I may agree with the reasons behind their lamentations as the reticence regarding sex scenes is a #metoo overreaction but I disagree with their conclusion. The sex scene did not die, it just became less present in mainstream entertainment on non-X-rated platforms. Honestly, implied sex does everything needed for a plot. The columnist complained it avoided a fundamental part of the human experience. That may be true but that part of the human experience is mostly the relationships that sex happens in and not the thirty second act itself. Few people north of ten learn anything by seeing a penis penetrating a vagina.
And while stories about sexual relationships explore that part of the human experience, that dead horse is so beaten that the only way to tell it is a horse is through DNA testing. Just compare the volume of media about sexual relationships versus platonic relationships. The ratio is insane. The artistic community is so monomaniacally obsessed with sex that it makes the Cookie Monster’s pathological fixation on cookies look moderate. It is the Jodie Foster to their John Hinkley, the fentynal to their opioid addiction, it is the white whale to their Captain Ahab, it is something deeply wrong with them. Sex is interesting but not that fucking interesting.
As an artist, I try to take the road less traveled and tend to avoid sex and sexual relationships in my work for that reason. I have wanderlust and when I venture to the land of sex, I find no wilderness to explore and nothing to discover. The roads are paved, the natives are converted, and the cell reception works. Sadly, it is the only part of the human landscape where every road is paved. Far fewer people can name the three branches of government than watched Fifty Shades of Grey, Ted Bundy is more famous than the Dalai Lama, Carl Sagan, Desdmond Tutu, or Malala, and Donald Trump was literally elected president. Too much sex in the media contributes to consumerist idocracy and they are too addicted to the dopamine to leave for a deeper and more cerebral place. There is a lot to discover beyond it because people almost never leave.
We need to have less sex in the media because they’re not going to eat their veggies if they are distracted by cookies. It will maintain the consumerist idiocracy. It prevents truths of the human condition from being known, it doesn’t cause them to be discovered. Maybe before the sexual revolution, I would have partially agreed with the article but now the dopamine is a collective, pathological, addiction making our culture stupider and shallower.
The Autistic Resistance 