I remember an episode of Married With Children where Al Bundy is describing the perfect woman having three breasts, with one of them on the back for dancing.
ETA, found the clip:
Samantha was topless in almost every episode of Sex and the City when it was originally shown on HBO. Then when it was rerun on TBS they cut all that out.
I recently saw Lost in Translation, which I didn’t like. But taken as a piece of art, I thought it was weird how hypersexualized the protagonist was by a female director. The opening shot is basically just a close-up of her ass. This wasn’t a lazy film; it had to be intentional. But why?
Later scenes hint at the possible reason: this young woman in the prime of her fertility is just an obstacle to her self-obsessed partner. He barely sees her.
Still. Weird choice.
That’s not my memory, but I haven’t seen it in a while. I remember a lot more in the first season, much less later. But, Samantha was meant to be quite liberated and, in that context, it doesn’t seem gratuitous.
As a straight male, I’ll admit I certainly enjoy looking at a nude female, but not in a film. I don’t like it even if it’s relevant to the scene or plot. As you mentioned, it’s a huge and unwelcome distraction.
My take is that the lead character was a stand-in for writer-director Sophia Coppola, and she wanted to portray herself as sexy. Nothing more complex than that.
Just chiming in to say I’m the opposite. It won’t make a bad movie better, but it doesn’t ruin a good movie for me.
Yes. If it’s reasonably fitting the storytelling nudity is all good. After all, lotta IRL people do a lot of that too.
There is such a thing as gratuitous contrived nude scenes. Pornos are full of those. Those don’t belong in serious movies.
An early girlfriend had three nipples, although the third [lower on her left chest] did not have significant breast tissue or a noticeable areola. She was comfortable wearing a bikini in public but avoided tight sweaters. My scientific curiosity was strongly discouraged.
Maybe it was a nubbin.
She was a practicing Wiccan and shyly proud of her ‘third nipple’ and at least once wondered aloud if it would function if/when she became a mother. Our late-teen relationship stalled at the “look but don’t touch” stage, although not for that reason, so I never found out. Like many young men, I was bemused and confused by the ‘look at me, but not like that’ aspect, which may make this marginally relevant to the OP…
Let’s find out:
Safe for work image from The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984).
Then there is Yarna D’al Gargan from Return of the Jedi, who has 6 breasts.
Consider me educated.
Perhaps you need to keep better abreast of such issues.
I read somewhere that both men and women tend to be turned on by a woman being sexually aroused/enjoying sex. And both tend to be less turned on by a man being sexually aroused/enjoying sex. I think it was a college class in human sexuality. I don’t remember it mentioning anything about sexual orientation.
'Gratuitous"?
Reminds me of the Twitter meme someone posted, asking what to do with leftover bacon.
Well yeah. “Gratuitous” is a subjective call. My go to is Poor Things - a fair amount of nudity and some here (mostly people who had not seen the movie) were critical of it as “for male gaze” and/or gratuitous, but my take watching the movie was that it was neither. And other scenes in other movies or shows where the staging to avoid nudity in a scene where the characters would have been expected to be nude in which that contrivance is distracting.
I think nudity can be in a film for artistic purposes, and I would expect movies about sexuality to include nudity. “Gratuitous,” however, is entirely subjective. I guess I’d define it as does nothing to serve the story. Writers are all the time including gratuitous details, many times not even related to sex, so I can’t even fault them for this, even though I do not prefer it. People are horny. Nobody went to see Wuthering Heights (shudder) for its examination of class and gender.
Personally I try to keep my sex scenes limited to those that serve the story, but sex is foundational to the romance genre in many ways, so there’s sensuality, however subtle, on every page. It may be notable, however, that most romance novels do not contain lingering descriptions of women’s bodies.
I tend to prefer a term like “fitting” or “appropriate” since in my view it’s not a matter of “too much”, but of the amount of nudity or sexiness not fitting the work and the scene. The nudity that gets labeled “gratuitous” is often actually quite mild; what makes it stand out is that it’s just so obviously “look at the sexy stuff” that it’s jarring to the point that it basically breaks the fourth wall. When people look at it and think “that’s fanservice” instead of “that’s sexy” you’ve gone too far because they aren’t immersed in the work anymore.
It doesn’t even mean using less sexiness; just making it less obtrusive. Sometimes more is better; one reason why “beach scenes” have such longstanding popularity is that you can have all the actors/characters run around nearly naked and it’s nor jarring because people do that kind of thing on beaches. Also, the fact that males dress skimpily too; besides being eye candy for those who like beefcake, it also doesn’t produce the jarring contrast you see in a bunch of art and games where you have guys dressed in armor or whatever and the women dressed like strippers.
That IMHO is why an obviously shoehorned-in sexy scene can actually be more jarring than a sex scene in a hardcore porn video. It’s not the amount of sexiness, it’s the fact it doesn’t fit.