Y'all, the issue isn't about whether people are justified in not liking sex scenes in movies. It's about them experiencing their discomfort as a violation being committed BY the film that then necessitates some kind of censoring action. That's the concerning part.
Folks are throwing around words like “consent” to describe the experience of watching a movie. Why are we using language associated with sexual assault to describe feeling uncomfortable about a constructed image?
Like, a film is not a person. A viewer’s reactions are not an objective and universal truth. Watching a movie is not a passive process by which things are done to the viewer in a straightforward and completely predictable manner.
It really feels like something got flattened out in recent years. Understanding that film is an affective medium does not mean that film is responsible for every combination of emotions that a person may experience while watching.
Part of my pushback against terms like “feeling seen,” “harmful images,” and others is that they’re predicated on the notion of film as agent of existential validation, and viewers as inherently passive. This recent turn in the discourse about sex scenes feels related to that.
And just to be really clear: I am NOT saying that people shouldn’t be able to object to films, or elements of films, that are hateful, racist, misogynistic, and so on, or that to do so means that the viewer is “taking things too seriously.”
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