Joan Semmel was the first visual artist that I know of who asked what a truly equal, compassionate and humane sexual relationship between a man and woman would look and feel like, and who tried to create images concerning this on canvas. She first asked this question during the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1970s, when women slowly began gaining economic equality but the visual representations of women and their objectified roles toward men did not seem to be changing much. She expected that men and women would, sooner or later, gravitate toward a type of non-exploitative sex, yet full legal equality did not necessarily mean that the most physically intimate type of relationship between the sexes would be changed much. The “beauty myth” clearly showed that legal fairness and justice between the sexes would not end the objectification of women, so we are still left asking what a humane sexual relationship would be like and how it might be possible given our cultural realities and expectations.
Legal and economic rights for women did not bring along sexual equality any more than civil rights for African Americans ended prejudice and discrimination. As commercial film is both a thermometer and a thermostat for what is happening in our society, perhaps we can take a look at sex in some of the most notorious films from the progressive 60s onward to see whether changing views on sexual relationships have popped up in our porn.
These films help one, in fact, realize that the so-called sexual revolution which began in the 60s and 70s was quite male-centric and more about the guy gaining greater access to sex than creating an equitable situation with women. These films reflected what was happening and encouraged things to happen. So, we see films signaling sexual liberation, but then we see women being kidnapped “for their own good” and functioning within a power-structure where they are second-class citizens in and out of bed. Is “humane” sex possible for the masses or just a self-actualized few who believe that higher forms of human experience are possible? Will a vast majority of folks be able to enter into an age of non-exploitative sex?
These films seem to indicate lasting corrosive values concerning sex existing alongside rhetoric concerning the opening up of attitudes toward human sexuality. The goal for artists and filmmakers would seem to be to promote truly humane sexual relations in our media as a counter-measure.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Meyer, 1965
In 1963 the Equal Pay Act was passed. In 1964 the EEOC was created. In 1966 the National Organization for Women was created and would go on to make significant achievements in ensuring economic equality between the sexes.
Around the time NOW was being created we see Russ Meyer go whole hog into the glorification of enormous female breasts. There had been large breasts featured before in films, and they had duly served the prurient interests of the male viewer, but Meyer took the breast fetish to center stage, shined an adoring spotlight on it and wallowed in it as a type of fascinating and gratifying sadistic threat to the male ego. The flaunting of huge breasts became part and parcel of a mythical outlaw female lifestyle, but there was little of the milk of human kindness in these bosoms. The ladies disdained any sense of compassion or morality and even derived immense humor from references to ethics. Being “good” just was not cool for the large-breast set. They lived for the moment, for pleasure, according to their whims and with no remorse as they relished a form of ultimate liberation from social concerns. Meyer blended in your face voluptuousness with a sociopathic attitude all geared to giving a satisfying shudder to the male viewer.
I Am Curious Yellow/Blue, Vilgot Sjöman, 1967
In 1967 the UN issued the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Lena Nyman ostensibly plays herself — a young Swedish woman who is appalled by the various social evils of the world and who wants to know why such evils exist. As we follow her in her daily life we occasionally see her engaged in some mild form of sex—her sexual and social explorations are thus blended in this film and are implied to come from the same source. (Interestingly, this was the first non-pornographic film to show actual intercourse.) But, this was a film written and directed by a Swedish guy who implied maybe it was just natural for sweet girls to also have regular intercourse (wouldn’t that be nice for forward-thinking, cool, progressive Swedish guys). So, the film’s message seemed to buy into the male-centered hippie dream of every guy having sexual access to every girl at any time (It’s called free love, man!). The liberated woman, to the hippie, was the woman ready to serve the horny, socially conscious guy at any moment’s notice. If she didn’t, she wasn’t progressive or liberated. The US government banned this film from entering the country initially, but it may have been more irritated with the attacks against the Vietnam War, racism, inequality and economic exploitation than Ms. Nyman’s sweet acceptance of sexual advances.
Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci, 1972
In 1970 there was the National Women’s Strike during which tens of thousands of American women demanded abortion rights, the right to affordable childcare and equal opportunities at schools and the workplace. In 1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments prohibited sex discrimination in education programs receiving federal support.
