When American Pie first hit the big screens in 1999, it seemed to trigger a whole new genre of movies aimed specifically at teenage boys. The likes of Road Trip, Sex Drive, Harold and Kumar and Dude, Where's My Car? all followed suit, with the humour focusing on sexual embarrassment and all the rigmarole of being a young man in the modern world.
Whether it's the toilet humour, penis jokes or downing kegs of beer - the films were all pretty similar in nature and proved to be massively popular when they came out. Such was the popularity of these movies, American Pie quickly became a franchise, with a grand total of seven (yes, SEVEN!) more films: American Pie 2, American Wedding and American Reunion, along with spin-off films American Pie: Band Camp, American Pie: The Naked Mile, American Pie: Beta House and American Pie: The Book of Love.
But, while it may have been extremely popular and fairly NSFW at the time, it turns out that American Pie is not going down well with people who are re-watching the movies online. Taking to Twitter to share their revelations, users of the social media platform have been labelling the film as sexist and misogynistic.
There are numerous scenes in American Pie that these people may be referring to, whether it's recording a woman stripping off on a secret webcam, or Stifler calling people out for acting 'gay'. Also, there's Stifler being horrified at being in a gay club and several women being manipulated into situations of a sexual variety. Essentially, these are all things that don't go down as well in 2018 as they did during the 1990s.
However, American Pie isn't the only production that has been criticised for it's 'outdated' and 'archaic' humour, with Friends also receiving a fair amount of scorn. Due to streaming services such as Netflix, people are now finding it easier to ever to re-live the programmes and movies that helped shape their youth, but are finding them to be fairly insensitive.
Friends, which is widely regarded as one of the most popular comedies of all time, has been subject to backlash recently. Whether it's the fat-shaming of Monica, or Ross finding out that his son is playing with a Barbie Doll and freaking out, there's a variety of reasons why Friends has found it harder to crack a younger audience.
New Statesman writer Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin said in an article:
"Chandler's dehumanising contempt for his queer father, which mutates into a loathing of any kind of effeminacy or gender nonconformity, in himself or anyone else.
"Plenty of people will tell you that this gay panic was 'of its time', but frankly that only makes it more sinister."
So while American Pie may have been a smash hit at the time it came out, it appears that the younger generation of bored of toilet jokes and misogynistic humour.
