Gratuitous sex and violence in films

Pretty-faced actor, Henry Cavill who looks like he could be related to Mel Gibson, sparked a debate when he said that he cannot stand sex scenes. I concur. I absolutely cannot stand watching gratuitous sex scenes in film and television—as they are boring—especially when the scene doesn’t drive the plot. You get 10 minutes of gratuitous grunting, or violence. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.. Creepy enough as it is, I also dislike being put into the role of being a peeping Tom, or a voyeur. 

For starters, most of us don’t need instructions. And the sex and violence scenes go on forever. Blow by slovenly blow. Sometimes I wonder who is getting off here. The director? The producer? And who is the audience? Puerile teenage boys? Certainly not the actors. Ditto that for gratuitous violence. 

Having survived the Summer of Love, the 1960s and 70s, I am hardly a prude. Especially since I come from the hot tub capital of the world. Not to mention living in the Bay Area home of free speech and civil protest. And a few riots... I was at that Abbie Hoffman rally at UC Berkeley.

How many people saw Cyra McFadden‘s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County? My grade school classmate, Mark Rasmussen, was the dude in the hot tub with all the peacock feathers. it’s funny that it’s become such a cliché, because, though we had hot tubs and peacock feathers, we did not to have them together. It was a figment of McFadden‘s imagination.

The imagination is much more interesting when it comes to things like that. I usually do something else while they play it out in real time, as it were. I am usually guaranteed at least 10 minutes downtime while the producers get off.