Yes Sex Scenes

"Well he never bleeds and he never fucks"

Nirvana - Stain

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"Did you really tell my kid that sex is... pleasurable?!"

Becker S4E16: Let's Talk About Sex

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"Controversies had arisen about the morality of sexual broadcasting. Some countries permitted programs for males but not for females, wishing to preserve the innocence of the purer sex. Elsewhere the clerics had succeeded in crushing the whole project on the score that radio-sex, even for men alone, would be a diabolical substitute for a certain much desired and jealously guarded religious experience, called the immaculate union, of which I shall tell in the sequel. Well did the priests know that their power depended largely on their ability to induce this luscious ecstasy in their flock by means of ritual and other psychological techniques.
Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder would decline."

 

Olaf Stapledon - The Star Maker

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"Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'"

 

George Orwell - 1984

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NSFW warning: the topic incurs this by definition, not going to bother warning about every single link. Don't get fired for Oglafing on the job.

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To summarize my previous point in No Sex Scenes, there is one very good reason to avoid depicting sex or sex appeal in any creative endeavor, be it a picture or song or video game: it's bad art. It inevitably distracts and detracts. Reproduction is the lowest of lowest common denominators, the fundamental, most primitive function of all life. Leaning on this basest crutch indicates incompetence in whatever else your work should be conveying.

On the other hand... so do lots of things.

There are a myriad flavors of filler and ways to pander, from guns to food to housepets, and any observer of our social norms and taboos must at some point step back and wonder at this one otherwise quintessentially mundane activity both demanded and villified far more than others even considering its primordial appeal. It's like half the species is for it and the other half is against it.

 

I'd planned this topic six years ago, ever since making the momentous discovery that sex is not real (when I say "topic for another time" I mean it... no matter how long it takes) but gradually realized it would require more than one discussion. For now, let's shift the discussion to comics.

 

Sandra and Woo ran a joke recently about a young girl listing events she'd like to see included in the Winter Olympics. In case you're not up on your Freud, her every idea subconsciously resolved to contestants humping each other, prompting teasing by an older girl. In any sane world everyone would chuckle at this apt little reminder of how obliquely our puberty can kick into gear, tip Novil and Powree a well-deserved quarter and move on to blogging about video games and science fiction. Painfully aware we do not live in a sane world, I checked the comment section for the inevitable wave of puritanical twits decrying the creators' sexual perversion and swearing off ever reading the comic again. Suffice to say the same crowd posturing as protectors of innocence would have had no problem with Sandra and Woo portraying the same little Heidi impersonator dreamily fantasizing about other sexual rituals like long walks on the beach, being serenaded by a boy-band, waltzing in a dress worth more than a house or being presented with diamond jewelry by a fantasy prince. To his credit, the writer decided to flip prudes the finger after that and wrote the next few pages about teenage girls playing top trumps with a deck o' dick pics.

 

The Legacy of Dominic Deegan, sequel to Dominic Deegan, Oracle for Hire, also upped the ante recently. From the start it made liberal use of nudity both female and male (in contrast to the original) to the point we've all become entirely too familiar with the hero Snout's... snout. After a recent depiction of Snout having a one-night-angry-stand with a voluptuous vegetarian, the author answered his critics thus:

"The choice to show an uncensored sex scene, as well as numerous depictions of nudity, is a direct response to the years and years of uncensored violence I depicted during the Oracle for Hire years. Never once did I hesitate to draw mutilations, decapitations, and showers of blood when there was a fight, but I always censored sexual intimacy and natural nudity."

To my No Sex Scenes angle, I would counter that Mookie's also been contriving situations involving nudity (no particular reason the characters would find themselves au naturel in unnatural situations like magical dreamscapes; might as well be represented by ideograms) but his point remains valid. Back in the 2000s Oracle for Hire provided that over-the-top cartoonish Tom&Jerry ultraviolence while at the same time successfully billing itself as a "nice" progressive sort of comic full of hugs and kisses and addressing the conventional social hot buttons like misogyny, racism and homophobia. However, I'd go one further. Oracle for Hire was always full of sex, and kinky sex at that. It never shied away from courtship rituals, from graphically depicting pining, rejection, dates, declarations of affection, questions of fidelity, gift-giving, grand gestures of devotion, weddings and everything else pertaining to the paraphilia we glorify as romance.