Bertolucci was arrested in Italy for this film and Maria Schneider felt she had been used and abused and exploited by both Bertolucci and Brando while the film was being made. While Paul (Brando), a middle-aged American, and Jeanne (Schneider), a young woman in her 20s, are searching for a new apartment in Paris, they accidentally meet and raw sexual chemistry takes over. They begin a regular series of rendezvous in an apartment during which they experiment with various types of sexual acts.
At the end, Paul wants something more meaningful and is then shot by Jeanne. Was Bertolucci asking, “Can we feel fulfillment having anonymous, wild sex, and, if not, why do we keep doing it?” Yet, in the way he explored this question visually, he also violated the ethic supposedly being promoted. You could say that Bertolucci examined the shelf-life of exploitative sexual desire itself, yet, Schneider was the one hurt by the actions depicted in the film. Then we have a female character shooting a man who has been exploiting her because he suddenly wants meaningful sex, even though the woman behind the woman in the film was growing deeply disheartened with what the guys were making her do.
Deep Throat, Damiano, 1972
In 1971 Congress Declared August 26th Women’s Equality Day. In 1972 Congress passed the Amendment of Women’s Equal Rights, although 38 states failed to ratify the amendment within 7 years.
In Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace discovers she cannot have traditional orgasms due to a genetic mix-up, as her clitoris is actually located inside her throat and she is only able to achieve orgasm orally. Folks in the early 1970s loved this kind of goofiness without seeing anything possibly problematic about it. The silliness of the plot created a faux innocence to the subject matter and made the film more accessible to vast throngs of people. So the film was about a woman who actually craves going down on men for her own selfish reasons, thus objectifying the woman and justifying the male desire for unrequited head. Unfortunately, things were not so cheerful and goofy for the star of the film as Linda Lovelace later alleged that she was coerced into making the film and that the sex scenes everyone thought so funny and adorable were actually scenes of her being raped.
Behind the Green Door, Jim and Artie Mitchell, 1972
In 1972 the Supreme Court declares that birth-control by unmarried couples is legal.
The premise is that there is a secret society, hosting its events from what seems to be a Loyal Order of the Racoon meeting hall, which abducts attractive women and puts them through a performance/ritual to help them develop sexually through group and lesbian sex. It’s further unfortunate that women were kidnapped and forced to go through this “therapy” against their will, but the female protagonist, played by Marilyn Chambers, is rather blasé about the whole thing. Marilyn Chambers, of course, had been a television model for Ivory soap, and had been seen before this film with the label “100% purity” spelled across her chest. In the film, forced sex (AKA rape) becomes “therapeutic” and provides license for everyone in the audience to fulfil his desires, whatever they might be.
Emmanuelle, Jaeckin, 1974
In 1973 Roe v. Wade allowed women to legally have an abortion.
This would be the perfect film to point out the fact that a sexual revolution cannot occur until men and women are truly on an equal footing. Emmanuelle, played by Sylvia Kristel, is in an open marriage with her husband, a guy who works for the French Embassy in Bangkok. We continually see examples of poor Thais who work as virtual slaves to white Europeans and this serves as the backdrop to Emmanuelle’s story, as we understand how lacking in clout she is in regard to the white men who wish to use her and how they “educate” her in the ways of sexual development. Indeed, the one woman in the story with a job, an archeologist, disdains the whole ex-pat crowd indulging in little other than sexual self-absorption. At the end Emmanuelle goes through a sexual ritual with an older man that, allegedly, suddenly turns her into “a woman”. If he had really cared about her, he would have helped her go back to school or get some type of meaningful job.
The Night Porter, Liliana Calvani, 1974
In 1974 women were allowed to have credit cards without first getting the approval of their husbands.
Max (Dirk Bogarde) had been a small fry in the SS and about a decade after the war we find him as a night porter at a Viennese hotel. His background is being cleansed by an underground group of Nazis and soon Max should be able to enjoy life as a solid citizen. Into his hotel walks Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a victim from the camp where Max had worked, with whom Max had had an emotional and sexual relationship while in the camp together. They resume their relationship in a room in the hotel.
Will Lucia report Max? Will Max eliminate Lucia as a possible witness who can have him arrested and jailed? The film is infamous for the implausible romance of a concentration camp victim and her oppressor, a phenomena that had been identified just a year earlier as as Stockholm Syndrome. Roger Ebert rightly pegged the film as being “…a despicable attempt to titillate…”
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Don Edmonds, 1975
In 1974 housing and credit discrimination against women are banned by Congress.
