An interesting, thought-provoking, and well-written article:
Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny
Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it.
See also the discussion on Hacker News.
Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. […]
I’m not a particularly avid movie-watcher, and I feel mostly uninterested in the superhero movies that appear to have flooded the cinemas in the last few years. I say this to highlight the point that even I have noticed this: the utter sterility of many (most?) mainstream movies with their total lack of sexual chemistry. I have thought that this is just Hollywood appealing to disappointingly dated purist sensitivities that the United States seems to be eternally stuck in, but this article offers a much more interesting exploration:
When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole. Germans and Norwegians became obsessed with individual self-improvement through physical fitness around the end of the Napoleonic Era. British citizens took up this Physical Culture as the 19th century—and their empire—began to wane. And yoga, in its current practice as a form of meditative strength training, came out of the Indian Independence movement of the 1920s and 30s.
The impetus of these movements isn’t fitness for the sake of pleasure, for the pure joys of strength and physical beauty. It’s competitive. It’s about getting strong enough to fight The Enemy, whoever that may be.
The United States is, of course, not immune to this. […] The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon sparked a new War on Terror, and America needed to get in shape so we could win that war. The USA’s hyper-militaristic troop-worshipping post-9/11 culture seeped into the panic over obesity and gave birth to a terrifying, swole baby.
Go read the article! I’m going to just pull this one paragraph out of the article without context, because I found it hilarious and accurate:
Contemporary gym ads focus on rigidly isolated self-improvement: be your best self. Create a new you. We don’t exercise, we don’t work out: we train, and we train in fitness programs with names like Booty Bootcamp, as if we’re getting our booties battle-ready to fight in the Great Booty War. There is no promise of intimacy. Like our heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like Rico and Dizzy and all the other infantry in Starship Troopers, we are horny only for annihilation.