New Trends in Perversion

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I just watched the IFC's series Indie Sex on DVD. This is a series not so much about unfunded sexual renegades as the title might suggest, but rather about sex in film-- where it's meaningful, where it's been censored, where it's hot, where it's new and creative, where it's pressed envelopes and so on. It's divided into four categories-- "Censored," "Taboos," "Extremes" (as pertains to kink, fetish and BDSM), and "Teens" (as pertains to teen sex comedies, dramas... with only minimal attention to hebephilia and other more "imbalanced" relations).

The writing of this blog has led me to seek out an awful lot of movies that do weird/new/interesting things with sex-- or at least the ones that are purported to do so. But there are still a lot out there of which I have not yet heard... and Indie Sex brought a few new ones to my attention, and, subsequently, to my NetFlix queue.

Among my new finds is a goofy little porn-lite flick called Preaching to the Perverted. It's a rather silly comedy that follows the story of a dewy young lad charged with infiltrating a raucous band of fetishists for the purposes of bolstering evidence against them for a morality trial-- in the sort of court that wants to say that some sex acts are Just Not Okay even when everyone participating is a consenting adult. And along the way, our dewy young lad falls in love with-- and impregnates-- the ringleader, one Miss Tanya Cheex (oh, I just love those dominatrices and their funny, punny sobriquets).

Ultimately, the film follows a pattern not all that dissimilar to many romantic comedies (ending with a bland, hetero-normative endorsement of near-monogamy), and, in my opinion, it kinda sells itself out in the end. When our boy is called upon to testify before the court, he perjures himself, saying that all acts on some tapes (ones he made during some early, intended-to-be-comical (the film's supposed to be funny, but it's just barely so-- it's interesting for other reasons, though) attempts at espionage) were simulated and that no one really gets hurt-- even if they want to be. Though he does prevent his beloved and her minions from going off to jail, his lie before the court undermines the message of the film-- that being, if everyone playing the kinky little games agrees that the rules of said games are acceptable, there shouldn't be legislation that says otherwise.

So, the movie's not the most brilliantly conceived gem of cinematic pleasure ever. Still, it's a fascinating curio cabinet of late '90s socio-sexual attitudes. It was made in the 1997 and, even in 10 years, I think a lot has changed about what seems risque. Most of the show is populated with assorted circus freaks dressed in sequins, feathers, vinyl, rubber, leather and other squeaking textiles. The fetish scene itself is portrayed as exactly that-- a circus. People perform. They get pierced on stage. They light firecrackers on their own chests. They rig up sexy suits of armor and apply dull drill bits to them so that they can shoot sprays of sparks on to the asses of the other people in their acts. And, because it's still supposed to be sexual, women have explosive, dildo-assisted orgasms on stage. But so much of it seems not so much about the sex as about the showmanship. Women wear costumes that expose their breasts, but there's nary a dick to be found. There are plenty of codpieces and other dick-shaped items, but no actual dick. Sex simply informs the way the performers are costumed, but few of the club scenes actually have much sex in them. In other words, it's not really all that titillating.

In the late '90s, internet porn was just gaining steam, and for many mainstream audiences, videos of leathered-up people being electrically shocked, spanked, burned and bruised were very new... and very sensational. Sure, we'd seen Bettie Page's good-humored riding crop games ... and people have been performing these acts for centuries in sideshows and traveling minstrel shows, but you add rubber and black tasseled pasties? Suddenly, ritual scarification becomes perverted, sexual, obscene-- whether or not the participants are actually HAVING sex-- or even getting sexually aroused. Seeing a film like this 11 years after it was made just doesn't affect me in the same way it once would have. It reads as fun, ebullient, sexually gleeful, but not so much something that really attacks any mores head on. We've all seen this kind of fetish burlesque stage show before, now. And it just doesn't have the same kind of shock value... especially once you've seen something along the lines of the documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (about which I wrote here).

Beyond that, there are some other odd little late-'90s attitudinal quirks played out in this film. The late '90s were the acme of the public consciousness' love affair with the clit. Somewhere in the '60s, as the Women's Movement left the ground and women starting claiming the right to sexual pleasure for themselves, much was made of the fact that the locus, for us, was there in that teeny nub of flesh. And by the '90s, a few things were taken for granted about the way the female body works: a) We all need foreplay and lots of it. A woman's body is like an electric burner, taking a few minutes to heat up, whereas a man's runs on gas and is immediately ready at the flip of a switch. (Hint: that's not true for all of us.) b) Women need to be friends with and feel emotional connection to our partners for us to feel sexual with them. (Uh, the hint above applies here, too.) c) The clit is all you need. (Yeah. No!) and d) Women are turned on by touch while men are turned on by visual stimuli, hence their *need* for porn (and women's *dislike* of it)(This ain't universally true, either).

