Sex scenes (not “chaste”)

REALISTIC?!

I am dead.

“Honey, I didn’t just rape you, did I?”

And here’s what I mean when I suggest “realistic” is relative…

*ears perk up*

I have feeling that between you and Stirch, there are far better tales to tell than what we receive in the movies.

*shrug*

No idea what you mean…

Jokes aside, everyone has tales to tell.

Heh, some more so than others. There are plenty of folk out there without any or are less experienced that don’t have these tales to tell.

Well, as I said in the original post, I have plenty of whiny self-pitying “””trauma””” tales which I myself despise too, but I am trying to move past it. Though that’s not really working. This is the first online space where I even mentioned the experience, I guess because there isn’t much troll activity where people accuse me of lying, ask to see medical records with diagnosis etc.

Right, but look at the original post. The question was whether or not there are films being made in the modern era (defined in the OP as 2015 forward) that contain erotic sequences. I've fully conceded that these days such films mostly live in the independent/lower-budget/smaller-release market (and especially the LGBT subset of such films). And I don't think that The Handmaiden is unknown. It has over 130,000 ratings on IMDb and is currently on their Top 250 list!

He's not asking her how she feels. Her consent is clearly not his priority (I mean, he doesn't want to assault her but he also doesn't hesitate to manhandle and threaten her, "If you try to get up, I'll feel it and I'll hurt you".) He says it sarcastically to her when she acts afraid of him.

I am fairly confident in my reading, yes. Every book--and they are all easy page-turners--follows the same formula. He gets involved in some situation. There's always a women in her 20s or 30s (and once in her 40s). He is in his late 40s or early 50s. He always sleeps with her, and it's clearly an extension of the fantasy of the books. The female characters serve double duty as a sex fantasy object and also as a ready-made damsel in distress so that the bad guy can threaten to torture or rape her and Reacher can save the day. I think it's stupid but whatever. My point is that a filmed version of such a story doesn't need the sex between them to be explicit except for the purpose of making the sexual aspect of the macho fantasy explicit.

People who do that are ****’s.
I’m sorry you went through that.
To clarify, I’m not talking about traumatic experiences but ones you enjoyed.

Okay, well. Even if you want to show he doesn’t care about these women/uses them/whatever, you can show him not giving them an orgasm or go further and, if they ask for oral sex, have him make a face. This is all a choice! One of my favourite bits of 8 Mile is where the mother complains to her 30-year-old son that her (also 30-year-old) lover doesn’t give her cunnilingus. That is GOLD. I, for one, would like to see that in a Jack Reacher sex scene.

I know. you’re right, I do have stories to tell there

*ears perk up once again*

As noted on page 1, this thread is not for porn…

😳

Apparently it was page 2.

Sorry!

Your first paragraph: yes, that’s how I felt with the Condor line. His suggestion that so long as he doesn’t rape her she has nothing to be upset about. I hated this line in the movie.

Second paragraph: I read a couple of the Reacher books. (Bailed out of my 1st & only Reacher movie). Not a bad read, I suppose, but wearying after a while.

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It's not that he doesn't care about them. It's that the author doesn't care about them. They are props. And to be fair, so is everyone else! The love interest, the bad guys . . . .they are all just mechanisms. And to be fair to Lee Child, his books are a slight cut above other action thrillers.

My point is that in terms of character development, showing Reacher and a woman in bed after sex, or making it clear they've slept with each other serves the purpose of those female characters. Reacher's a manly-man and no woman has the power to resist his rugged charms. Throwing in an actual explicit sex scene would just be for titillation (and let's be real: we'd see her body but not more than a glimpse of his).

I think that her response is pretty perfect though. He says, "I haven't raped you, have I?" and she answers, "Yet." She has plenty good reason to assume that he might harm her at some point. Him not having harmed her much (because he has manhandled her, twisted her arm, etc) is not some sort of solid proof that he won't hurt her later.

For a while in the early 2000s I was flying a lot. I would buy a Reacher book at the airport and read all or most of it on the plane. Like I said, easy page-turners. I probably haven't read one in about 10 years or so.

When you read them at all close to one another, their formulaic nature becomes kind of painfully obvious. (And, again, the one where he slept with his dead friend's 20-something daughter was kind of a low point for me.)

