One of the most tiresome debates in online film discourse is whether there’s too much sex in movies, even as there is demonstrably less sex in movies than there has been in decades. It’s easy to blast as neo-Puritanism, but if it is, it’s a strange kind: people complain about sex scenes as tame as those in Oppenheimer or sexy popstar Sabrina Carpenter being a sexy popstar, but watch hardcore porn on their phones. It’s an odd reconstruction of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s and ’90s, simultaneously taking pro- and anti-sex positions by reifying the Madonna/whore complex: sexuality is degrading objectification for certain women, but not others. At least part of it is a reaction to the #MeToo era, which reorientated how we think about actresses taking off their clothes on screen. That squeamishness doesn’t extend to pornstars or OnlyFans models, maybe because “taking off clothes” is a core part of their job description, or because of their pervasive dehumanization. This discourse about the supposed gratuitousness of sex on screen is underpinned, as Madison Huizinga puts it at Café Hysteria, by an “inability to parse sex and sexuality from objectification… resulting in all mentions of sex often collapsing under one clumsily defined umbrella.”

Sex scenes in mainstream movies—sex in mainstream culture, period—can be deemed unnecessary precisely because porn is so widely available. Porn itself no longer comes in the shapes of other cultural objects—magazines, or feature-length movies, or even videos with titles that aren’t just a garbled collection of SEO keywords. The rise of free online porn video clips represents, as The Last Psychiatrist blog put it in 2011, “the pornographization of porn.” Simultaneously, sex in mainstream movies is evaluated for its narrative utility, and whether the story could have moved forward some other way. Otherwise, it might as well be porn. In today’s major studio movies, everyone is beautiful and no one is horny, as Current Affairs contributor RS Benedict once memorably wrote. It’s a divide that is rooted in, and which perpetuates, an understanding of sex and sexuality as not just personal or private, but separate from the rest of human life, perhaps secret, even shameful. Porn and the rest of entertainment have never been further apart, each abandoning the vast waters—from erotic thrillers to nudie-cuties to sex comedies—between “hardcore porn” and “movies where characters never even give someone a smouldering look.”

But porn and art didn’t always seem so far apart.