Movies used to be sexy without trying, now they aren’t. What changed?
Casual eroticism that took sex as intrinsically valuable has disappeared from the movies. What made it vanish and how might it come back?
Recently I did something that was probably long overdue in my cinematic education: I watched Dirty Dancing for the first time. The movie was perfectly fine, a straight down the line romantic fantasy emblematic of the formulas of 1980s American cinema. But for as conventional as the film is, especially within its own time, something about the film stands out when watching it in 2025: its eroticism. Now, Dirty Dancing is certainly not the most erotic film I’ve ever seen, not even close. It is a comfortable PG-13 with no nudity or onscreen sex. But in a way, that’s the point: the film is casually erotic. It was a major box office hit that made ten times its budget, and it could do that while drenched in eroticism. It could be sexy without that being a big deal. And the movie is certainly sexy. It is a film built around sexy people wearing sexy outfits doing sexy dances to sexy music, and all that sexiness is uncomplicated. It is a free-spirited eroticism, the kind that feels no need to justify itself. It’s the kind of eroticism visibly missing in today’s popular cinema, and it got me thinking about where this eroticism went, what caused its disappearance, and how we might see it return.
