You might recall the essay āEveryone Is Beautiful And No One Is Hornyā, from 2021? It definitely made a splash when it hit - partially because we were all waking up from a year-long trauma-induced coma and needed content not about Covid or the election- and I remembered it decently fondly. A lot of people seemed to notice a sort of bland perfectionism in film in this era, where everyone was attractive but you had a lot less raw sexuality on the screen. There was a sense of a creeping sexual taboo in the air, and the article seemed to nail it - not only pointing it out, but explaining it and connecting it to the wider zeitgeist. It is well-written too, with zingers like these:
A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.
A total banger of a line, that is how you sum an ide- wait, war? Uh, what is this about again?
Because when you look back on this piece, it actually a profoundly weird essay, saying a lot more than in my opinion most people remember. And I donāt think time has been friendly to its whole edifice. I donāt want to be too unkind to it - the reality is almost every essay that make sweeping claims about cultural trends is going off vibes and never say links to a dataset to back those up (though they should!!) People are going to judge based on their own vibes, and that is fine. But these vibes stretch the tolerance and credulity even this genre can typically give.
Many are sympathetic to its core claim about a mismatch between crafted beauty and real sexuality, and how it has accelerated today, but these are the kind of things it puts forward as causal to that:
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 USAās hyper-militaristic troop-worshipping post-9/11 culture seeped into the panic over obesity and gave birth to a terrifying, swole baby. Public school gym classes featured special military fitness days in which students practiced throwing mock grenades. George W. Bush added an Adult Fitness Challenge to the Presidential Fitness program. On American and British television, a new wave of documentaries and reality shows sprang up to bellow at us for being too fat to defeat al Qaeda: Honey, Weāre Killing the Kids; Supersize Me; You Are What You Eat, in which a bony harridan screeched at Britons whose feces did not meet her exacting standards; The Biggest Loser, where lean coaches bellowed at fat contestants in a manner strikingly similar to that of a stereotypical drill instructor.
Which I wonāt say is completely invented, certainly war inspires anxiety & discourse, but most of this is made up? āPublic schools had students practicing throwing grenadesā okay maybe a school somewhere did that, but 99% of people would find this statement deranged, this was not a thing. You can read about Bushās Healthier US Initiative in dozens of publications, and it is dry discourse about obesity driving healthcare costs & life outcomes from top to bottom, no militancy in sight. You can just watch The Biggest Loser? On Youtube? Again, yelling occurs somewhere, but it is too busy tempting them to eat donuts in timed challenges and being a shitty reality show to be this militant. 9/11 had virtually nothing to do with concerns about health in the 2000s! It was caused by, ya know, rising obesity - the same thing causing these same kinds of political discourse in other countries, many of which also absolutely had all this stuff!
The essay is littered with things like this, and of course with scant evidence for any of its claims (if you are going to claim in the late 2010ās people are having less sex because they are all too poor and are stuck with roommates, would be useful to know that the percent of people living with a roommate probably has gone down since the fuckfest 90ās). One point that particularly gets me is this somewhat tangential claim aboutā¦McMansions?
Over and over again, she reiterates the point that McMansions are not built to be homes; theyāre built to be short-term investments.
And like, are they? Do āMcMansionsā have faster sell-dates than trad-style colonial homes? Does this claim really check out? Or do you just hate them because of their political aesthetic and so want to dress that up? But I donāt want to nitpick the odd tangents to death - instead this point is brought up as part of a discussion about houses in movies today:
Compare [example house in older 1980s film The Poltergeist] to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.
And I just have to ask: what films? Why could you not name an example? I am sure they exist, minimalist-modernist designs are a thing. But they have been since the 1950ās - the authorās description is pitch perfect for every James Bond film. Meanwhile if I take 2019 - the ārelevantā year of comparison for this February 2021 article given the 2020 Gap Year Hollywood took - I certainly wouldnāt describe the sets of that year's successful adaptation of Little Women as ācavernousā or āsterileā. The Poltergeist example the author cites is a horror film, so if we do like for like we have 2019ās The Quiet Place, a gigantic hit - and its post-apocalypse made-in-a-cave-with-a-box-of-scraps family home I guess does not have āexcessā but uhhhh not for the reason you are claiming here!
