Everyone Is Watching Porn on Netflix

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [View in Browser]( [Subscribe]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Everyone watching Netflix is horny. - Floor Is Lava, a thing that exists. - 30 years later, Splash Mountain is finally not racist! - Hanging at the LGBTQ Community with Britney Spears. - The Chicks making everyone angry again. Hell yeah. ‘Netflix and Chill’ Is Now Actually Porn When you click on the film Love on Netflix, where it has spent the last week in the Top 10 of the service’s most-watched movies and shows, the very first thing you see is a woman dragging her nipple up and down a man’s erect penis as she masturbates him and he fingers her clitoris, which is pointed directly at the camera. This isn’t implied, or done with prosthetics of any kind. The scene continues in a single take for nearly three full minutes, climaxing—heh—when he ejaculates. To clarify one more time, it is not some sort of gluey substance used to cinematically replicate the bodily function that you see. The dude cums. [Alternate text] The film, from [shock-art director Gaspar Noé](, was actually [released in 2015](, when it made headlines for its screenings in 3D cinemas, where you could see the jizz come flying at your face. While, for obvious reasons, the ACTUAL SEX of it all dominated most discussion of Love, it was in the service of a fascinating erotic drama about relationships. Netflix tags it as both “steamy” and “cerebral,” which...solid LOL there. A five-year-old movie that launches with a staring contest between you and an attractive actor’s splooge hole is trending in tandem with Netflix’s other porny obsession of the moment, the kinky soft-core 365 Days—or, as critic Nick Schager [called it on The Daily Beast,]( “a Polish Fifty Shades of Grey.” Y’all are really logging into your parents’ Netflix account to binge watch porn. The film’s been the source of as much water cooler debate as it has cold showers, owing to its controversial storyline about a woman who falls for a Mafia boss who kidnaps her, the abusive nature of some of its sex scenes, and the whole “everyone shut up so I can enjoy my explicit sex and nudity in peace” counterargument to it all. Now, the youths have entered the picture. As [Decider]( helpfully explained to me when I Googled a semblance of “Love...2015...trending...huh?,” the film surged in popularity after [a TikTok went viral]( encouraging those who were titillated by 365 Days to then go watch Love and record their reactions to the aforementioned first scene. After spending my lunch hour figuring out how to use TikTok, I found a bunch of them. They’re funny! The youths are at it again! This time, uh, prompting each other to watch full-penetration sex and bond over it. (Yes, that opening scene to Love is a middle-school slow dance compared to the horizontal mambos yet to come.) [Alternate text]( It’s tempting to parse some sort of meaning from the fact that two of the most-watched entertainment options in the country right now could, on another website, be wanking material. Whatever it means...it’s not good. Remember these last few weeks when people were wondering how they could productively use their couch time to educate and responsibly amplify Black art? Those lists that were everywhere, outlining which movies everyone should watch? When Netflix itself launched a Black Lives Matter collection of options? Well, people transitioned from being woke to horny in record time. None of those films and series by Black creators featuring essential Black storylines were still lingering in the Netflix Top 10 by the end of the week. (Mercifully, [neither was The Help](.) That’s depressing, and wholly unsurprising. Is it productive to go on a tangent about how telling it is that the flames of activism that spread across the country this month are so quickly extinguished for a pivot to sex and, probably, masturbation and self-gratification? That as the nation still burns, we’re bingeing soft-core porn, the final season of 13 Reasons Why, and, apparently, the last remaining [non-problematic Tina Fey project](? (Baby Mama: New to Netflix in June!) That, before I finish typing this paragraph, there will already be a dozen emails in my inbox telling me to get a life? No, that is not productive. So instead I leave you with this. Should you, for any reason, desire to hide a certain film title from your Netflix history so that no one else who may be sharing that account can see that you viewed it—like, say, a movie that opens with a three-minute hand job—click on “Account” in the drop down in the top-right corner, find “Viewing Activity” and then click the “Hide” icon.” All of America Is Lava In the show [The Floor Is Lava](, the floor is lava. That’s it. That’s the show. It’s just like in the game so many of us played as kids without realizing that apparently everyone played that game as kids. The premise of that game: The floor is lava. That’s it. That was the game. [Image] The first instinct is to laugh. They made a TV show version of the floor is lava. That’s pretty funny! But then comes the information that kind of makes you want to cry. The Floor Is Lava is the most-watched TV series in the United States right now. There are worse ways to pass the time than watching The Floor Is Lava on Netflix. The series is squarely of the Wipeout and Holey Moley “people epically fall off obstacle courses and we laugh at them” family. As far as these things go, it’s spectacularly done. Production value is top-notch. Oversized furniture is scattered across a large room that, to escalate the hilarity, is filled with a pool of bubbling red liquid meant to look like lava. The gameplay is the same as it was for me as a kid [redacted] years ago: You gotta get from one side of the room