Mookie asks: if violence, why not sex?

I would ask: if half of sex, why not the other half?

I always had to roll my eyes at hearing fans of the first Witcher game struggle to praise its by the numbers "kill ten rats" routine or its gratuitously MortalKombatish third person slashing, when we all knew we were in it for the gratuitous nudity. Especially for the infamous collectible cards memorializing the various women in each town eager to jump the itinerant dashing hero's bone(r)/(s). I did get around to trying Witcher 2 at one point, only to find the gameplay choked to death with cutscenes and the casual sex eliminated with extreme prejudice. Oh, sex is supposedly still included (though I didn't get that far) but now strictly leashed to romance plots and supplication minigames. It's more sophisticated now.

Oh, hey, waitaminute, you know who addressed sophisticated sex? Oglaf, the comic which started as pornography but soon found the comedic value of us monkeys' humping instincts overtaking conveyed sex appeal. Every once in a while the authors flip the proverbial fingerer to purveyors of classy humping, to the ludicrous attempts to justify what neither deserves nor needs justification. One of the more incisive observations pointed out how the myth of Odysseus is "fixed" from a limbically satisfying glut of sex and violence into social respectability simply by being couched in a man's devotion toward his wife - and thereby implicitly family, tribe, etc. in ever-widening social spheres.

 

Back in 2016 I briefly mentioned my progress from being born into worship of both the supernatural and of women to apostasy from both, and how easily I had slipped in my early teens from traditionalist chivalry in defense of weak women to modern feminist servility in defense of strong women. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... with a pixie cut! It took me almost two more decades to gradually discern feminism's partial role as "a new velvet glove for the old iron fist of sexual repression" not a product of but a reaction against the sexual revolution. Just as Biblical coveting always did, feminist rape paranoia and outcry against "objectification" fills a market demand for justification to leave female desirability in place while at the same time demonizing concomitant desire, fabricating male guilt and penance. While I used the term puritanism to describe the moralistic posturing against Sandra and Woo's acknowledgement of pubescence and the centrality of sex to... sex... that descriptor only fits most readers in a purely figurative fashion, being modern, enlightened, woke inquisitors desperate to position themselves on the right side of the witch hunt. Not that you'd ever be able to differentiate between Mrs. Grundy's old and new incarnations from their stance, which is sort of my point.

 

Does anyone ever decry gratuitous romance?

Not with any expectation of legitimacy. We men used to at least mumble under our breaths about "chick flicks" two decades ago (try doing that now) but even then we accepted as transgressive and actionable our complaints about movies being derailed for the sake of women's morally superior kink of supplication before uterine fiat. In order for sex to be considered permissible, it must always be lent some utilitarian implication. The man must prove his heroism first, or sacrifice himself, or both. Sex can never simply be a quotidian, pleasant shared experience. It must be the absolute zenith of human aspiration, to be sought at any cost, through however many trials or convoluted dialogue minigames... and must always be paid for in blood, or at the very least a lifetime of servitude toward the woman so magnanimously demeaning herself by permitting you to touch her.

The demonization of sex varies slightly with time and place... but when has romance ever been demonized? When has the female slant on sex ever been considered morally wrong? Prompted comic fans to declare, en masse, they'll never read again? Required authors to defend and justify their decision to portray a candle-lit supper in a page-long apologia struggling to point out "hey, at least it's not as bad as when I had that one guy feed his enemies their own entrails"? When has a wedding ceremony ever required a NSFW warning? When has the obscenity of the RomCom supplicant standing outside his love's house begging her countenance to shine upon him ever been pixelated? When has an "I love you" ever been bleeped?

Edgier humor like Futurama will occasionally make half-joking admissions that sublimation of men's sex drive is abused, harnessed and monetized by religions, governments and corporations... but even they will not dare admit that women have always done the same by their very nature. We don't hate sex, not entirely. We're with sexual desire inducing subservience in men. We just oppose sexual satisfaction, because sexual dissatisfaction is so profitable. Where would our species, where would women be without that crowded periphery of disposable outcast males willing to do absolutely anything for the slimmest hope of a lay?

So if you agreed with my last post that we should have No Sex Scenes... are you willing to say the same against romantic scenes? And are you mentally competent to spot your own innate and indoctrinated bias?