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what do you mean exactly with the boring, fake-leftist everyone is beautiful no one horny - thing? sorry english is not my first language and i think i might have misunderstood

so like 5 or 6 years ago an article went viral claiming to identify a recent sexlessness in usamerican blockbuster cinema, and to diagnose this as a reflection of a broader cultural turn since the aughts in which fitness standards became more stringent and nationalistic, eating disorders became more prevalent, and american youth lost interest in sex. the first time i read this article i thought "that was a badly constructed and poorly thought through argument", closed the tab, and went about my business. then i scrolled past reblogged quotes from it on this website for 6 months nonstop and was obliged to become a full-blown hater.

i get where this person is coming from and i too have #opinions about the fitness standards of the 21st century (cf mark greif's 'against exercise' lol). but american fitness's rise in the latter half of the 20th century is pretty well documented; although trends within fitness certainly change, the author has no evidence that fitness's overall prevalence has increased since the turn of the century. similarly, weight suppression and energy deficit (these are the characteristics of eating disorders germane to the argument) have long been common in the us, but i have not seen any indication that they have increased as a result of more people being culturally influenced by fitness standards. rather, energy deficit tends to track with socioeconomic status, because a large number of people in the us are food-insecure. talking about eating disorders without talking about food insecurity and poverty is so insane and ideologically rancid. the only piece of evidence cited for an actual change here is that american youth have less sex now than in previous generations. this is true but i think the reasons are much more complicated than "going to the gym too much". in general if your purported diagnosis of a social trend is something only financially accessible to a small percentage of the population, consider that you might be wrong or incredibly limited in your perspective.

i also think it's just, deeply unserious to try to use superhero movies as evidence of much in the wider culture. yes the mcu is sexless. it is made by a massive studio seeking the broadest possible commercial appeal. the financial structure of hollywood is not exactly the same at all times; the marvel juggernaut did not exist in this way in the 70s. it's hard to use cinema as any kind of cultural barometer if you're not going to discuss how expensive it is to make a given film and where that money is coming from. weird perverts still exist in the 21st century and some of them make art. some of it is cinema. i don't deny that mainstream theatrical releases have been showing certain dispiriting trends (huge studios, preexisting ip, &c). it is a huge leap to blame this on cultural sexlessness without any discussion of the production process of cinema. i would also think, if you want to discuss american nationalist fitness standards and their effect on cinema after 9/11, it would help to talk about the vast number of films made in the decades since that are like, explicitly or allegorically about 9/11, and also the pentagon funding of american cinema writ large. but like, what do i know.

i should be fair to this author and say, again, i would find the whole thing less irritating if i hadn't been forced to reread it one million times on this website. like, it's not a good article but it could have just been mediocre and forgotten. i don't exactly know why people on here seized on it with such verve, except that it basically relies on a nostalgist appeal to the softer, more forgiving days of (checks notes) the american 1970s and 80s, and despite the author half-heartedly disavowing this very traditionalism at least once, it does seem to me that people responded positively to it. anyway, in my mind this article has become basically representative of a whole bunch of claims about modern american sexuality that basically boil down to "people aren't fucking anymore and everyone wants to be hot" without saying anything interesting about beauty or sex, or historicising any such trends. think like, jia tolentino's barre essay. probably not entirely fair of me to sum up all of these positions by referencing this one article but well you know.