to the other without touching the floor. Because the floor is lava. If one player falls into the pool, the camera cuts away before they resurface for air in order to make it look like the lava really melted them, a pleasantly demented commitment to the craft. The host, Rutledge Wood, narrates everything with an appropriate deadpan perspective on the absurdity. It’s a silly, great show. It’s also, once again, the most popular TV show in the country. Of course, Netflix famously does not release ratings or viewership statistics. But considering that “popular” summer reality shows like America’s Got Talent and World of Dance [are only getting 8 and 4 million viewers](, respectively, and Netflix has roughly 70 million subscribers, it’s not a massive leap to presume the service’s no. 1 show is trumping those numbers. (If I’m wrong, throw me to the lava.) Should we do that insufferable thing we always do and try to assign meaning to this? Is the lava floor the unsettling trauma of the world around us right now, and the set pieces the contestants jump between tantamount to lily pads of sanctuary, to which we, like the players on the show, cling desperately? Are we retreating to the nostalgia of our youth, traumatized by the realities of the world we’ve aged into? Honestly, I think the floor’s just lava. That’s the show. What we [gather as a nation to watch]( can speak to who we are as a people at that time: The Andy Griffith Show in the ’60s, All in the Family in the ’70s, The Cosby Show in the ’80s, or the post-9/11 comfort laughs of Friends. So you know what? Maybe it does fit. What more accurately describes 2020 than “the floor is lava”? Splash Mountain: Now, With No Racism! As garish totems memorializing the country’s racist past are [toppled across the country](, it was a matter of time before Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox had their comeuppance. But Trump can call off the National Guard. As Disney Parks announced this week, [the Splash Mountain theme park ride]( featuring characters from the iconically racist 1946 film Song of the South is going away, but isn’t being lassoed through the streets. It’s getting a much overdue reimagination. Rather than animatronic critters held over from a film so controversial and problematic that Disney has abolished it from its vault entirely, the popular log flume ride will now be themed to the film The Princess and the Frog, which in 2009 introduced the Mouse House’s first Black princess. [Alternate text]( A fun exercise (as in absolutely heinous, soul-crushing, and blood-boiling) is to scroll through the replies to [Disney Parks’ tweet]( announcing the upgrade. Karens saw the Bat Signal and arrived promptly with reactions like, “DISAPPOINTING!” “Why are you giving into a loud small group?” and, “This is ridiculous. Are we just gonna change everything and just rewrite history completely?!?!” I’m excited for the sweet sounds of Princess Tiana voice actress [Anika Noni Rose belting “Almost There”]( to drown out these asinine protests to a literal mountain of racism. Which, to drive the point home one more time, is themed to a movie so racist Disney will no longer allow people to see it and which got its name “from Michael Eisner wanting to plug the movie Splash,” as Tom Zohar pointed out on Twitter. I only feel sad for those now deprived of the seminal rite of passage: Going to Disney World as a kid, loving that ride, and then the anvil dropping when you learn that the whole thing is racist AF. Britney’s Pride Message Britney Spears filmed an enthusiastic and truly joyful video [wishing her fans a happy Pride Month](. However, in it she makes a crucial grammatical error, dedicating it to “all my friends at the LGBTQ community,” with the “at” making it seem like there’s some retirement home somewhere—or, you know, a YMCA—where all us gays hang out, gossip, and drink iced coffees. [Alternate text]( Beyond the heartfelt, sweet message, Britney gave everyone at the LGBTQ community the greatest gift of all: [Twitter comedy and endless memes](. The Chicks Have All of Dixie Bothered Again There are people who reside in the fetid bowels of the universe (Twitter), where the rot has decayed to such levels that they have become noseblind to their own noxious lunacy. It is here that people are reacting to the news that the Dixie Chicks have [changed their name to](, simply, The Chicks. [Alternate text]( Evidently unaware of their own hypocrisy, they are exasperated that The Chicks are the latest in a line of entertainers who have rebranded in order to dissociate from racially charged terms. Everyone is caving to the cries of the cancel-culture mob! Enough is enough! You have to laugh. Those insinuating that dropping “Dixie” from the name is kowtowing to cancel culture are the same ones who, checks notes, CANCELED THE DIXIE CHICKS. Must we [remind for the 400th time](that there is precisely one (1) entertainer to have been canceled and it was the Dixie Chicks by conservatives following their (accurate) George Bush and Iraq War denouncement? The anti-cancel contingent is on one lately with their “wake up, Sheeple!” warnings about cultural policing in recent weeks. The Sheeple are already awake, folks. That’s the point. Baa-baa, bitch. [Image] - Welcome to Chechnya: About the gay purge in Russia, it’s a brutal watch. Watch it anyway. - Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga: I dunno, it’s Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams being goofy. Fine enough. - I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: Your new true-crime obsession. [Image] - Irresistible: The buzz on Jon Stewart’s new movie is BLEAK. - My Spy: Shocked to learn that a Dave Bautista family comedy is not great. Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can [safely unsubscribe](.