Sex in the modern vernacular is most commonly used in reference to the biological concept often confused with gender or physical intercourse, but this does not fully encapsulate the meaning of the word. As culture critic Haley Nahman writes in her article “The Death of Sex” “[sex is] natural arousal that attends 3D life.” As she argues further in the same article, “natural pleasure” is on a decline. With the advent of social media, which provides the user with a constant slot machine of dopamine, naturally occurring pleasure is becoming fewer and farther between. Pleasure does not have to be limited to just sexual pleasure either, pleasure can be sensation, enjoyment, feeling, or attitude; or, as director Paul Verhoeven put in an interview with Variety, “Sexuality is the most essential element of nature, It is the ultimate euphemism for earthly pleasures and all its attendant qualities: desire, touch, anguish, longing, satisfaction, thrill, connection, presence. Essentially everything the internet can’t meaningfully give us.”
I have written at length before on how AI has ruined love, so I won’t rehash it for everyone’s sake, but the essential argument is: love is hard, love requires work, AI is built to alleviate work, replacing human love with AI only enslaves us to the service of others. The only addendum I would make to my argument would be to cast a wider net. Even before the advent of Chat-GPT, there has been a serious insularity to the internet. Just looking at the algorithm now, it divides and hooks viewers in a way never seen before. This is stating the obvious on the most popular sites (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc…), but it is more insidious on the community side of the internet (Reddit, Facebook, 4Chan) where people are not only allowed to drown in the algorithm but encouraged to drown together.
Looking at sex in the purist definition, the algorithm has killed sex. Incels, which have been enabled entirely by the internet (a mixture of anonymity and a misuse of the word “safe space”) have, in my opinion, kept themselves from getting laid. As they’ve communalized, they’ve rationalized their shared experience to the point where there is a science to it. They have wallowed to the point of no return—return, in this case, being getting laid.
Even looking at sex in the looser definition (see above) the death of sex is even more pervasive. Everything is standard, made for the lowest common denominator. Instagram Face, Airspace, all insidious. There is nothing on the internet that is made for you to feel or love, just to enjoy. Even the corecore/hopecore trends which are meant to inspire feeling die off while a new TikTok game face filter trends every week. This is not meant to assert a frankly trite “internet bad” point, but rather pose the question: why are some trends constant and pervasive and others fade out after a, comparatively, short run?
The cruel irony is that in such an insular internet, there is still marketing for the masses. Perhaps it’s the commodification of identity, and since our identities have homogenized, marketing for a specific type that feels specific, but in reality is just a product of curation and conformation bias, is most profitable. I don’t have sources for that, just theories.
Moving back to Nahman and Verhoeven’s comments, a year before both articles came out writer R.S. Benedict wrote the essay “Everyone is Beautiful and Nobody is Horny” for the magazine Bloodknife. In it, she argues that while the look of characters on screen has never been better (actors are leaner and in better shape than ever before) there is a stark lack of sex scenes or even “sexiness” on screen. Benedict chalks this up to a post-9/11 shift from exercise and athleisure as social events to exercise as a moral purpose. In the wake of 9/11, programs like the Presidential Fitness Challenge were announced to “get America in shape.” This shifted exercise away from its roots in relaxation and towards a moral purpose. This, to Benedict, created a cultural ripple effect, where superheroes, who also saw an uptick in popularity after 9/11, became symbols of the True American Way. Subsequently, they have been desexed. There is nothing sexy or alluring about fighting ISIS or invading the Middle East; Chris Evan’s Captain American can’t have sex because his body was not made for sex, it was made to fight the good fight.
This desexing of superheroes has leaked into all movie culture. “There is already—for twenty years—certainly a movement toward Puritanism.” Verhoeven continues in his interview with Variety “And the question that is asked is ‘Why would you show a sex scene?’” The decline of sex on screen is a divisive topic and at the core of the debate is Verhoeven’s question: why would you show a sex scene? Proponents of sex scenes say that they promote realism and add edge to a film, opponents argue that they are gratuitous and add little to the story. I would argue something different: the narrative and cinematic merits of sex scenes are irrelevant, rather, they are disappearing through the homogenization of popular culture. While there used to be a clear divide between adult and kids movies (the R and the PG, respectively) the PG-13 label has dominated the box office in recent years (side note: PG-13 movies have gotten more violent, while they show fewer and fewer sex scenes). What kids watch and what adults watch have a much broader overlap than ever before, partially due to the sheer dominance of franchise movies at the box office (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, etc…). Studios know that franchise films are the most profitable, and then they design them backward for the broadest possible audience.
