Where has the erotic film gone?

Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the twenty-first century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but sex has dropped off a cliff since the year 2000.

We used to love what they used to call a steamy blockbuster. I came of age in an era where the “erotic thriller” — 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct — were the box office draws, in which big stars lost their drawers. Comedies like A Fish Called Wanda, Green Card or When Harry Met Sally relied on frisson and fizz for a large part of their appeal. Adult relationships — whether cutely romantic or dangerously obsessive — got bums on seats.

No more. The big cinema hits are superhero, horror, sci-fi and fantasy, and not at the grown-up end of those genres. As with so much of this century’s mass culture everything feels arrested in very early adolescence, the fraught kidult time when you may well be thinking about sex and worrying about sex, but not actually having sex. This is cinema on puberty blockers.

We now have the deeply unsexy phenomena of ‘sex positivity’ and ‘body positivity’

The expanding Chinese market, with its stricter rules and very different social attitudes towards sex, is an obvious factor here. CCP-appointed censors are just not going to pass such western capitalist decadence. And then, of course, there is porn, and the problem for Hollywood of “How you gonna keep them down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paree?” When pretty much any sexual display can be accessed in a couple of clicks, the suggestion and tantalizing teasing of the erotic loses its intrigue.

I’m afraid that the prudes of old were right about mystery being the greatest aphrodisiac, and imagination being the most important sex organ. The familiarity of over-exposure has debased the coinage of the hot. The prevalence and availability of porn has trashed the lure of cinematic sex. I grew up when dog-eared, very well-thumbed soft porn books were passed around at school. When schoolboys whispered excitedly about glimpses of bits in films. This was an era when fleapits did roaring trade on the promise of a fleeting second of boob, surrounded by comedy turns from the likes of Bob Todd and Robin Askwith. Knickers and bras were pored over. Porky’s was regarded as sophisticated.

But how can cheeky or titillating — such as they were — function against the backdrop of OnlyFans? The modern audience, to be frank, is spent. Why bother adding simulated sex to your film when the punters can get a look at the real thing for free in seconds? Then, of course, there is the general squeamishness and awkwardness around sex. What filmmaker would want to get themselves into a tangle of intimacy coordinators, lawsuits, social media criticism, and walk into the very center of a multitude of angry ideological battlefields about consent, identity and sexism? You can and will be judged. Much better, much safer, just to have some punch-ups and some gore, or discuss weighty philosophical issues through the medium of Batman or Star Wars.

I remember some years ago discussing with a friend the likelihood that the pendulum of our culture would, inevitably, swing away from its sexual tone. That pattern — naughty alternating with prudish — has always held true historically; the still shocking outrageousness of Restoration comedy flared only very briefly between Cromwellian Puritanism and the Society for the Reformation of Manners. But how, we wondered, could that possibly happen in our hyper-sexualized age?

The answer was staring us in the face. We now have the deeply unsexy phenomena of “sex positivity” and “body positivity.” Everything is out on display, jiggling about on a Pride parade in the open air — but it’s a turn-off, more effective than any bucket of cold water from the Junior Anti-Sex League. Sex is still all around us if we want it — but it is just too much bother. Remember when we used to make jokes about it? That world is as lost as Atlantis.

Relaxation is key to intimacy. You need to relax to begin the different, pleasant, tensions of sex. (Again, yes I know that some people enjoy the risk of being caught — let’s ignore them.) But we cannot relax, because politics and porn have overlaid even more neurosis on to sex, which we were pretty neurotic about anyway. Safer for the cinema, safer for everybody, not to go there.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.