And then came niche market porn. And an upsurge in interest in the Tantra. And suddenly squirter jokes echoed through the corridors of pop culture. Yes, we were/are witnessing the apotheosis of the g-spot and her gushy little offspring, the female ejaculation. Laura Kipnis offers a much more fleshed-out and better researched timeline about how different female pleasure sensors go in and out of style in her "Sex" chapter in the (totally kick-ass) book, The Female Thing... but you get the picture. Our ideas about sexuality fall in stride with the ebb and flow of trends-- social, scientific, political-- just like anything else.

But Preaching to the Perverted was clearly made before the g-spot orgasm became a symbol of female-empowering hetero sex. It was made in a much clit-friendlier era. Early in the film, Tanya Cheex expels her slave from her kingdom for good-- because he committed the infraction of attempting to penetrate her. She spits at him, "My clit ring can give me more pleasure in just a few seconds than that thing (abusively grabbing his cock, just below the camera's frame) could in a million years!" And she is fully distraught in the morning after the eventual consummation with Peter (hehe-- also slightly punny, if you ask me!), our boy mentioned above. Penetration, in this film, is associated with acceding female autonomy to men. And that was an attitude I found still rather prevalent when I was an undergraduate... in, of course, the late '90s.

Frankly, I'm thrilled that it's not anti-feminist to like being penetrated anymore. It's a glorious time to be a sexually active woman, in that we are, at last, able to own our own turn-ons. We're no longer looking for someone to blame (the patriarchal culture, our low self-esteem as determined by the patriarchal culture, or our "seriously ruptured relationships with our fathers" as Susie Bright puts it in her fascinating essay "Rape Scenes") for our rape fantasies, for our desires to Bottoms (assuming not all of us, no matter how much we try, can be the Top sort). (Please also note that, in this dated school of thought, blaming that amorphous patriarchy was just another way of conceding power to it-- when taking personal responsibility is, as always, the more empowering, though more fraught, route.) We're allowed to be aroused by that which actually arouses us. We get to enjoy fucking men. We can even enjoy giving blow jobs, which has previously been the ultimate symbol of female denigration. Being a slut is no longer something about which we should be ashamed, many of us wearing the moniker like a Brownie badge. And on top of all that, bottom-y sluts have the same rights to the varied, multiple paths to feminism as do the dominatrices and the celibates and the strictest of lesbians. Regardless of vehicle that gets us there, we are finally beginning to recognize that the Temple of Feminism is open to all who value women's contributions to our culture, our consciousness-- our very lives. Not just the ones who follow certain limiting rules in the sack.

***

Meanwhile, I'm also reading A. M. Homes novel, The End of Alice. Published in '96, it's another clear product of its recently bygone era. It's the story of a correspondence between two pederasts, one duly jailed and the other at the onset of *her* molestation career. Even putting aside the slightly unusual conceptualizing of the molester profile as female, the book obviously arose out of this rising tide of panic with regard to sex and kids. Now, I'm certainly not saying we're not still in the midst of this particular panic-- we're still putting up with the fear-pandering entrapment-fests of Dateline: To Catch a Predator every now and again. But this book really capitalizes on the most popular psychological theories about the causes of pedophilia. Theories that have been gathering momentum just in the last 10 to 15 years.

Early in the book, Homes offers us, by way of explanation, very Lolita-esque flashbacks to the childhoods of her two lead characters. The man in jail was once in love with a twelve-year-old girl named Alice, but she died (we learn later that HE actually stabbed her to death). The girl had a kinky, pre-pubescent relationship with her best friend that involved her tying him to a radiator and making him watch her masturbate while his flesh singed. But then, the boy died (through no fault of hers). As in Lolita, the thinking behind this sort of story represents an older model for this sort of pathology: some stressful event in the midst of sexual development causes the subject's sexual preferences to crystallize around the image of the (extremely) youthful paramour. And as a result, the subject's predilections never really mature to "normal" adulthood. This was the operating theory behind this sort of behavior when Nabokov published Lolita in 1955. This is Homes' point of entry.

However, at roughly the halfway mark, another story, another flashback slowly emerges. The man in jail tells us of his mother's release from a sanitarium when he was 9 years old. He tells us that she took him to a private Roman bath. And then he relays an incredibly disturbing (even for me, and I am not easily disturbed) series of events that result in the mother goading the child into fisting her to orgasm in the bath. I read this passage in my hair salon yesterday while waiting for my color to set and accidentally caught myself in the mirror a couple of times notably cringing as I read. But what's interesting to me is that the story emerges as "the real reason" behind this man's fucked-upedness. Why? Well, haven't we heard everywhere from The Today Show to Dr. Phil that most child molesters were molested as kids themselves? The story represents the new psychology. Clear as day. Why did we never learn about Humbert Humbert being fondled as a boy? Because, in the '50s, that's not what made you a molester. But now? Such things have gained new relevance.

