The horniest cinemagoing nation on the planet, according to science
Sex sells. We didn’t have to say it, but we did. It’s applicable to all walks of life, including cinema, and thanks to the miracle of science, it was even determined that one nation is hornier than the rest.
Again, it doesn’t need to be mentioned, but making an erotic thriller is one of the easiest ways to turn a profit on the big screen. Audiences love being put through the emotional wringer when they go to the theatre, and if they aren’t laughing, crying, or screaming in terror, why can’t they be titillated?
History has shown that they can, and they will. While Hollywood hasn’t quite recaptured the salacious magic of the late 1980s and early 1990s boom period that turned the steamy genre flick into one of the most bankable forms of celluloid entertainment, streaming seems to have picked up a lot of the slack.
Netflix, in particular, is overflowing with features, TV shows, and miniseries that are happy to leave their clothes strewn all over the bedroom floor, drawing in bumper viewing figures as a result. It’s an almost universal thing, but when it comes to which countries are more receptive to films that get them hot under the collar, science was there to sort through the sordid facts and deliver the dirty data.
Using a sample size of almost 6,000 movies released between 2000 and 2023, the number-crunchers, presumably with saxophone-heavy slow jazz playing in the background, collated ratings of those titles from across 44 countries, determining a correlation between rating, the volume of sexual content, and how receptive viewers in each nation were to seeing bits, bobs, and everything else onscreen.
Interestingly, the countries least receptive to sexual and suggestive content all hailed from the same continent, with Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea at the bottom of the pile. Ireland was fifth, so make of that what you will, while those saucy Scandinavians were shown to be the most open-minded.
Those randy buggers from Finland were deemed to be the least likely to clutch at their sparkling pearl necklaces, but when looking at the bigger picture in terms of which nation’s censorship body or ratings board was most at risk of becoming up in arms at sex-fuelled cinema, the Finns only scored as high as ninth.
However, keeping the Scandinavian end up, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway were the three with the lowest correlation between censorship ratings and onscreen sexual content, making the rock-hard case that the Nordics are by far the most willing to embrace the big-screen beast with two backs.
Look, there are folks in every country who fancy a bit of sexy cinema every now and again, but science has decreed that if you don’t want to be judged for it, there are worse places to be than Scandinavia.
