When members of a certain stripe are discussing whether a movie is appropriate despite its R-rating it’s common to say “it’s just violence” (or another one: “there are a handful of F-bombs”). 

It’s also routine for members of a different stripe to bemoan the fact that sex is considered the be-all for appropriateness in movies when violence should be considered just as much. 

I agree that violence (and swearing, for that matter) are both spiritually deadening, but I actually agree with the take that sexuality in movies is particularly dangerous and damaging for most people (with some exceptions to-be-discussed). For the most part I actually do think that sex in movies is worse than violence.

The fact is that sex, unlike violence, holds a natural appeal to most people. I mean sure, we might want to punch somebody in the moment occasionally, but unless they have very deep issues people don’t enjoy hurting people just to hurt people the way they might enjoy being in the sexual situation playing on the television.  

For the average person sex provides a temptation, an alternative path off the straight and narrow in a way that, say, cutting off limbs and spraying blood Quinten Tarantino-style does not. Watching a super hero blow bad guys away with a bazooka can be some fun, but (again, with rare exceptions) it doesn’t motivate most people to go out and blow bad guys away with bazookas, whereas for non-asexual the average sex scene provides a titillating alternative to what they should be doing. 

That is not to say that temptations to non-gospel-living are the only criterion for something being bad in media. In that sense violence is per se worse than sex. As I noted, something can be spiritually deadening without being alluring. Saw– or Hostel-type torture films never really appealed to me, but they certainly do not fit in the category of “of good report,” and it would feel weird doing a temple session afterwards. That kind of gratuitous, boundary-pushing violence has a darkness all its own that’s in a different category than a titillating sex scene, so to be clear: I’m not saying that the former is better than the latter. I would argue that a consensual sex scene is much less problematic than scenes where torture is meant to entertain in a twisted way.   

But most violent scenes are either comical, unrealistic on the benign side to maintain a benign rating, or realistic to make a strong social point about war or violence. Each of these has their potential issues: for example, gun fights where the people only bleed a thimble-full at a time downplays the reality of violence in ways that the realistic violence films try to rectify. However, again, this violence, while it can be problematic, does not have a whole lot of implications for our day-to-day.

Sex scenes do. Most of these are primarily used to add a little spice, a little jolly rancher sweetener to a film. That’s why most such scenes are custom built for that purpose. I still think it’s fine to have a norm against a person viewing a sexual activity of another person they are not married to, but it would be somewhat redeemable if sex scenes were more representative, or designed around making a point or telling a story about reality instead of being a jolly rancher. (And yes, there are some scenes that do show sexuality in all its complexity, but I would still argue that they’re not the majority). One would still be excused for thinking that sex is the exclusive domain of 20-something singles in New York City (which is ironic, because in reality single people have much less and much worse sex than marrieds), and not very normal-looking, slightly overweight, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-America couples. 

I’m not saying this justifies NC-17 level explicitness, but neither should we go back to I Love Lucy where they sleep in separate beds and we collectively, implicitly agree that sex doesn’t exist or, to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, the characters don’t have sex lives. At the risk of being cliche and predictable, a vacuum of any discussion of appropriate or representative sexuality in media gets filled in one way or another. And I’m not just talking about pornography. The first time I saw the “private parts” of a female was when I read the book Rape of Nanking in elementary school (in their defense, it’s not like my parents were policing the books my sister was leaving out). Times and Seasons is PG-13 rated, so I won’t go into detail, but you can imagine that a book about the horrific Japanese occupation of Nanking wasn’t the best introduction to female reproductive parts. And we’ll leave it at that.  

But again most sex scenes (but not all) are very patently designed to titillate for the sake of titillation, involving model-level attractive young people with voracious sexual appetites for each other. In a sense it’s always been thus, even before Shakespeare’s “beast with two backs” we had Pompeii frescoes advertising sexual services. Implicitly or not, it communicates an anti-gospel message away from developing one’s self sexually with a person, and towards the fleshpots of Egypt (how’s that for a double entendre). However, unlike other anti-gospel messages we get in cinema, this one appeals to some of our strongest drives, which makes it all the more risky to play around with. 

Of course, on that point, there are some people for whom this does not apply. For some asexuals seeing attractive people having sex has the same natural erotic appeal as hearing a cicada mating call. And that’s fine. They don’t need to be nearly as careful. When I lived in Philadelphia I took a detour once through its gayborhood and started browsing a gay bookstore out of a sort of a sort cultural tourist-y interest. There were a bunch of sexually explicit DVDs (back when people got their porn through DVDs), but being a pretty solid 0 on the Kinsey scale the gay porn had the erotic charge of watching paint dry (not being subtly homonegative here, that’s just the way it is for me personally); I saw it like a cultural anthropologist would and didn’t feel particularly sinful as I glanced over the titles, and I assume asexuals have a similar reaction with all things erotic. I’m not making an argument about how sinful it is for an asexual to see explicit materials, I’m not sure I have a fully developed perspective on the issue, but whatever it is it’s less risky than for a non-asexual. 

But on the other hand one often hears the “I don’t see the appeal“ line in regards to pornography in such a way that it’s a not a very subtle dig at people who do see the appeal. I suspect that some on the left use this line when they are ostensibly pro-sexual liberation and don’t want to be grouped with conservatives. It allows them to punt on the completely consensual heterosexual male gaze while still ostensibly accepting liberal sexual liberation, but the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio has decided to date 20-year olds still really, really bothers them. At the end of the day “born this way” has a lot of implications for heterosexuals as well as sexual minorities. 

So for large swaths of the population a titillating R-rated sex scene does have more damaging potential temptation-wise than an R-rated cop shootout, and that fact should be taken into account when rank-ordering how problematic it is for people trying to live the Latter-day Saint lifestyle.