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Soft Focus, Hard Bodies Do Sexual Ideals Lead To Ideal Sex?
By Patrick Hunn
People like watching other people having sex—whether it’s as part of a dramatised narrative between the sheets on our favourite TV shows, or for another purpose on some shadowy, pixelated corner of the Internet. But when it comes to the real deal, what do these portrayals of sex do to the way audiences conduct themselves in the bedroom?
Sex on screen is something that seems to make people as uncomfortable as it makes them excited. Depictions of sex in television and film are given brutal, unforgiving biopsies as soon as they are released and critics are quick to find faults: there is either too much sex or there isn’t enough sex or, as viewers are likely to complain, people don’t really have sex like that: the list stretches on and on and on.
The focus of discussion, albeit a divided one, is usually about the kids. It is hypothesized that if they are allowed to enjoy such material unchecked society will spin off its axis and, powered by untamed arousal, fly into the sun. There is, after all, evidence to suggest that exposure to such material leads to uneducated, harmful behavior. For instance, a frequently dredged up fact is that pregnancy rates
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among young people are higher in countries like the United States than in other industrialized nations—which is sometimes blamed on a higher saturation of media that ‘promotes’ that sort of behavior. On the other hand, conversations between parents and their children over things like AIDS, sexuality and consent are had only because a television show or a film provided the catalyst. That, however, is