Sex-appeal has given way to a ken-doll smooth portrayal of love and lust in the cinema. When did we condemn the silver screen to perpetual virginity?
It’s early afternoon on a day in late April. The date exactly evades me – even though I kept the ticket stub. I’m on a first date, which started the night before, and this is the second cinema I’ve been to in as many days. Notting Hill, home of Carnival, is inherently sexy. Electric cinema is too – even the name, Electric, exudes sex appeal. Not late, but not early enough to bag two seats together, we take the bed at the front. Sexy. My shirt is backless and sexy, and I’m excited, despite lacking the attention span for films, for the sexy spy flick I’m about to watch.
Black Bag marries Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. It screams sexy, it cries sex. A very long hour and forty-five minutes later and I find myself lying in the sexy front-row-bed, dissatisfied. There was no sex scene. For a film bathed in innuendo and sexual talk, there was no sex-appeal, no chemistry, no actual sex. When did cinema become so chaste?
In 2000, less than one hundred movies were tagged as containing ‘no sexual content’. In recent years this has become four to five times that. Sex is slipping quickly from our screens, as the younger demographic of theatre-goers are also having less sex. The numbers have been slowly declining over the last 20 years, and the cinema screen is reflecting this. There, perhaps, is an effect of the lack of third places for young people to meet naturally. With less of generation-Z drinking and going out, bars and clubs become less of a home for chance encounters. Prices are higher; people don’t want to, or can’t, spend £20 on a cocktail at a bar with an esoteric name. Or perhaps we’ve become too optimised in our time and bodies to waste precious minutes blaspheming our tight abs with a beer belly.
Time, money, and the wild goose chase for perfection are barricading us from good old fashioned debauchery.
Raquel Benedict’s 2021 article “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny” is a seminal piece on the topic of the sexlessness of modern media. Linking the fall in sex scenes to the rise in thin, fit bodies. There’s an army of beautiful people in the making, and you don’t even realise you’re a part of it. She notes that cinema “reflects the culture around it” – sexy but not erotic. Movie men are muscle machines, but superheroes don’t fuck anymore. They probably don’t have the time to.
Hustle culture is at an all time high and time has become a commodity. Everyone’s hobby is a small business now – you can’t just crochet, you must open an Etsy account. If you have a skill, monetise it. Because if you can’t make money from it, it’s a waste of time. Fitness is a worthy investment into the time bank of life. Optimising your body allows more work to get done. More labour means more money. On the other side of that same coin is the monetisation of our bodies themselves. Humans are always seeking the most efficient route, even adapting our language to convey the highest amount of information in the least amount of time. Naturally, we cut out the middle man and economise on our thin, fit bodies – rather than the labour they can produce.
The modelling industry is famously monopolised by thinness, and despite the efforts of the body-positivity movement, the size-inclusivity in fashion weeks worldwide has plateaued. 0.8% of looks presented in Spring/Summer 2025 collections featured plus sized models. As the pendulum has swung back to ozempic-fed bodies, models are skinny again. This reinforces and incentivises the economics of thinness, where rich or poor means thin or fat.
As Benedict discusses, people in thinner bodies have lower libido. This is not correlation, it is cause-and-effect. As calorie consumption is decreased, the body begins to ‘feed’ on the energy in fat cells. In times of more extreme calorie restriction, energy is saved for ‘essential processes’ like the heart and liver. Sexual desire is put on the back burner.
So, in the current economic climate where the cost of living is at its summit, naturally, money – and making money, is foregrounded. As creatures of efficiency, we will seek to optimise our bodies to optimise our income, under the regime of hustle culture that capitalism has imposed on us. We will get thinner. We will get fitter. We will get less horny.
But it’s not just the models, it’s also the clothes that they’re wearing. Fashion is becoming more conservative. Fast fashion has surged, as the trend cycle is shorter than ever. Anything and everything can be printed onto a baby tee; minimum fabric, minimum cost. This culture of materialism urges us to buy more and more and more. Run don’t walk to Zara for the CUTEST new skirt! Now available in child-labour-produced polka dots! I overheard someone say, out loud, that “polka dots are the new stripes”, and I felt like i’d walked onto the set of the 2001 Josie and the Pussycats film.
