Why Are We Even More Afraid of Sex Now?

Recently, I was trying to chart the path of my melon felon journey. Call it nostalgia, but I was curious about the things I latched onto and how the patterns of my knocker-obsession seemed to form a map of chesty muses both real and animated. Having been born in 1980, I’m ever so slightly a member of Gen-X. 

What this means is that I’m one of the last generations who remembers a time when everything I did wasn’t tracked and monitored by Big Brother, Big Business, Big Tech, or fucking ads. Commercials and ads have always been around, but there was a time when they were meant to make sense. Unlike modern ads, which seemed designed to go viral but only succeeded in fermenting a kind of bone-deep animosity towards the product that ensures you will never buy whatever the ad is pushing. 

It also means that I grew up with the strict delineation of “kids movies” and “movies for adults”. That is, until Joe Dante made a film called Gremlins, a masterpiece of mean, acerbic, gory, tender, frenetic 80s cinema. It was also one of the major factors in the MPA creating PG-13. PG-13, simply put, meant that said movie was a little too much for kids, but teens might be okay; but kids might enjoy it, if the parents think it's okay.

I can assure you if you were under 13, the PG-13 was tame stuff. It was the Rated 'R' fish you wanted to catch. But if you were in a bind, PG-13 would be alright. Nothing you'd brag to your friends about later on, but it'd do in a pinch.

Not to be all “back in my day” or “kids these days”, but when I was younger, a movie having T&A was a reason TO seek a movie out. Whether or not we were old enough was beside the point. We had been told it wasn’t for us and, like any right-thinking child, knew that it meant we desperately had to see the verboten material or else be forced to live a life of shame and despair. 

I’m not saying we were perfect; we sure the fuck were not without our faults, but the notion of sex was, at the very least, healthy. The guardrails set up to prevent us from getting a peek at a nice, juicy rack, or a gander at a pert bum, were both effective and hilariously easy to hack. But that was the point. We weren’t old enough to see it, but seeing it wouldn’t kill us; it was just sex. 

These movies, far from traumatic, became benchmarks in our lives. I remember one time I was watching Police Academy, which I had recently purchased on DVD. My roommate came home, saw the movie, grabbed the DVD case, and shouted, “The movie with the tits!” Everyone had a movie that held that first taste of the forbidden human form.  

Sadly, society being what it is, women had a much more fraught relationship with this phenomenon. Male bodies are even more verboten than women’s. A subject for a different article. (Release the dong-cut of Oppenheimer, Nolan, you coward!) 

But even then, young girls were hardly left in the dust. The airwaves were filled with teenage soap operas stacked with bed-hopping twenty-somethings playing teenagers. Hell, in the mid-aughts I. Marlene King served up the mother of all teenage soap operas in 'Pretty Little Liars', a show that dominated Tumblr, more so than maybe even 'Glee'. King's show was such a juggernaut partly because it spoke to so many people of all races, genders, and sexualities. It's a buck-wild horny-on-main show and a problematic AF show that is a hoot and a holler, and the fact that it can't exist today is fucking depressing.

Even 'Saved By The Bell' aimed itself at a certain age demographic, but understood that more than one gender watched it. In the 90s, if you walked into any bedroom, chances are they had someone from the show hanging on their wall. Or maybe it was 'Dawson's Creek'. The point is that all these dudes who say 'you have to keep men in mind' are telling on themselves because this shit was the MCU of their day.

The real issue with the MCU is that they have no one in mind. Just genderless, sexless, principle-less fans. A bunch of people so terrified of seeing something human that they'll pay through the nose for anything that makes them forget the meat sack they're wearing, even if the images onscreen look ass-terrible.

Growing up, sex was everywhere, but it wasn’t billed as sex. It was billed as something natural. April O’Neil, that buxom redheaded roving reporter who often played the damsel in distress to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was an early crush. Except, I never realized how racked and loaded April was. It wasn’t because I wasn’t into boobs; my love for Elvira and Dolly Parton would have waylaid that assumption. But it was simply because while I may have found them aesthetically pleasing, I was not yet the grown melon felon I am today. 

But that’s just the thing. April, the animated version, was based on the equally fulsome teasing sex-pistol Fujiko Mine from Lupin III. Her character design certainly had sex in mind, but April was never overtly ogled or leered at. To my childish mind, the most outlandish aspect of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that none of the turtles ever had a crush on her. 

Contrast April O’Neil to the MCU, and in the early stages you have much the same thing. Gorgeous people, who clearly fuck, but are themselves, not overly sexualized. The lone exception being ScarJo as Black Widow. This was due to both her outfit and her overwhelming movie star BTE persona that, despite never approaching the sultry kinkiness of the comics, she somehow implied it with every breath and movement. 

There’s this strange dueling narrative about Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z in which they are both puritans when it comes to sex in TV and movies while also somehow being the generations that spawned the notion of gooners. For myself, a member of Gen-X right before the cutoff, it’s a strange paradox to witness.  

Last week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened and smashed box office records. Amidst all the opening weekend hubbub, there was a small conversation about a small scene without any outright nudity but filled with implied nudity: the Yelena Belova spa scene. A scene where a naked Yelena, covered in strangely opaque blue water, gets our neighborhood sad sack to strip down and get in the water with her.  

