Sex Radical Cinema

By Carol Siegel

In this provocative study of cinematic and televisual representations of "sex radicalism," Carol Siegel explores how representations of sexually explicit content on film have shaped American cultural visions of sex and sexual politics in the 21st century. Siegel distinguishes between a liberal approach to visual representations, which has over-emphasized normative equal opportunity while undervaluing our distinctive erotic selves, and a radical approach to visual representation, which portrays forbidden sexualities and desires. She illustrates how visual media participates in and even drives political policies related to pedophilia, prostitution, interracial relationships, and war. By examining such popular film and television shows as Mystic River, The Wire, Fifty Shades of Grey, Batman Returns, and the HBO hits, Sex and the City and Girls, Siegel takes the discussion of radical sex in the movies out of the margins of political discussions and puts it in the center, where, she argues, it has belonged all along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253018113

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Recent Changes in the Representation of

Sex and Politics in American Cinema

THIS BOOK BEGAN several years ago when I was asked via a telephone political poll, Do you identify as a liberal or a conservative? I was shocked by the pollster’s annoyed response when I said, neither—I’m a radical. He informed me that he could not continue the survey unless I chose one or the other position. Subsequent calls during voting seasons have led me to realize that I no longer have a position within the American political spectrum that is recognized by those who analyze Americans’ investments in politics. Relying entirely on call screening to avoid being polled seemed one way for me to deal with how much this unsettled me. Because my politics lean much more toward the collectivist than the individualist, which is part of what radical means to me, writing a book to clarify what radicalism might mean in my field, cinema studies, seemed a better way to go. And in any case, I am not just a radical; I am a sex radical, a position that generates even more confusion, not just when trying to have my opinions included in political polls but also when trying to explain the reasons I value some films more than others for reasons directly determined by my politics. However, the point of this book is not to make me personally more politically comprehensible, but rather to bring a new perspective to the ways politics that are left of center relate to cinematic representations of sexuality. I am particularly interested in articulating what it means for a film to be pro-sex and at the same time supportive of gender and sexual equality, which is precisely what the term sex radical cinema means to me and to many other feminist, gender, and queer studies scholars.

The difficulty of articulating a comprehensible politically radical position on sex in cinema is not merely personal; it is a problem for everyone concerned with the politics of sex, gender, and cinema, as well as with the ways they intersect with American constructions of race and the mappings that place us in our rapidly deteriorating physical world. Such issues are intricately tangled up with each other, as this book will show. All discussions of the representation of sexuality in film include analysis of the films’ politics, and most of them center on those politics. But the most typical method of relying on sexual conservatism and sexual liberalism as contrasting categories blurs the significant line between liberal and radical sexual politics. This tendency in film analysis may seem necessary in our times, because political polarization has resulted in popular media frequently collapsing every political position other than conservatism into liberalism. Still, an approach that seeks to define film depictions of sexuality as either conservative or liberal is limited in the extent to which it can support the sex radical aims of contemporary feminist, gender, and queer studies. This book does something different through focusing on distinguishing between what is liberal and what is radical in cinematic representations of sexuality.

In each chapter the discussions of what I deem sex radical cinema (and what I do not) comprise an effort to address this problem by bringing to bear on cinema a sex radical feminist vision that can renew our sense of what radicalism is and can be, and to differentiate it from a liberalism that merely solidifies the very systems of gender binarity and sexual prejudice that spoil many efforts at progress toward a more just society. The representation of sexualities on film concerns more than how sexual desires, object choices, and acts are depicted. It also concerns how these depictions fit into a worldview determined by beliefs and anxieties that may initially seem only tangentially relevant to sexual politics but on closer examination are inextricable from them. To look at how the politics of cinematic representation of sexuality inform and reflect other areas of political life takes discussion of sex in the movies outside the margins of political discussions and puts it into the center, where it belongs.

First I will provide some crucial definitions that are rooted in feminist thought because of its pertinence to this project. I use the term sex radical feminist to refer to feminists whose political position is that women and men have the right to express their sexualities freely as long as the expression takes place between those who are capable of meaningful consent to participate. This expression includes treating sex as a pleasure in its own right, independent of whether the sexual desire is complemented by a desire for an ongoing relationship. In other words, like B. Ruby Rich, I write as an old-time outlaw girl (41). That turn of phrase should help us keep in mind that by taking this position, sex radical feminists are also challenging the view of some other influential feminists who believe it is impossible for women to freely consent to engage in sexual activities that many consider demeaning. These other feminists often attribute to false consciousness assertions of agency by minors who choose to have sex and by women who engage in sex work, and who dismiss as delusional their accounts of finding pleasure in their choices. Such feminists describe the position of sex radical feminists as reactionary in that they see it as endorsing a return of women and adolescents to subordination as objectified victims of patriarchy. To understand this conflict and how it informs the reception of cinema, it is necessary to untangle the meanings assigned to political radicalism both as it concerns sexuality and in a more general sense. So I begin with a little history that might serve to establish the legitimacy of a position on sexual issues that is neither liberal nor conservative, but is both radical and feminist, before going on to explain why this can be a useful position from which to approach analysis of representation of sexuality in film.

