{"id":51947,"date":"2025-12-02T00:32:02","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T07:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=51947"},"modified":"2025-12-01T08:14:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T15:14:25","slug":"its-just-violence-why-i-think-sex-actually-is-worse-than-violence-in-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/12\/its-just-violence-why-i-think-sex-actually-is-worse-than-violence-in-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s just Violence\u201d Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

When members of a certain stripe are discussing whether a movie is appropriate despite its R-rating it\u2019s common to say \u201cit\u2019s just violence\u201d (or another one: \u201cthere are a handful of F-bombs\u201d).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em> I actually do think that sex in movies is worse than violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t enjoy hurting people just to hurt people the way they might enjoy being in the sexual situation playing on the television.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em> worse than sex. As I noted, something can be spiritually deadening without being alluring. <\/span>Saw<\/span><\/i>– or <\/span>Hostel<\/span><\/i>-type torture films never really appealed to me, but they certainly do not fit in the category of \u201cof good report,\u201d and it would feel weird doing a temple session afterwards. That kind of gratuitous, boundary-pushing violence has a darkness all its own that\u2019s in a different category than a titillating sex scene, so to be clear: I\u2019m not<\/em> 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. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sex scenes do. Most of these are primarily used to add a little spice, a little jolly rancher sweetener to a film. That\u2019s why most such scenes are custom built for that purpose. <\/span>I still think it\u2019s 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<\/a> and much worse<\/a> sex than marrieds), and not very normal-looking, slightly overweight, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-America couples.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying this justifies NC-17 level explicitness, but neither should we go back to<\/span> I Love Lucy<\/span><\/i> where they sleep in separate beds and we collectively, implicitly agree that sex doesn\u2019t exist or, to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, the characters don\u2019t 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\u2019m not just talking about pornography. The first time I saw the \u201cprivate parts\u201d of a female was when I read the book <\/span>Rape of Nanking<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019t go into detail, but you can imagine that a book about the horrific Japanese occupation of Nanking wasn\u2019t the best introduction to female reproductive parts. And we\u2019ll leave it at that.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s always been thus, even before Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cbeast with two backs\u201d we had Pompeii frescoes advertising sexual services. Implicitly or not, it communicates an anti-gospel message away from developing one\u2019s self sexually with a person, and towards the fleshpots of Egypt (how\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s fine. They don\u2019t 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\u2019s just the way it is for me personally); I saw it like a cultural anthropologist would and didn\u2019t 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 (or, say a gay man to thumb through a Playboy), 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But on the other hand one often hears the \u201cI don\u2019t see the appeal\u201c line in regards to pornography in such a way that it\u2019s a not a very subtle dig at people who <\/span>do<\/span><\/i> see the appeal. I suspect that some on the left use this line when they are ostensibly pro-sexual liberation and don\u2019t 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, b<\/span>ut the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio has decided to date 20-year olds still really, really bothers them. At the end of the day \u201cborn this way\u201d has a lot of implications for heterosexuals as well as sexual minorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When members of a certain stripe are discussing whether a movie is appropriate despite its R-rating it\u2019s common to say \u201cit\u2019s just violence\u201d (or another one: \u201cthere are a handful of F-bombs\u201d).\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t enjoy hurting people just to hurt people the way they might enjoy being in the sexual situation playing on the television.\u00a0\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1254,3022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-sexuality"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51947"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52027,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51947\/revisions\/52027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}