Of course, every culture has its counter-culture. 60s American materialism had the Hippie movement, rejecting the new American middle-class values, established institutions, and nuclear war. Countering the fast fashion crisis, more conservative fashion is on the rise. ‘Timeless’ styles are seeing a resurgence, with higher necklines and lower hemlines finding their way onto fashion week stages. They act as a way of reproducing the class system; showing that one can afford to not buy ‘cheap’ fast fashion.
Dressing conservatively is, in a way, also puritanically sadistic. It stems from the same self-restriction that it takes to be in the thin, fit body that you are dressing. By diminishing your sex appeal, you are denying yourself pleasure in sex just as in food. Fashion becoming more conservative tells us that our society is too – it holds a mirror to our political and social environment. If clothes are more modest and less sexy, so are we.
In 1962, economist George Taylor first noted the hemline index as a recession indicator. in times of strong economy, hemlines are shorter, while in weak economic conditions they fall. With the cost of living so high, it’s no surprise that modest fashion has seen such a rise. Film and fashion walk hand-in-hand, so with cultural trends moving toward a more conservative norm, it is not unexpected that the sex-scene scene is dying like a Scream victim.
There is also a suggestion that the pornography industry is killing the sex scene. Pornography is so far removed from the erotic. Anaïs Nin began to write erotica for an anonymous client in the 1940s. ‘The collector’ demanded she shrink the story. “leave out the poetry” he demanded. she wrote back:
“Sex loses its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone…it becomes a bore”.
Her words still ring true to the importance of the sex scene artistically. Commercially produced pornographic content is not only an exploitative and corrupt industry, but is robotic and completely removed from the erotic. It is optimised in its own way to “maximise genital visibility” in a mundanely heterosexual way, so focused on its own androcentricism, the climax of the ‘storyline’ – or lack thereof – being the male orgasm. This optimisation is deliberate and damaging, physically rewiring dopamine receptors in the brain; becoming a drug.
This raises the bar for cinema sex scenes, they must out-sex the poetry-free porn that our generations feed on. “It wasn’t enough to make people horny; a sex scene had to move the story forward or serve a stylistic purpose.” writes Vinson Cunningham. Maybe producers are simply daunted by the task.
Or perhaps, in contrast, the younger generations are sheltered from vulgarity entirely. After all, it is not only sex-scenes dropping from cinema statistics, but mentions of drugs and alcohol. Are movies following suit of trends in younger people drinking less and having less sex, or is our life imitating art?
The recently implemented online safety act in the UK, intends to protect children and adults from potentially harmful content, such as pornography. Requiring facial identification on some websites and content that may be disturbing. While I, by no means, am a defendant of porn and its industry; this mass censorship is arguably more harmful than protective. Not only are people of all ages being forced to hand out vast measures of biometric data, but also being blocked from accessing news, information, and political protest information if it is classed as ‘harmful’.
Perhaps, in an era of censorship, it is not financially or politically viable to display sex in film. Xualin Tham’s ‘Revolutionary Desires’ argues that cinema’s sex scenes wield political power. “Cinema’s erotic imagination … can be politically transformative.” The sex scene confronts us with the raw truth of the commodification of sex. Forced to realise our complicity in the vouyer-consumption of watching it. If sex is a commodity, whatever happened to ‘sex sells’?
Tham traces the disappearance of sex and eroticism on our screens and argues its political salience, writing of capitalism’s division of human from human desire. By alienating us, through shame, from sex and erotica, “consumer capitalism easily annexes our wants and desires”. The removal of sex from cinema is a weapon to “bolster hegemonic forms of privatisation like the nuclear family”. Thus, they argue, the portrayal of sex in films, in all its queerness, depravity, and eroticness, is a tool of revolution.
With the sex scene fading out, and the erotic so far removed from what little there is left; I fall back on my trusty copy of A Spy in the House of Love, or Delta of Venus. (Anaïs Nin never fails me). A picture may say a thousand words, but perhaps pillow talk is better left to the pages of Sarah Walters’ Fingersmith or Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher.
