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Keeping it clean: Hollywood sex scenes decline by 40%

Since the millennium, there is substantially less erotic content on our screens – with changing audience tastes and ‘intimacy coordinators’ to blame

Photograph: Yorgos Lanthimos/APThe report also found that on-screen portrayal of other “vices” is not declining at the same rate: swearing and violence in films happen at roughly similar levels as they did in 2000. skip past newsletter promotion Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters Follows suggests a number of possible reasons behind the decline of the sex scene, including changes in audience taste with a “preference for content that either avoids sexual themes altogether or handles them with more subtlety”; concerns that sex scenes may impact on global release “result[ing] in more restrictive age ratings or censorship, hence reducing a film’s potential reach”; and the increasing influence of “intimacy coordinators”, reflecting actors’ discomfort at the amount of sex scenes they had previously been asked to do.

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