It has become impossible to think productively about sexual politics without acknowledging the vast differences between understandings of the general political spectrum at the height of the sexual revolution and today’s popular, dominant definitions of terms like radical and conservative. The old political definitions were as follows: Reactionaries desired a return to an idealized past when authority was respected and laws were obeyed. Conservatives wanted to preserve the status quo. Liberals worked within the extant system to give all law-abiding citizens equal opportunities to compete for the advantages our capitalist system offers. Radicals attempted to do away with the reigning political system in order to replace it with one that would provide fulfillment of basic needs to everyone.

Classic political positions have undergone drastic redefinition. The traditional scale from left to right is no longer charted as radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary, but instead, for the purposes of media description as well as polling, Americans are allowed only two possible, mutually exclusive descriptors: liberal or conservative. Reactionary appears to have fallen out of ordinary discourse entirely. The status of the term radical is more complex. Radical used to mean extreme and different from the mainstream in the 1980s, when it was used interchangeably with excellent, because being different from Republican Reagan supporters was considered good by people who styled themselves hip. Now, however, it is regularly used in political rhetoric to describe significant difference from what the speaker considers ideal. The word radical can thus designate extremist political positions on both ends of the spectrum. A good illustration of the current instability of the term radical came to me in an email sent August 14, 2012, from Moveon.com with the subject line 10 things about Paul Ryan’s radical agenda. The email was designed to stir up alarm about Ryan’s plans, frightening liberal voters into taking action against him and his supporters, or at the very least into making contributions to opposing candidates. Among the agenda items the email designates as radical are eliminating Social Security, denying Pell grant support to low-income college students, opposing gay rights, and criminalizing abortion. Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center attempts to mobilize its supporters with regular reports on what are described as the radical political activities of neo-Nazis. In contrast a typical report from FoxNews.com is headed Obama’s Radical agenda for America extends far beyond EPA proposal and goes on to describe the presidential policy on carbon emissions as a lot like everything else the administration is doing, in producing a society in which government rather than individuals controls our production of everything, and thus our lives (Morici).

Two main forces unsettled the old political terminology. The most obvious was the fall of the Soviet Union, beginning in 1985, which created a category crisis in political reporting. During the early 1990s, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party had relinquished power but was still popular with many Russians, the US media began to call supporters of the former regime reactionaries. This made some sense in that the pro-Communism Russians did want to move backward in time politically, but it disturbed the official cold war discursive practice of equating leftism, radicalism, and communism. And it challenged the Left’s discursive practice of equating reactionary politics and fascism.

A less obviously resignifying but perhaps even more influential event was the late 1980s rise of American Republicans who defined themselves as radicals. These new radicals spun their mission as one that would return America to an imagined uniformly conservative 1950s as a rebellion against a power structure that they claimed dominated politics at every level and was held in place by liberal media and the public educational system. For example, by representing the Fairness Doctrine’s rule that opposing political views be given equal airtime as a curtailment of freedom of speech, Rush Limbaugh was able to describe his own program as revolutionary and thus radical.¹ Newt Gingrich became minority whip in 1989 and speaker of the house in 1994 and acted as the leader of the Republican Revolution that led to the federal government shutdown in 1995. The concept of the radical Republican was born. Liberalism had to be redefined as preservation of the status quo, while conservatism, which literally has that meaning, had to be redefined as a radical rejection of the current state of affairs.

This change has some similarities to the views of the cultural revolutionaries of 1968, because, as Michel Foucault devoted much of his work to pointing out, liberalism frequently works to shore up the status quo through a regime of discipline. In Discipline and Punish he contrasts regimes of punishment with those of discipline. The regime of punishment acts upon those who transgress the law only after they have transgressed, but in the regime of discipline training and gratification are employed to encourage obedience to laws so that punishment might be rendered unnecessary (180). The regime of punishment is concerned with controlling groups through each member’s fear of the application of the law to wrongdoers, while the regime of discipline works to create a sense of individual allegiance to a norm that ideally will ensure proper behavior through the consent of the governed (193). And within the regime of discipline, the judges of normality are present everywhere (304). Doctors, educators, and social workers all maintain the universal reign of the normative, creating a society that seems gentler and more open than that under the regime of punishment but is in fact carceral, modeled on the prison as reformatory (394).

