didn’t understand POV in film and shot it like we’re looking at her.
Secretary is entirely about a woman’s awakening through BDSM. Not just the characterization but the character development is through the sex scenes. (Well, and given that it’s a movie about kink, all the random non-sex kink scenes aren’t really distinct from the ones where people are naked.)
Or, on a similar note, watch Amélie. Do you honestly think that sex scene could be omitted? It’s near the beginning where a guy grunts and sweats on top of her while she tries hard not to giggle. It tells us everything we need to know about how unsatisfying and lackluster men have been for her up to the point the story starts. If the dialogue just told us she’d had bad sex, we might imagine it was traumatic or disgusting instead of her true reaction: that it was ridiculous.
I find Crash hot, but I don’t think that was the primary point or the reaction of a lot of the audience. Both the film and the book it’s based on are about disconnected people in technology-filled modern cities who deal with their alienation via sex. The sex scenes are always about something: power, grief, obsession, fear. Many of the scenes show moments of emotional change that drive what the characters choose to do next.
Any halfway decent sex scene should be doing double or triple duty:
It should be hot or gross, or whatever the surface point of the scene is.
It should show characterization and possibly move the plot forward.
And, optionally, it should add to the themes and symbolism of the work.
Using this as an opportunity to share one of my favorite video essays from Folding Ideas, an analysis of a 90-second sex scene from Tuca & Bertie and how it ties into the wider themes of the show:
“We don’t often know what our boundaries are until we hit them.”
“And honestly, I don’t think you could do the same [storytelling] this efficiently without that aspect, without it being a sex scene and without the vulnerability that represents. (…) This type of interaction, one that doesn’t just have sex as the backdrop for things to happen in front of, but uses the dynamics of intimacy for their intrinsic qualities, it is exemplary storytelling.”