Which gets right down to what this article is really about, right? It isnāt about all movies, or āHollywoodā, or even popular movies. It is about Marvel movies. In 2019 Avengerās Endgame made eleventy dick-tillion dollars, and it did it without ever showing a boob, and we all had to sit through an avalanche of these films in every preview screening for years. At the end of the 2010ās, they really did seem like all films. I get it, I felt it too. The Marvelfication of culture.
But you know what? We made that up. It never really happened. It turns out Marvel didnāt crack the code on The Future Of Film and usher in a new age of culture. Instead, a creative team made a successful sprint of movies that a bunch of fans liked, and then it was over. People moved on, recent Marvel movies are kind of a flop, and the culture kept spinning. This article goes on about dehydrated abs as the apex of masculinity, and the same year the Dune remake comes out and all anyone can talk about is how badly they wanna fuck Twink-Emperor of the Universe Timothee Chalamet. With the full benefit of hindsight, all Marvel movies ālooking the sameā is justā¦obvious? Of course they did. They were made by the same guys. It is like claiming deep insight into culture because all the Star Wars Prequels look the same! The only insight there is to how addicted George Lucas was to blowing budgets on excessive CGI.
If you have been around the internet for any length of time, this article is of course drowning in 2010ās social media leftism discourse. All the claims about 9/11 militancy, how āobesityā is a social construct of the state, how the body is being made into a metric, all of this is trying to fit the round peg of a hot political ideology into the square hole of something people were noticing about movies, that as I mentioned before did resonate with readers. This part holds up to me:
Old films still featured recognizable human bodies and human facesābodies that could theoretically be achieved by a single person without the aid of a team of personal trainers, dieticians, private chefs, and chemistsā¦
ā¦And yet, these characters fucked. Blue Velvetās Dorothy Vallens and Jeffrey Beaumant fucked. Michael Keatonās Batman and Michelle Pfeifferās domme Catwoman fucked. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor fucked.
So what is the real story behind this?
Most of this ~vibe is just much more pedestrian than this essay wants to admit to. Much of this is technology - there was nothing ārawā about say 90ās fashion magazine girls, because it was easy to wipe away the blemishes in a photo, but for film that technology wasnāt there yet. By the 2010ās it was - and not just in CGI, but in fitness regimes, plastic surgery, and more. Other things are just the cycles of fashion - the girls of the 50ās were heavily dolled-up, 90ās girls are thin as a reed, etc. And then we have economics & genre - this essay compares R-rated 80ās action films to today's PG-13 mass-market films in an era where film is global and has to appeal to the lowest common denominator of censorship mores. The violence of Marvel movies is also pretty sanitized for a reason! And meanwhile, TV is grittier than ever - prestige dramas just ate the market share here.
But, if you will indulge me, there is a small piece of the puzzle that is more interesting, and more specific, because again this whole article isnāt about all movies, right? It is really about nerdy, pulp movies. The older movies it references are things like Terminator, The Poltergeist, Batman, Escape from New York. The reason it is about Marvel movies is because they āstand forā this genre today. But I remember another nerd franchise from the 2010ās - Game of Thrones. While superheroes dominated the box office, Game of Thrones dominated the Nielsen ratings. And let me tell you, Game of Thrones did not have a no-one-is-horny problem. Booooy howdy did it not! It was so famous for its gratuitous sex scenes in fact, that it inspired the coinage of the term sexposition, where characters are just having sex in the background while necessary plot exposition occurs. This wasnāt your lame hobbits-and-wizards fantasy series - this was:
ā¦At first. Because that sexposition term wasnāt a compliment! Game of Thrones got a lot of fans, yes, but a lot of flak alongside it. In the 2010ās, nerdy media wasnāt for just nerds anymore, off in their little social niche. They were for everyone now - the āNerd Ascendancyā had swept pop culture. And with that ascendancy came a lot of discourse. Society was changing, nerds were changing, and in particular feminist nerds were becoming much more influential. They found this kind of content objectifying and self-indulgent - and honestly rightly so much of the time! These scenes kind of sucked? The critiques were not fringe media essays, but were published in mainstream publications - and creators listened. By the latter half of Game of Thrones, these āsexpositionsā scenes were gone. No one is fucking for fun on screen anymore - it is for narrative, or it isnāt happening. And this is the same era the peak of the Marvel Movies is occurring - that kind of content got critiqued, it wasnāt cool anymore. The perception was that people wanted media to be more inclusive.
Which was a change driven by a certain kind of person:
The kind of people who wrote articles titled things like āEveryone Is Beautiful And No One Is Hornyā.
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