As a result, as Foucault explores in his lectures on biopolitics, liberalism belongs to the regime of discipline, in which the interests of individuals and their desires to act freely in their own best interest are always seen as potentially threatening the maintenance of a societal norm. Thus, he says, liberalism condition[s people] to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger (Birth of Biopolitics 65–66). In Foucault’s view, because consumer capitalist governments have only one true and fundamental social policy: economic growth, American liberalism can treat citizens only as human capital to be bred and developed in such a way as to give a good return on the investment in them of their parents and social institutions, such as schools (144, 228–30). Consequently, although American liberalism is presented as a mode of giving citizens greater freedom, in actuality it is a consumer of freedom (63), enforcing a whole way of being and thinking in which the whole of the social system is understood through the model of monetary exchanges (218, 243). The result is a political approach with a foothold in both the right and the left, above all resistant to that which might undermine economic stability, such as nondomestic expression of sexualities (218).

In his study The History of Sex in American Film, Jody W. Pennington explores how films made during the 1960s and ’70s reflected the threat posed by cultural radicalism to those elements of liberalism that cohered with conservatism to form an uneasy consensus on sexual matters (45). However, this analysis is hampered by his view of leftist radicalism as stressing individual autonomy rather than the collectivism foundational to the era’s identity politics (57). The emphasis on what would later be called public sex cultures, of which film viewings became an important part, is thus lost.

In contrast, this book looks at film as a site of sexual representations that can either reinforce or resist the disciplinarity that is crucial to attainment of the American dream of individual material success. As the discussions of films in each chapter show, cinematic, and especially American cinematic, representations of sexuality are always contextualized, although not always obviously, through reference to the fear of departures from the norm that might undermine the current American ideal of a family, legally bound to each other, whose lives are structured in such a way as to maximize their income, accumulation of material goods, and ownership of real estate. Gilles Deleuze’s books on cinema and his writings with Félix Guattari on capitalism help provide a framework for my analysis of the rhetoric of cinematic resistance to this sort of regime of discipline. Because Deleuze and Guattari frequently identify a specific type of art, the minor/minoritarian, as opposed to the maintenance of norms that are foundational to maintaining consumer capitalism, I draw on their concept of majoritarian and minoritarian art. According to Deleuze and Guattari, minoritarian art forms stress the specificity of each experience and thus oppose the construction and maintenance of universalized identities that always serve to keep in place the dominant powers, and that are supported by majoritarian art (Thousand Plateaus 100–110).²

Deleuze explores this idea in his two books on cinema. He argues that imagery in film has traditionally been used to create an easily interpretable world through an accretion of clichés. And such cinema has been seductive in that it makes sense of human experience. Hence continuity editing and immediately recognizable characters as well as strong, familiar plot lines are perennially popular. How can one not believe in a powerful organization, a great and powerful plot, which has found a way to make clichés circulate? (Cinema 1 209). Yet in order to resist movement which is increasingly military and policing, which drags puppet-characters into rigid social roles, forcing us away from a desire for limitless becoming and into an acceptance of fixed being, film must smash cliché and so offer lines of flight away from the webs of meaning that ordinarily confine our understanding (100–101). This is achieved through a turn to the body as that which plunges thought into the unthought, that is life. (Cinema 2 189). At one time we seemed to know this; now we do not. What happened? In order to answer that question we must deeply investigate the representation of sexuality within popular political discourse.

To the extent that discourse determines what is intelligible and, consequently, what can be said or imagined, the millennial changes in political terminology are particularly significant for the representation of sexuality. The confusion generated by the designation of leftists as reactionaries and Republicans as radicals has made it more difficult to represent sexual radicalism as a distinct and describable political position. Added to these difficulties is the confusion over how the politics of sex radical feminism are to be understood.

