Making out hard is now fashionable

So many things are changing lately. One of them, at least in the U.S., is the famous boom of PDA, which stands for "public display of affection" and means more or less all the various kisses, hugs and strategically placed dead hands that are seen in public. In our country this kind of expansiveness is relatively normal: magazines like Novella 2000 or Chi? are full of celebrities on vacation glued to each other, nor on the street and in real life is it difficult to witness effusions between regular or casual lovers. It's different in the U.S., where making out hard in front of the cameras is considered a bit edgy and where gossip magazines have begun to register a new trend among celebrities, who for the past few months have abandoned shyness and reticence and are not afraid to be immortalized in more or less tangled situations ranging from Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez holding hands or intent on making out hard in L.A, to Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen playing Lady and the Tramp with an ice cream cone, to Hailey and Justin Bieber posting intimate shots on Instagram. Quick list of other stars involved in various PDAs that the American press is reporting on this week alone: Brooklyn Beckham and newlywed Nicola Peltz, Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin, Bella Hadid and Cameron Diaz with their respective boyfriends, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas. The absolute masters of PDA, however, remain the members of the Kardashian clan, especially Khloe Kardashian and the affiliated Megan Fox, who throughout the course of 2021 and much of 2022 have by no means skimped on making out in front of photographers with their respective husbands. But Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson have also based their much-talked-about relationship on a PDA gesture, nominally the innocent mold kiss exchanged live nationally on the set of Saturday Night Live - but it is known that even from small sparks great fires break out. 

Not bad for a country where, three years ago, an article titled A Visual History of Gross Celebrity PDA That We Can Never Unsee was published in W Magazine and where the country's newspaper presses stop if Tom Holland and Zendaya exchange a very trivial lovers' kiss in the car. «Stitched together, those gratuitous PDA snaps and much-Instagrammed vacations formed a nouveau reality show—replete with drama (given the many divorces among them), romance, and (unsubtle) hints at sex. Yes, they’re performing and seeking attention, but there’s still something vaguely messy and terribly human about people so effusively expressing their love for each other while the world looks on», wrote Vogue last year, veteran of interviews in which Megan Fox thinly veiled allusions to her and Machine Gun Kelly's between-the-sheets stunts, although everyone was more concerned about the mutual drinking of each other's blood.

The paper makes it a matter of "tact," and indeed among the many normal effusions, we have had more curious episodes in the past year: one such case is certainly Kourtney Kardashian sucking Travis Barker's thumb in an Instagram video, a moment that elicited more "what the fuck" reactions than moral grievances; the rest of these instances have been provided to us by Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly, who have revealed so much about their private lives (ranging from "tantric night terrors" to red carpet outfits pierced at strategic points, so to speak, so as to allow celebrations of their respective love on the go) summed up in the phrase "the kind of sex that would make Lucifer clutch his rosary " in a series of revelations that led to the birth of many memes about the couple's weirdness and the epic tweet: «Everything i’ve learned about Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly has been against my will».

The same tendency to display such explicit physical effusions in public also exists outside the "valley of the dolls" in which these celebrities live. If last year we were discussing how post-pandemic fashion campaigns were full of couples and non-couples intent on making out really hard (and with few clothes on, too), the habit of displaying strong physical effusions has also become a common sight on social where models/and various influencers have started sharing suggestive pre- or post-coital videos, more or less explicit nude photos but always in compliance with Instagram's permissive standards and Twitter's nonexistent ones, and they have also realized that so many of their followers are willing to pay to peek even deeper and therefore have opened their own OnlyFans. In its sheer vastness, then, Twitter has in recent years become a fertile breeding ground for amateur porn stars who may be in other professions in their day but who don't mind supplementing their salaries by showing the world their escapades. And lately certain licentiousness has come out of the shadows of anonymous ad pages and become real parties (in Milan an example might be those made by creative hub Carnale which, by the way, also publishes a wonderful print magazine) bringing a healthy wave of sex positivity to a city where much is done but little is said. That our society is becoming more sex positive, however, there is no doubt: this year OnlyFans recorded a total of 170 million users with a monthly creator growth rate of 70 percent according to the TechJury website. Sex has become a business that can be done at home, some provincial newspapers even write profiles on couples who after OnlyFans can afford to buy a car of their own and pay rent-which says a lot about our society. 

If, thanks to social media and platforms like Twitter and OnlyFans, sex is becoming more and more like entertainment, celebrities, who make their living from entertainment, have probably realized that modesty does not pay. Of course, these are still celebrities who have nothing better to do than build a reputation for edginess, although the infamous scandal of leaked nude celebrity photos in 2014 after the Cloud was hacked proves that even Hollywood A-listers are not particularly shy in their private lives. Nevertheless, the new generation of stars (and ordinary people, apparently) have far fewer problems with sex than in the past-and now that the problem of sexual liberation seems solved, there are only 99 more left to solve.