Do we know for sure that either of these theories is correct? That either is incorrect? That it's not an amalgam of the two? That, tomorrow, scientists won't find "the molester gene" in some of our brains? No. We know none of those things. But I DO find it fascinating that this particular writer bought this particular theory AND its hook, its line and its sinker! She couldn't have written this book ten years earlier-- not because such things didn't happen, but because we conceived of them so differently.

The style of the book is also, um, notable. It may be the grossest thing I've ever read (no, I still haven't figured out how to get my hands on an English translation of Feuchtgebiete but I'll let you know when I do). It's full of scab-eating and licking of fingers that have recently been extracted from assholes. It has gluttonous, purple passages on the degustation of junk food-- in revolting binges. Little girls die with weapons in their vaginae. The blurb on the back says it "is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive." The "horror story" part is certainly true, though in an unexpected way. The detail Homes expends driving home the fact that children are really and truly unhygienic and foul is, um, effective. However, the sum total of all this repellence is that Homes creates some rather one-dimensional characters. They are all too awful to be anything beyond comically unsympathetic. No tortured monster like Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children. Not even a sadly stunted, but passionate man like ol' Humbert.

Though, I should say, our jailed molester sure wishes he was Humbert Humbert. He, our primary narrator, has this over-the-top, urbane diction that lands him somewhere between Nabokov and Hannibal Lector-- which Homes uses to great comic effect. Within the first couple of pages, Homes has the girl ask the old man, "The way you talk is so peculiar--did you go to school in England?" He replies, "University of Virginia, B.A., 1961. The speech impediment is an affectation." Indeed it is. Clever girl, this Homes. However, it's still a little prosier, a little more over-written, overly expository than I like. But that's just quibbling.

***

So, after all this thinking about the shifting sands of sexual mores, it occurs to me that we're currently watching something else that was once normal become a new taboo. Just in the past couple of days, there have been a series of articles (mostly commenting on each other) circulating through Sex Blog World about the illicit thrills of condom-free sex. A Jezebel post speaks of it as though it's a substitute for engagement (does that mean I've got diamonds coming my way?). The Frisky weighs in in response. And Boinkology jumps into the fray as well.

Now, I know we're not supposed to refer to our current epoch as "The Post-AIDS Era", because, well, it's not. But there IS a palpable easing of tensions regarding STDs right now, when, in this country anyway, provided you are insured, AIDS is a lifelong but treatable disease, rather than an automatic death sentence. We still have the conversations: Have you been tested? How long ago? How many times have you been fucked since then? How many without condoms? And if we're smart, we wait until another round of tests turn up clean before we engage in any frictive skin-on-skin action, before we proceed unsheathed.

But condomless sex is like the new kinky thing to do. Even though 30 years ago, it was the norm. Now, suddenly, even reading and writing articles about how its a possibility feels like a huge social transgression. And a huge, arousing, slippery, private transgression, too.

To bring this inordinately long post full circle, I wonder if part of the feminist anti-penetration stance was subconsciously fueled by AIDS anxiety. Would Tanya Cheex had felt so laid bare by getting laid if she hadn't been afraid for her life? If letting someone cum in her hadn't exposed her to the contingency of being laid to waste by the least empowering, most undignified plague of the 20th Century? Obviously, there was real (second wave) feminist rigor behind the idea that penetrative, vanilla sex put the female at an inherent, biological, anatomical disadvantage (well, it kinda does, but that's part of the fun!), but I can't help but wonder if this little subsurface fear of disease didn't bolster the steadfastness of those who held that opinion. Just a theory. And we all know theories are subject to erosion, addition and changes of all sorts.

In any case, it seems to me that the whole whips-n-chains leather scene was a logical release in an era when performing penetrative sex acts meant taking your life in your hands. There even arose a little subset of the fetishistic arts that surrounded very clinical practices involving rubber gloves and other assorted prophylactic measures.

I know all this stuff still goes on--and preceded the '80s and '90s AIDS-fear-pervasive culture by millennia. Maybe it's just that we're all a little jaded, a little less shockable by that which is labeled "kink" or "fetish." But it seems to me that, when intercourse is a less socially-sanctioned activity, humans don't lose their desires to feel something intense. Enter pain play. Enter pain play in the common discourse. Is that too big a stretch?