Gene Siskel said this was the most degenerate film he had ever seen in downtown Chicago, a hotbed of degeneracy back then (and not just due to the presence of the mayoral administration of the time). It is a film that depicts acts of torture and castration of guys with 1970s haircuts who really look like porn actors rather than concentration camp victims they supposedly portray from the 1940s. Ilsa is doing crazy sadistic experiments to prove pseudo-scientific propositions and she is also castrating every male prisoner who climaxes too quickly with her.
So we get extreme, unrealistic role-reversal here to feed the s/m fantasies of some guys. The secret of the success of this film is that its campiness and kitsch seemed to trump the horror of the subject matter for many people. It became a huge draw based on its negative reviews and was a cult film to be seen at midnight movies well into the hipster 90s because, like, it was, uh, so ironic.
In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Oshima, 1976
The first UN World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City in 1975.
This film is based on the true story of an obsessive love affair between Sada Abe, a prostitute, and the man to whom she became mistress. Abe became famous throughout pre-war Japan after she was found wandering the streets with her lover’s severed sexual organ after several nights of sex. They experimented with sexual asphyxiation, and Abe went a bit too far and inadvertently killed the guy.
Distraught, she cut off the body part as a keepsake and wandered aimlessly in a daze until the police discovered her. Eiko Matsuda, who played Abe, became the first actress ever to perform oral sex in a non-pornographic film. Oshima had found her in an experimental theater group as he knew that no established Japanese film actress would dare to do a role like this. As you might have expected, Eiko was shunned and abandoned after being used by Oshima and died in obscurity. Can a prostitute fall in love with her patron given the basic nature of the relationship?
Caligula, Tinto Brass, 1979
In 1980 Paula Hawkins (R) Florida, is first woman elected to the U.S. Senate who did not follow her husband or father to the Senate.
Roger Ebert wrote, “Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.” So how was Gore Vidal initially involved with the script? How did they get Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren to star in this? I am not sure what slight of hand tricks were pulled to befuddle so many people, but this became a porno film with highly regarded and reputable actors pushing the plot.
They did not see this? Who knows. Apparently Bob Guccione, the owner of Penthouse magazine, filmed many of the sexually explicit sequences himself and tacked them onto the film. So we get a rare hybrid of ancient Roman history and Penthouse style sex. So was the porn meant to spice up the history or was the history there to make the porn seem more high-brow?
The 80s and 90s….?
Conservatism dominated the 1980s as the trendy/faddy, so-called “sexual-revolution” became more mainstreamed and less commercialized. The 1990s provided few films similar in scope or salience to those produced in the 1970s. In the meantime, women moved increasingly closer to full equality of opportunity in the US. It took a major filmmaker to step forward and attempt another major statement concerning sexuality in the late 90s. This, perhaps, helped launch another wave of notorious sexually oriented films encompassing everything from Ang Lee’s Lust/Caution to Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.
Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick, 1999
Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is a faithful husband who is continually tempted to indulge in acts of promiscuity due to his own wife’s infidelity and the lack of moral restraint he sees around him. Everywhere he looks folks are signaling that it is OK to cheat, OK to betray one’s lover, OK to experiment. Nevertheless, ultimately, he chooses monogamy and family life over casual, meaningless sex.
Various orgy scenes were relatively tame but led to the conspiracy theory that Kubrick was surreptitiously revealing the existence of Illuminati-like groups (which then murdered him). The fake conspiracy within the movie may have inadvertently or deliberately prompted some of this. So the film can be seen as a type of response to the sexual revolution, a swinging of the pendulum back to monogamy and a rejection, by a man, of the selfish goals of the 70s. That was something…Did it, however, contribute toward a vision of the equality of sexual relations? No.
Dreamers, Bertolucci, 2003
It’s Paris, 1968, as the university students of France are staging a rebellion that nearly topples the French government. As politics flares on the streets, three young film-lovers are holed up in a small apartment indulging in talk of film while engaging in a protracted threesome. Two of these folks are brother and sister. The incest seems to be a deliberate violation of a taboo during a time when all norms and values were being challenged. Is the incest evidence of self-absorbed radicalism, genuine love, perversity? Bertolucci’s overall message in the film seems to be a warning about using film or art to shield oneself from social reality, but 32 years after Last Tango the sex is still gratuitous and exploitative. The film received a very rare X rating.
