ABSTRACT
The adage that ‘sex sells’ has been a long held belief for producers of all kinds of cultural texts: from Shakespeare spicing up the romance in his plays; to ancient Indian writings on the Kama Sutra; to exotic Orientalist paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The arrival of the moving picture soon gave rise to erotic (or sordid) ‘peep shows’, but as cinema developed through the twentieth century, cultural attitudes toward sexuality on-screen saw many European cinemas (especially French, Italian and Scandinavian filmmakers) taking a relatively liberal view. Meanwhile the English language national cinemas of Britain, the USA, Canada, and Australia took a more puritan turn by establishing strict cinematic boundaries. The introduction of more clearlydefined classification systems led to some adventurous forms of filmmaking from the 1960s onwards, in which taboos on nudity in particular were lifted. But while this revolution took place, much of Asia was more circumspect, and traditional or conservative values toward overt sexuality (often closely linked to the attitudes of the colonising forces across Asia) were maintained through a balance of official and unofficial codes for what was acceptable as film content.
