If you think sex in the 21st century sucks, just be glad you don't live in one of these scifi dystopias. When Big Brother is a peeping Tom and three-penised mutants are eligible bachelors, getting off is a turn-off.
Science fiction is filled with examples of folks who can't get laid without total weirdness transpiring. We've divvied these themes into five categories, and here are some of our favorite post-eroticapocalyptic worlds.
1.) The Worst Crimes Are Love Crimes!
This kind of erotic dystopia deals with societies in which the populace is horny as hell, but draconian laws force them to keep their pants on.
- In the 1977 softcore scifi musical Cinderella 2000, rutting is verboten for all but the upper crust of society. Unfortunately for sober viewers, the film's sexually oppressive overlords did not ban hippy-dippy, free-love musical numbers that would make Wavy Gravy vomit a psychedelic rainbow in disgust. It's also worth mentioning that Cinderella meets Prince Charming at a gang-bang.
- 1972's Z.P.G. tells the tale of an Earth at an Malthusian crisis point - a global edict bans reproduction for 30 years. Although sex isn't banned per se, mind control and unnerving Animatronic babies discourage citizens from diddling.
- George Orwell's 1984 is the granddaddy of sex-free dystopias. Party members are forbidden to fornicate, the Anti-Sex League encourages the sublimation of the libido into Big Brother worship, and Party scientists research ways to annihilate the orgasm.
2.) The Best Orgies Are Killer Orgies!
This dystopia is the near opposite of the above. Free love is encouraged by the powers that be, but the untrammeled privilege to put your appendages into someone else's holes comes at a sinister price.
- For the humans in the domed city of Logan's Run, life is a non-stop swingfest of orgy chambers, getting loaded on hallucinatory gas, and jumpsuits, jumpsuits, jumpsuits! Too bad the ruling computer executes everyone once they hit 30.
- Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World describes orgy-porgies, or massive societally sanctioned sex parties. Of course, relationships beyond the fleetingly sexual are frowned upon and everyone's sterile anyway. To paraphrase the Buzzcocks, Huxley's characters are a bunch of orgasm addicts.
- In the 1968 youthsploitation flick Wild in the Streets, America is conquered by free-loving counterculture young'uns. All citizens over 35 are placed in internment camps, where they're dosed with LSD until they ride the Magic Bus to Valhalla.
3.) We Reproduce With Machines And Pills!
In these dystopias, thrusting and fluid exchange are replaced with newer, weirder forms of sexual reproduction.
- Oh, Demolition Man. You're so goddamn awful but I love you regardless. Every time you pop up on Saturday afternoon basic cable, I have to watch you, even if you're on Univision. Who can resist the stilted VR sex scene between Sandra and Sly?
- In the 1984 Polish comedy Seksmisija (Sexmission), the film's cryonically frozen male protagonists wake up in a post-apocalyptic 2044. All men are dead from radiation and women produce via parthenogenesis. The female overlords give the heroes chase once they refuse a government mandated sex-change operation.
- 1968's Barbarella depicts a 40th century Earth where humping has been replaced with exaltation transference pellets and psychocardiogram readings.
- In the movie and comic book series Surrogates, humans make love robosexually using comely cybernetic surrogates. The human operators? They stay virginally cloistered in their apartments.
- In Thomas F. Monteleone's short story Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep, gelatinous beings create children while humans have hands-free sex using machines that interpret their brainwaves.
4.) Sex? No Thanks, I'm Good.
- In these scenarios, no one's interested in boning. This is generally achieved through pharmacological means - citizens must take anti-sex medication or risk breaking the law. George Lucas' THX 1138, Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Welcome To The Monkey House," and Lois Lowry's children's book The Giver all delve into dystopias that prescribe an RDA of anti-Viagra.
- And in the other corner, there's John Boorman's 1974 documentary Zardoz, which has so much limp-dick chicanery going down I don't know where to start. All you need to know is that the gun is good, the penis is evil, and Sean Connery is the only man on the planet who can get a boner.
-1989's softcore romp Flesh Gordon 2: Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders is about an alien planet under the thrall of a supervillain with an impotence ray, but that's not even scariest part of the film. No, that honor's reserved for the claymation cock creature. NSFW here, readers.
5.) Fuck This Slob...Or Humanity Dies!
Denizens of these dystopias have the unenviable task of breeding with some mook, lest the entire human species goes the way of the dodo.
- In the 1988 Rowdy Roddy Piper star vehicle Hell Comes To Frogtown, all humans are either sterile or amphibiously homely. Scoundrel Sam Hell must impregnate the kidnapped virgins in Frogtown - if he fails his mission or goes rogue, the bomb strapped to his male bits will explode. If sex with Rowdy Roddy isn't your fancy, well, there's always Commander Toady and his "three snakes."
- Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog is the timeless, heartwarming tale of a nuclear wasteland, a nomadic teenage hornball, his telepathic dog, and the subterranean society of women who only like the guy for his semen.
- In Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, escape artist Yorick Brown and his capuchin Ampersand are the last male mammals on Earth, which is problematic for both A.) the human race and B.) heterosexual women who like their men decidedly non-neurotic. (Awesome Silver Age Y cover courtesy of Mightygodking.com)