Hollywood’s New Sex Comedies Have a Surprising Twist: Traditional Values

I kept hearing that sex in movies was dead, but I’ve spent the summer watching a surprising amount of sex in the theater. It hasn’t been actual, physical sex on screen — not porn, and not drama, either. The movies continue to lack costume-drama ravishing. “The Odyssey” was surprisingly sex-free, given the source material. But that old standby, the sex comedy, is legitimately back, and this time, it has a conservative twist. 

Classic 1980s sex comedies featured horny teenagers and hot female objects of desire who not only lacked agency, but sometimes even lacked names. The woke backlash to these movies produced joints like “Blockers,” “Booksmart,” and “Bottoms” (apparently studios required “B” titles), where our horny female heroines were either lesbians or just as prone to objectification as their male counterparts.