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Not jusr sex. Most romance can be deleted from series and movies and they would not lose any plot. It is virtually always shoehorned in.

Watching softcore porn with your friends and family is kind of undesirable.

The issue isn't sex itself. It's putting a sex scene in most movies meant for adult audiences. Imagine if there had to be a shootout or extended martial arts fight in every romance movie or Hollywood just wouldn't fund it.

Use it where it makes sense, and leave it in the tool box when it doesn't.

I have strong feelings about this because I miss horny comedies like American Pie, and sexy thrillers like Wild Things. I miss stuff like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Boogie Nights, Office Space, Eyes Wide Shut, True Lies. They all had sex/nudity in a way that furthered the plot, or was just plain fun. All of the criticisms I see here sadden me:

• "It doesn't further the plot!!!"

It can absolutely be an important part of the story. See the examples above. Look at most of our ancient mythologies. On top of that I pose the question: Why does it have to further the plot?! Why does sex/nudity have to justify itself when tons of movies have gratuitous action scenes and violence that add nothing to the plot? 90% of John Wick is gratuitous violence that added nothing to the story (but I still love it). Our culture celebrates violence and we'll watch people get tortured to death without batting an eye - but if some tits show up on screen then suddenly everyone becomes a critic analyzing whether the story REALLY needed it or not.

• "I don't want to watch that with my kids/parents/coworkers/etc"

I agree. So don't. Some of my favorite movies are raunchy comedies or sexy thrillers that I would never want to watch in polite company. That doesn't mean they shouldn't exist! If art were constrained by what you wanted to display in front of your kids/parents/coworkers then our artistic & cultural landscape would be a much bleaker place.

• "We have easy access to porn, I don't need porn in my movies!"

The fact that you only equate sex/nudity to porn reveals a problem. Kids today can’t associate sex/nudity on a screen as art, or even just fun, anymore - because in their minds sex/nudity is inextricably tied to porn. The reality is sex/nudity can be fun, dramatic, scary, or funny depending on the context. It can have a place in many kinds of stories, and comparing it to porn is like saying "we have war documentaries so we don't need war movies." They are completely different things!!

• "It's usually cringey & not done well."

By that logic you could make arguments against a lot of different genres and classic story elements. I don't like the argument that because media these days sucks at doing something they should avoid it altogether. I think they should just do better. Movies in the 80s and 90s proved it can be done.

It’s disturbing to me that we’re culturally encouraged to find fun in violence but sex needs to be cordoned off to a containment genre and excised from mainstream art. I’m not saying it needs to be in every movie - but its been obvious for a while they’re going out of their way to avoid it, even in places where it would make sense or be fun. I want art to stop awkwardly excluding a major part of life. I want out of this "Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" Twilight Zone multiverse that all our modern movies seem to take place in.

Sex is too important to be left to porn.

Well yeah, I think this is universal. No one wants to watch a sex scene with their parents

In other news, the entertainment industry is run by soulless ghouls that will do anything they believe is necessary to increase revenue, including adding sex and violence that requires no language or subtlety to understand.

It's the stupid toxic "romance" that I want rid of. It gets so boring and tedious to watch. If it's important to the story, then fine. But otherwise can we just normalize friendship between opposite gendered people without the need for bad relationship drama, jealousy, and normalizing the idea that when someone says no, they're actually just "playing hard to get".

Not a teen here but the amount of sex that show characters have seems crazy to me and I genuinely think it affected me because I couldn't keep up as an impressionable child. It's ok to have lots of sex but do we have to act like that's normal and that I should be suffering when I go more than a month without sex?

If it does not serve a purpose for the plot, then it’s not needed. Simple as that.

I'm not a teen (far from it), but I'm with the kids on this one. The vast majority of sex scenes in movies are awful. They're awkward and totally unrealistic. It completely takes you out of the movie. Most sex scenes are not engrossing or engaging, they don't immerse you in the story, they push you out of it.

Most every sex scene feels like it was made by someone who's never had sex. Every angle is the right angle, every thrust is ecstasy, it's nonsense. It's like someone who thinks the covers of romance novels are depictions of real life.

There are a lot of intimate moments that can be portrayed convincingly enough on film, but sex is rarely one of them. And it's just not necessary. Let the audience infer, let us use our imaginations.

Actual no holds barred sex of every sort you wish to see, as often as you wish to see it, a click away on the interwebz, the titillation found by past generations in R rated movies and late night Television, no longer computes, and is wholly unnecessary

If there's a 1 minute sex scene in a 90 minute movie, you're guaranteed to have your parents walk in during that one sex scene.

I remember watching the wolf of wall street on opening day with my parents when I was a teen.

Based on that experience, I agree, that was so awkward lol

I can't think of a single sex scene in a movie that added value to it. They're pointless and akward to both the audience and actors.

The number of sex scenes are down since 2000 of the movies coming out of Hollywood. But if you're willing to read subtitles, there's still a lot of horny videos coming out of Western Europe.

For me, make the sex relevant to the plot and make the sex they have congruent with the characters.

The kids are right.

So I've noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

• IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
• IP is billed as "adult" with "mature themes"
• Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to "Game of Thrones" a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
• Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
• IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
• IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
• Writing ends up being terrible
• Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
• Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
• VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
• Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
• There's a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it's comical instead of jarring
• There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
• Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
• If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
• In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
• A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

In that context it's no surprise younger people don't like sex scenes. It's basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.

Most of the (supposed) younger generation people I interact with online seem even more prudish and conservative about sex than my very religious parents were growing up. It's super weird to be the older person who's ok with sexual content. I don't really get it.

And yes, I know people will claim it's because it's only when it's not done right or when it feels shoved in, but honestly from the way they talk about anything dealing with sex, it feels like that's just an acceptable excuse and they really just don't want the content to exist at all, even if 'done right'. It's like a huge chunk of the generation is asexual or something.

Lol, If someone puts a gun against my head and says guess the most lied about thing in human history, honest to god I would say, Teens lying About sex.

For some reason I question the validity of this study.

I've been saying this for so long. Don't get me wrong, some films do make sense to have sex scenes. But there are so many that either have hardcore (for TV) sex scenes or just random full nudity that makes it nearly impossible to watch with anyone other than my partner or close friends.

Like if I recommend a film or show to someone and completely forget that it had sex or even just nudity in it, it usually wasn't important to the story. On the other hand, it may have made sense to include in the film but it was so terribly done that I promptly blocked it out.

The other issue is that it has become increasingly difficult to find any shows that either don't include sex scenes, or don't have ridiculous levels of violence, or whatever else is difficult for me to deal with when I just want something easy to watch that's not a kid's movie (although kid's movies have their own set of issues).

Streaming services don't even make it easy to find something to watch - they show you the same stuff over and over, or they pretend that everything is in English when they include so many other languages in the selections. If I am unable to pay attention to the captions then I would prefer to have something in English without trying a bunch of different shows first. I mean I guess this is partly (mainly?) my fault since I've failed to learn another language despite years of studying. But I think it just irritates me that they lie about it more than anything.

Idk I am off topic now and this has turned into a really long comment that probably doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said in this thread.