Sex, in the most literal sense, is for an adult audience. The lack of sex in movies leads to two distinct markets: the regular film industry and the adult film industry. This retreat of sex out of the public eye capitalizes on the taboo of sex in order to create a distinct niche market; however, as the two worlds separate, the taboo grows larger. When resigned to a more shameful, second market, the adult film industry festers.
Sex work, like all work, is an exchange of labor for money. Often, opponents of sex work, whether out of righteous concern or religious indignation, like to pry upon the moral virtues of “selling your body.” This is a short-sided argument as all labor is a sale of the body—no employer would hire a bodiless employee. That being said, sex work should not be equated to all labor because, put simply, it’s not. Sex workers, although the experiences range, are often put at risk in ways a teacher, construction worker, or lawyer might not.
Sex in these films has become a simulacrum of what sex is. Scenes of build-up or consent are cut out, sex is often cut down into easily consumable 10-minute videos where there is little context to what is happening, rather, the viewer themselves is supposed to fill in the gaps with a messy assortment of tags thrown into the description to bring up viewership. None of these are meant as critiques of sex workers themselves, rather, the system that they are forced to perpetuate in order to survive.
It is worth noting that not all people who are sex workers are forced to do sex as their only job. The main, and most apparent category, within this is are celebrity OnlyFans that, as Mia Khalifa pointed out in an interview with Ziwe, push actual sex workers out of the conversation. These celebrities have an unfair advantage of an outside audience, which will naturally outcompete one that has to grow organically. In another sick twist, the irony of having an outside audience from your sex work also includes (often) pedophiles who have been counting down the days until you turn 18 (see Bhad Baby).
The problem with sex work is that while it is a legitimate form of labor (provide service get money, unlike other jobs *cough cough* landlords) there is a serious stigma attached to it. Thus, doing sex work, which for most sex workers is not done out of vanity or aspiration, but rather desperation, forces people out of the actual workforce, confining them more and more to the adult and the taboo. This separation of labor and of media is symptomatic of a larger puritanical shift away from sex in the public eye. I’m not arguing that students should be aware of their teacher's OnlyFans, but rather that, that teacher is likely to never work in a school again, and because of this, we, as a society, should consider the ramifications of blasting a teacher for trying to survive and thus bringing her OnlyFans to the attention of her students, or even more so, the ramification of not paying a teacher a living wage. But when it comes to sex in media, in particular, when you leave it to the porn industry rather than movie studios, the only reference a generation will have for what sex looks like is porn, which is not to say that Hollywood sets a phenomenal example, but (and not to get too puritanical here) sex is often then portrayed as an act of love of physicality between two people, not a transaction of tags designed to get clicks. Neither are perfect, or even good, and in a perfect world they would both be critically examined and improved, but letting one proliferate over the other will have consequences, and ignoring them “for the sake of the other side” is stupid.
I think we don’t have a sex scene because we don’t know what it looks like to have sex anymore. We, as a society, have little idea of conceptualizing pleasure in its purest of forms, rather choosing to substitute it for cheaper, (admittedly) faster mimicry of what it means to feel good. Thus, we don’t understand pleasure in its most literal form. Porn has rotted our minds while there is no genuine pleasure to replace it—so what are we left with? Marvel movies have become emblematic of the death of sex in all of its forms. Their character's physique is for a purely aesthetic cause, meant to imbue a certain sense of patriotism as if their superhero bodies should instill a feeling of pride for the country they represent— “That’s America’s ass.” The movies themselves force a vapid sort of comic rhetoric where almost nothing can be taken seriously, quips undercut dramatic moments, and very little of these movies feel sincere. The takeaway here, to be clear, is not that Chris Evans should be uglier, but rather Chris Evans needs to fuck. And he can’t make jokes while he does it, he just needs to fuck on screen. He needs to do something vapid and sexual that makes the audience feel excitement for something for the sake of it, not because it’s a metatextual reference—because it’s real.
I fear that we are currently watching the death of sex, and while it is, perhaps, crude and taboo to phrase it like that, is the only term that couples love and pure, unadulterated pleasure together. My greatest fear, however, is not that sex is already dead, but rather, that we are too incapacitated to do anything but watch it die.
Long live sex, long live love, long live intimacy, long live a Chris Evans sex scene.