I don’t know. I suppose, as Corax says early on in the thread, it’s more about what we want to achieve with this. It doesn’t have to be for “titillation”. In Taking Lives, which is for the most part an awful film imo, there is a scene where Jolie takes Hawke to A&E because he’s torn his stitches during sex. A sex scene can culminate in that and will also serve plot purposes. I don’t agree that an explicit sex scene has to exploit the woman or that it makes sense not to have any to avoid that.

Again, I find it hard to dissect the Child stuff as I’ve never read a word of it.

God, I don’t know. I’ve just reread the above and I don’t know how we got to that, this isn’t really the point imo. As Stu mentioned some pages back, it’s about a lack of sensuality. Regardless of who cares about who in the story, you could have a shower scene where Reacher/woman wash blood off each other, then have sex, again as “stress relief”.

Obviously you can’t/shouldn’t “randomly” throw in an explicit sex scene. But as Stu was saying and as I intended to suggest, the absence of these scenes in the first place signifies that sexual interaction between human beings has taken a back seat. To me, that’s a problem.

Let’s imagine a story where a guy kills someone while driving because he was getting a blowjob at the same time. I believe that showing said blowjob in detail (would require some innovative angles, but whatever) would be relevant, as that would help us get in the character’s headspace. If we see how mindblowing/distracting/“great” it is, we understand how he crashed the car. Stuff like that.

An acquaintance who teaches creative writing likes to bang on about “showing, not telling”. Why don’t we apply the same logic to sex scenes? Why “tell” us that Reacher slept with girl x by giving us a shot of them in bed post-factum if we can show it?

You know?

Someone here was saying (cliches thread again; I think, I love it) that there are too many shots/scenes of people brushing their teeth. But not explicit sex scenes. Sex is as normal/natural as brushing one’s teeth. It’s not about “titillation”. And what’s wrong with that anyway? What’s wrong with looking at a beautiful naked woman’s body and “getting off”?

I stare at both naked men and women in films. Last time I felt like getting off at a sight of a naked/semi-naked guy: Taxi Driver and, yes, thank you, whoever mentioned him - Viggo in Eastern Promises. Women - Eva Green in Dreamers.

Actually, scrap that, I can think of LOADS of sexy male full frontal nudity shots. Thank god for that, the world ain’t ending yet.

I agree. My point is that there are films (like the ones adapted from the Reacher novels) that are action thrillers that could have sex scenes, but don't need them and I really don't mind the decision not to include them.

Well, the original post asked specifically about scenes that are "graphic sex scenes".

I think that there is plenty of sensuality to be found in films these days. Portrait of a Woman on Fire had plenty of sensuality, but no explicit sex. Moonlight has a lot of sensuality that is very relevant to the character development and plot. Shiva Baby has a sensual sequence in which we see how sex is a key dynamic between two characters.

Even in the "big budget superhero" genre, you have the scene in Wonder Woman where he is nude in the bath that has a playful, sensual frisson between the two characters.

Again, when I look at the list of films I've seen from the 80s/90s, I really don't see that sexuality or sensuality is that much more present. I'm happy to concede that the Marvel-level films exist in a more sexually (and emotionally! And intellectually!) sterile space. But was Star Wars all that sensual? Or Jaws? Or Back to the Future?

There are stories where sexual interaction is a key part or even the key part of the relationship between the main characters. But there are also many stories where it isn't.

I guess? It might be relevant, but would it be necessary?

From a business standpoint, because an R-rating restricts your audience. And from a story-telling point of view because it's not necessary and is thus a waste of time. And because nudity/sexual content necessitates special shooting conditions and additional crew. And also because some actors don't consider exposing their body something they are comfortable with.

Violence or things considered gory is the same, if you think about it. Films often do not show us explicit footage of something. When was the last time you saw an actual vulva in a childbirth scene? Why just TELL us that the baby came out? Why not show us?

It's not about saying that there's something wrong with sex. We also don't get explicit pooping scenes. Pooping is as natural as brushing one's teeth. And I would argue that in many films the sex/nudity IS about titillation, which is why so many of them lean incredibly strongly into male gaze territory.

There are stories where the sexual relationship between the characters is relevant, and even where the type of sexual relationship they have is relevant (as in Dear White People or The Handmaiden). Relevant to the plot or relevant to the character. For example, I think that it's really powerful to see the sex scene in Saint Maude for multiple reasons. But if it's not necessary to the story, why include it?

From the 80s and 90s, though? In films that would be considered mainstream? There's definitely more male nudity in films these days, but the disparity is still really huge. And male nudity is often not actually couched in sexual/sensual sequences. In fact, the first three that come to mind involve fight sequences where the point of the nudity is vulnerability. Viggo's body in Eastern Promises might be sexy, but I'd hardly describe the sequence as sensual or "explicitly sexual".