Nymphomaniac I and II, von Trier, 2003
So we have a movie where a woman becomes sexually aggressive to the point where we are challenged to either buy into an archaic and morally laden term like nymphomaniac to describe her behavior or chuck all judgments and possibly just accept her for what she likes to do. The only problem: this is another thought-experiment of female sexuality done by a guy. The film is notorious because it shows the traditionally “passive” sexual partner as an active predator, based on the evidence that, yes, women also possess a sex drive (it seems to work a bit differently from the male sex drive, however). At one point our moral faculties are assailed by the fact that Joe, the female protagonist, neglects the care of her child to indulge in S & M. Joe readily dismisses concepts of romantic love while barreling headlong into sexual adventures, sometimes hurting people in the process. The ending mirrors that of the ending of the opera Thais by Massenet, so there’s nothing original there. It’s hard not to classify the film as just following in the tradition of exploitation and objectification.
Flower and Snake, Takashi Ishii, 2004
This film narrowly walks the line between pornography and established cinema. Like Eiko Matsuda, Sugimoto Aya, an ex-J-pop star, showed real courage in playing a role most Japanese actresses would not have touched – the highly masochistic Shizuko, the wife of a corrupt Japanese businessman. Shizuko is a professional dancer with whom an aging Yakuza boss becomes enamored after seeing her on TV. He blackmails the businessman to temporarily give Shizuko to him, only to find out she is a very sexy cold fish.
No matter, the Yakuza can handle this. They whip together an s/m training program to turn her into a nympho. At the end, however, you realize it was all a dream in repressed housewife Shizuko’s fertile imagination. This film is partly notorious for helping to relaunch Sugimoto’s career as she became an outspoken, public woman, even speaking about divorcing her first husband because he could not please her in bed. Sugimoto Aya has also become famous in Japan for fighting for animal rights and is a strong anti-fur advocate. But did this film help push human sexuality in a more humane direction? Nope.
Lust/Caution, Ang Lee, 2007
The Eileen Chang story is way different from the movie. In it a naïve and young Chinese student is recruited to seduce an aging, balding, pot-bellied Chinese man who has been collaborating with the Japanese military. After he is seduced and led into a trap, he will be executed by those in the underground. Ang Lee sexes the movie up by using a non-bald, non-aging, non-potbellied, downright sexy Tony Leung to play the collaborator and Lee adds gratuitous elements of sadomasochism to the screenplay. The more the guy beats and abuses the woman, the more she seems to fall in love with him. I felt the abuse toward the female character was highly problematic and might have been inviting audiences to indulge in their own woman-hating, but I guess the film became notorious (for a while) because no mainstream Chinese film had ever had such meaningless, absurd and gratuitous sex in it.
50 Shades of Grey, Taylor-Johnson, 2015
In the novel Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is a handsome, anti-social, cruel, abusive, narcissistic and self-absorbed guy who falls deeply in love with a woman of less than laudable character herself. Christian Grey seems to be superficially based on Heathcliff. The movie shows the obsession Grey has with s/m and how he attempts to finagle Anastasia Steele into becoming his “submissive” while apparently becoming more open to an emotional relationship with her at the same time. S/m still seems to have a strong taboo attached to it but the movie brought some of its common practices onto the radar of the everyday household.
Yet, with Ana’s ambiguity toward this sexual practice, and her outright distaste for it at the end, the film seemed to be hedging its endorsement. The fact that Grey’s dominance might have been based on psychological problems did not help the cause or reputation of s/m either. Furthermore, sexologists will tell you that the fantasy of submission is much stronger in males, yet, this would violate a major social taboo: the male serving the interests of the dominant woman. If Steele had been the domme and Grey the sub, this would have been an even more notorious film. A greater film might have explored the interpersonal dimensions of various kinks in a more sympathetic and non-exploitative manner.
What would compassionate, non-exploitative and humane sex look like? Your guess is as good as mine. I was influenced by both Semmel and the book by Edward Lucie-Smith Sexuality in Western Art to look for it in some of the more sexually notorious of films of all time and I came up empty. Perhaps an article like this is a good start to encourage artists and filmmakers to more deeply explore concepts of social and economic equality and how a concomitant equality may be reached in the realm of physically intimate behavior.
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