Hollywood Sex Wars: If this is young sex, I’m glad I’m old.

Hollywood Sex Wars is a hideous film. I detest these stereotypes:

  • Women are big-breasted lust machines, willing to do whatever it takes to please men as long as money and/or gifts are bestowed in exchange.
  • Men are sex-crazed animals who don’t want relationships, just a quick get-in, get-off, get-her-outa-here, tell-the-guys.

If this is young sex, I’m glad I’m old.

The plot is a 14-year-old boy’s wet dream – plenty of nipple shots, obscenities, drugs, and ordinary guys getting the hottest girls. FYI, despite the profusion of bare, jiggling, surgically (or digitally) enhanced breasts, penises are always off-camera, unless you count a couple of dildos.

I can only imagine the effect of the denigration of women’s looks on an impressionable, self-conscious teenage girl. Average-sized breasts are unsexy. Fuller sized bodies are unsexy. Average looks are ugly. The guys are far from dashing, but those who understand the attraction of money and drugs will score anyway. Yecchhh. Both genders are equally degraded.

Typical lines from the movie:

  • “We don’t want girlfriends, we want to bang hot chicks.”
  •  “Although girls want to get fucked and do drugs, you have to trick them into it.”
  • “Hone your inner pig.”
  • “The women we’re after are money grabbing hos.”
  • (One woman to another:) “You like to fuck and party, don’t you? Those are marketable skills, and totally tax-free.”

Ghastly, isn’t it? The girls barter gifts for sex (stripper shoes = a blow job; shoes costing over $500 = he gets laid). The boys learn to use cocaine to attract the hotties. Both genders are equally duplicitous and manipulative.

Shortly into the movie, I wanted to turn it off, write my review based on 15 minutes, and move on to work that didn’t leave the taste of dog poop in my mouth. But I wanted to see Fabio, the only person of our generation who, I discovered close to the end of the film, has ten seconds and one line in the entire movie. Totally not worth it.

The worst moment (of nothing but bad moments) for me as a sex educator is when one boy describes how he cuts a hole in the condom so that it rides up and away as the friction proceeds. By the time she knows, he pretends he’s so big that it broke. This is followed by a brief safe sex warning, which is undermined by everything else in the film. When one girl finds herself pregnant, for example, she hits up maybe a dozen sperm shooters for abortion funds.

Of course one couple falls in love despite the training from their homies, with sweet background music, walks in the park, posing with statues, you get the picture. Equally predictably, their pals manipulate the dissolution of their relationship. I won’t tell you how that ends, because, frankly, who cares?

If more than five people see this despicable, reeking repository of vomit-worthy stereotypes, I’ll have failed in my duty to inform you.

So why am I, a senior sex writer with a reputation to uphold, using my precious time and yours to review this loser film that none of you will ever see (please promise me that)?

Hollywood Sex Wars was a reminder to me that if we’re to have a chance of changing our society’s view of older-age sexuality, we have to counsel young people about theirs. Who better to help young folks put relationships and sexuality in perspective than those of us who have been around the block and figured out our own sexuality and self-image at age 20, 40, 60, and beyond.

Will they want to talk sex with us? Surely not at first, but if we continue to be outgoing, candid, and respectful of ourselves and them (something the movie doesn’t even pretend to do) then we have a chance.

Thank you, Hollywood Sex Wars, for reminding me what we have to fight against.

I’d love to read comments from both my age and much younger. Tell me, have I done more harm than good by giving Hollywood Sex Wars the publicity of my review? Should I have listened to a friend of mine, who said, when I invited him to watch this movie with me:

I want to thank you for the invitation, but after watching the trailer, I decline. And I don’t know that your name should be heard anywhere near this movie.

2 Comments

  1. Anonymous on November 18, 2011 at 3:19 pm

    I appreciate your taking the time for the review, and you certainly didn't damage your name or brand by reviewing it, but it's obviously a bad movie just from the PR – the "cover", the title, etc. Don't even need to see the trailer. We mature folks have more interesting things to spend our time on, like pursuing real relationships.

  2. SallySMiles on November 18, 2011 at 12:27 pm

    Well – frankly it sounds like what was going on in my youth is still happening. The continuation of the degradation of women and the stupidity of male behavior. Not to worry – I'm convinced it should be shredded.

    As to your review – love those adjectives – it's very appropriate and I thank you. As one who has six grankchildren ranging from 1 to 19 = this is awful, but a goood opportunity to set the record straight. YES – makes me glad to be old, but the memory is clear that this is more of the 'same ol, same ol'…

    Keep talking Joan – we're listening and spreading the word. Thanks.

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