Was Sex Better Before? (In Hollywood)

Not really. But film critics ignore the limits of Hollywood sexiness past.

“More sex!”

Such has been the cry of film critics and aficionados for some years now. Superhero films are aimed at family audiences, and they’re notably uninterested in sex scenes. Often they even avoid sexual tension. Director Richard Linklater summed up the criticisms in a recent interview:

I think what’s out of fashion, people say there’s no sex in movies anymore, but there isn’t ‘adult’ in movies anymore, as sexuality in movies equals adult…When I was 13 years old and looking at movies, I thought the adult world looked pretty interesting, it looked fun and I thought, ‘I can’t wait to get there!’ But it wasn’t just the sex, it was the adult situations they showed.

But somewhere along the way Hollywood inverted that. It’s like they said, ‘we’re going to make films where you can stay 13 forever, you stay that little kid with little kid concerns’, so I guess it drifted away as its complexities weren’t the subject matter of mainstream cinema as it had been before.”

Linklater posits an older, hornier, more mature Hollywood past, and contrasts it with a frivolous, childish, sexless Hollywood present, with films that don’t care about “adult situations” or adult themes. He thinks we need to return to that sexier, cooler Hollywood, rather than just barfing out more anti-concupiscent capes.

But was the past really a wonderland of adult content? And is the present so bereft? I think the answers there are, “no,” and “very much no.”

The Not So Great, Not So Adult Past

Critics like Linklater act like the mostly sexless big budget all-ages Hollywood blockbuster was birthed (chastely) from the big metal helmet of Iron Man in 2008. But that’s obviously not the case. PG-ish blockbuster continence has been the norm for decades at least.

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