“It’s my office,” Yelena says. Yelena is played by Florence Pugh. Pugh will likely ever be featured on this site; only a fool would deny that, among her peers, she has the most lethal face card and contains one of the most potent BTE auras, just in her eyes and voice alone. 

The director, Destin Daniel Cretton, frames the moment as fun and treats the nudity as casual. It’s not inherently a scene meant to be sexy. So why do some people think the scene is obscene? Because nudity has no place in a “kids' film”. 

You may not have heard about it because the conversation never went viral and died a mercifully quick death. However, the sexlessness of modern films is so egregious that the mere idea of casual implied nudity was akin to violations of obscenity laws. 

Honestly, this delineation between casual and sexualized nudity has always been a tricky one for American audiences even in my day, but the modern so-called “debate” is depressing because we’ve reached a point where nudity itself is sexual. The human body has become verboten. Partially because, with the growing Trans movement, some people have become petrified that they are no longer “normal”. Or worse, might find themselves attracted to someone who has the same tackle as they do. 

I remember someone saying something on, of all things, an old MTV reality show. I don’t remember the name or even what it was about; I think it was a dating show. But the situation was they were talking to a couple, one a cis woman and the other a trans woman.  The trans woman was nervous about having sex with their cis partner. The cis-partner said-and I’ve never forgotten this- “You’re not an alien. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”  

They are not aliens-and neither are we. So why do we treat each other as such? Worse is how we have come to treat our bodies like aliens. The sight of them, the discussion of them, the mere notion of them. So many people have seen trans-ness and instead of being freed, instead of being in awe of how big and complex the world really is, have retreated into a back alley of “this is what a body MUST look like,” a cousin of “big tits are freakish”. 

An irony because trans people love bimbos almost as much as cis males do and for much the same reason. The human body, and gender, can be a way to express oneself in a way other art forms are inadequate to. That some things can be said without words and that sex and desire are such a human experience that wanting to be the cause of it is nothing more than a sign of having a pulse. 

We all want to be loved and be desired just as much as we wish to love and to desire. If we at all wish for people to grow into healthy sexual beings, then we must allow for that discovery to happen. The creators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did not set out to create a generation of boys who only desired busty redheaded damsels in distress. Quite the contrary, they simply liked the way they looked. Whether or not you found April attractive was never the REAL reason you liked the show. 

This terror of the alien has spread so far and wide that it has seeped into family and kids' media. We have become afraid to let kids become fascinated by the human body. Well-intentioned or not, we created this puritanism by telling them they could not view this alien species known as their own body for fear of being irrevocably damaged and hornified. 

We’ve even had to invent a notion of a porn addiction, a thing that does not exist. When I say porn addiction does not exist, I mean every institution in charge of designating such things has said, repeatedly, and backed with thorough evidence and research, that it does not exist. People will point to gooners as evidence to the contrary. (Gooners are not addicted; they are obsessed; the difference between those two terms is both clinical and very real.) 

Shows used to have 'very special' episodes where younger characters learned about sex. Usually by lusting after an older character. Which was normal and healthy, which often led to the other conversation about healthy boundaries between reality and fantasy, and by accident, the notion of consent.

But my point is you can’t expect someone to grow up sexually healthy if you imply at every turn that the human body, THEIR body, is something that should be scared of. Because that’s what all of this- the puritanism, the anti-sex, the rad-fems, the anti-trans, ALL of it- boils down to: a simple, nightmarish fear of the human form. 

That, more than anything, makes me sad. Because it means so many people can’t even love themselves.

*From left to right:
Top Row: Pamela Anderson as C.J. Parker in 'Baywatch', Jennifer Love Hewitt as Julie in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Casandra Peterson as Elvira in Elvira Mistress of the Dark, Linda Kozlowski as Lisa in Crocodile Dundee.
Second Row: Princess Jasmine voiced by Linda Larkin in Aladdin, Eliza Dushku as Faith in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', Ariel voiced by Jodi Benson in The Little Mermaid, Leslie Easterbrook as Sgt. Callahan in Police Academy.
Third Row: Valerie Perrine as Miss Tessmacher in Superman: The Movie, April O'Neil voiced by Renae Jacobs in 'The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles', Michelle Thomas as Myra in 'Family Matters'.
Fourth Row: Debbie Dunning as Heidi in 'Home Improvement', Lynda Carter as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman in 'Wonder Woman' or 'The New Adventures of Wonder Woman', Colleen Camp as Yvette the racked French Maid in Clue, and Jamie Lee Curtis baring her jesticles as Ophelia in Trading Places.
Last Row: Jessica Rabbit voiced by Kathleen Turner in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the cast of 'Pretty Little Liars', the cast of 'Dawson's Creek', and Teela voiced by Linda Gary in 'He-Man: Masters of the Universe'.

Images courtesy of ABC, Wind Dancer Productions, Touchstone Studios, Sony Pictures Releasing, Columbia Pictures, HBO Entertainment, Warner Bros., and CBS