You are not wrong. But I see nothing wrong with titillation and I believe removing that is unnatural. Also I think sensuality and sexuality go together for the most part, at least this thread was/is about that.

I think that depends on your definition of “necessary”. I’m not hiding behind semantics, but even romance as such is not necessarily crucial to the story; sex doesn’t even have to have anything to do with romance. American History X, which is one of my favourite films, has a pretty graphic male rape scene. This falls more under “violence”, but aggressive sex/rape scenes are still sex scenes and I think that if there is rape in the story, it should be portrayed graphically (though not Irreversible-style; that’s a bit much) because to most people, it is a “graphic” moment of their life that their mind likely won’t ever erase. I would instead interrogate why it supposedly isn’t necessary. Why not give any screen time/attention to the characters’ sex life and instead choose to erase a huge chunk of the human experience?

The difference between that and defecation is that I doubt many people would actively object to sex scenes on the grounds of offensiveness, whereas defecation many find offensive (though I don’t). In the same vein as above in relation to bad sex/Cat Person, I wonder why you would compare something people generally find unpleasant to think about (defecation) to something most humans would, one would hope, for now, at least, find generally pleasurable (sex).

Never thought I’d say that, but I’m beginning to get why my mother would get exasperated with me for watching all that incessant horror. She would say, “Why don’t you watch something beautiful”, by which she meant aesthetically pleasing, visually attractive, in short, not blood and guts. I feel the same way here: what could possibly be the argument against showing a titillating sex scene mid-film? Sex is beautiful and everyone has it. Why not reflect that? The argument against showing defecation is quite simply that people will find it off-putting, nothing more. But I don’t see why people are supposed to find a titillating sex scene where everyone enjoys sex and can get it up off-putting.

I love The Handmaiden, but I don’t see how these sex scenes are any more necessary plot-wise than a hypothetical sex scene between Jack Reacher & whoever, Tony &Pepper (sorry, Stu, that has stuck!) or, indeed, James Bond & Vesper. We could have just as well seen that the two girls are in love via sideways glances, little handwritten notes and sighs, Romanticism-style. Again, I see an imbalance!

Why is a graphic sex scene between two LGBT women (I would readily agree that holding hands sex scene is one of the best ever made) deemed more necessary plot-wise than a graphic sex scene between Bond & Vesper, if we are to believe the man would leave the secret service he only just got into for this woman? Both stories are about “love that transcends circumstance”, broadly speaking.

By that logic, we need a pornographic rendition of Romeo & Juliet with Adriana Chechik to explain why the whole thing is such a big deal that everyone would decide to die.

Either an explicit sex scene is due in both or it is not due in either. I don’t get the logic. If it’s two women, then women aren’t being objectified, but with men they are?

Women in Love (1969) - a homoerotic one at that.

Mr Ripley - lots of gorgeous homoerotic stuff there, including a naked Dickie in bath, full frontal, albeit brief.

Poison (1991) - Haynes.

In the Realm of the Senses (1976).

I think naked/semi-naked men fighting is always a sexual scene. Think about Ancient Rome etc. I would argue the Casino Royale (2006) Bond torture scene is sexual as hell in a certain way; with a reference to scratching one’s balls too. Sexual, humorous, violent - pretty perfect to me.

Even if there are fewer naked men, why is that a problem? There’s the lesbian community too, I’m sure they enjoy the naked women - why rob them of the pleasure? Re: naked men: I would have liked a graphic Will/Hannibal sex scene in Hannibal and think it would fit thematically, especially as we know Fuller knows how to make them “anatomically accurate”. The relative lack of naked men has little to do with the discussion of explicit sex scenes in general imo.

Also disclaimer: I guess I’m bad at judging “mainstream”. But I just found 46 titles tagged “male full frontal” in 1970 alone: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?k...year=1970,1970

Hermes Bird (1979), lots of Bertolucci, Hi, Mom (1970 again), etc.

This is off the top of my head in no order.

Which is not to say there isn’t an imbalance, but I really don’t see a problem. I would still maintain without question that yes, there was much more sensuality/sexuality in the ‘80s & ‘90s.

It was realistic to the situation in that particular movie I felt.

What makes you think he's not asking her how she feels? I read it a different way perhaps. I'll watch it again soon.