A brief overview of some twentieth- and twenty-first-century changes in widely popular American representations of sexuality can help to establish where we were at the end of the 1960s and how we came from there to where we are now. If one were to generate an etiological narrative of changes in America’s dominant sexual ideologies during this period, it might sound something like this: Sexual revolutionary theory was initially provided by neo-Freudians like Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization (1955), and Norman O. Brown, in Life against Death (1959). These ideas were seized upon by young people of the ’60s counterculture who read these texts as asserting that free expression of sexuality is revolutionary and brings about larger political change.³ Such change was observable in everyday life.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s American women, and many others in industrialized countries, experienced far greater freedom from punitive repercussions for exercising sexual freedom than women had previously. Feminists were instrumental in bringing about many of the changes. New widely publicized and available birth control technologies and the legalization of abortion meant that sexual activity outside marriage need not result in the birth of unwanted children. The proliferation of shelters and crisis centers for assaulted women and feminist work with law enforcement ultimately eliminated the previous common understanding that women who consented to sexual relations with one man then belonged to him to do with as he liked or that women who consented to sexual relations with multiple partners implicitly consented to be generally sexually available. And affirmative action hiring practices and policies demanding equal pay for equal work resulted in more women being able to survive financially without a man’s support. All of this meant that women were freer to engage in sexual activity for pleasure alone without fearing reprisal. Because women were freer to choose sex partners based on physical attraction or affection rather than economic necessity or the need for protection, men could enjoy a sense of equality with their female sex partners. This greater freedom for both sexes led to a revolution in sexual behavior, with significant numbers of people choosing to have sex outside marriage—often with multiple partners—as a form of self-discovery or as a mode of entertainment. Popularization of the Freudian theory that sexual repression resulted in discontent and, if severe enough, mental illnesses and social disorders, including institutionalized violence and abuse of the weak, led many people to believe that the sexual revolution would make people happier and gentler with each other and populations less supportive of military aggression.

But developing alongside these new ideas were contrary movements in one strand of feminism. Throughout the 1970s, and thereafter, a vocal minority of feminists promulgated various sweeping critiques of heterosexuality, all based on the idea that men’s and women’s sexualities are irreconcilably different due to biological, social, and cultural factors. Among the beliefs that characterized this way of thinking was that heterosexual women could reach orgasm only through sustained clitoral stimulation. Consequently, women who wanted satisfying heterosexual sex lives would have to negotiate with a lover who was willing to spend substantial time learning about his female partner’s specific, complex system of responses. Thus all heterosexual activities without male commitment were exploitive of women. As Pennington notes, "Commitment and meaningful relationships became buzzwords associated with sex" (65; emphasis Pennington’s).

These beliefs brought some feminists into an unanticipated alliance with the rising religious right as they worked together to suppress pornography, maintain criminal penalties for sex work, and force youths (male and female) into psychological treatment if they sought casual sex rather than concentrating on forming loving, chaste relationships.⁴ One result was the exponential growth of therapy cultures that disseminated the idea that mutual pleasure in sex can be achieved only through working with a partner to build feelings of trust and safety. This frequently entailed guidance by a therapist or an instructive manual.⁵ The advent of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s coincided with a growing panic about the diminishment of economic opportunities for the generation entering the workforce, and both of these situations fed into the new monogamy-centered vision of sexuality. The safe and empowered person was the one who formed a two-income family with a disease-free partner committed to marital chastity.

Throughout the 1980s Americans were pressured by therapy culture, law enforcement, media, and new social mores to understand sexual behaviors as means to ends rather than pleasurable ends in themselves. Self-help books that taught a predominantly female audience how to use their sexuality to find and keep status-enhancing marital partners proliferated (Siegel, New Millennial Sexstyles 29–57). Feminism, both when it supported that idea through favoring committed relationships and when it contested it through critiques of heterosexuality, became popularly associated with repressive attitudes about sex. Feminists were often caricatured as antisexual. But panics about child molestation made repression increasingly socially acceptable,⁶ as did constant repetition in popular media of the idea that men shared a single sexuality that by its very nature was exploitive of women.

Images of female sexual freedom in popular media, such as music videos and advertising, depicted that freedom more and more often as prostitution or as calculated manipulation of men for material gain. The underlying assumption seemed to be that because women could not enjoy heterosex for its own sake, they should use it to advance their material status, a view that was not so different from the traditional justification of female deployment of sexuality as a means of securing a wealthy male protector. Indeed, the pop star Madonna’s material girl persona signified for many the new sexually liberated woman. Nina K. Martin notes how pop feminism of this period, and after, envisioned "the active sexual woman as one who markets her sexuality, and she deplores the millennial enthusiasm for selling sex in the name of female empowerment and self-growth" (Sexy Thrills 70, 65; emphasis Martin’s). In hip-hop videos, as Patricia Hill Collins explains, the theme of the materialistic, sexualized Black woman [became] an icon (126). She contends that in the songs and videos of this popular music form, many women not only represented themselves as sexual objects, their bodies on sale for male enjoyment, but also regarded with contempt women who did not use their sexuality to make money (126).

The latter is an important component of the sexual system that Collins astutely identifies as the new racism, in which sexual spectacles present, in a refreshed and compelling form, oppressive ideas that had become outdated, such as that African American women’s worth derives exclusively from the market values of their bodies as objects of sexual exchange (31–33, 42–43). This movement toward a newly racialized concept of the sexual body as commodity developed concurrently with a concept of a pristine and delicate white body as the ultimate symbol of purity, the white magnolia that a touch would despoil. As Henry Giroux argues, In the 1990s, the new cartography of race has emerged as the result of an attempt to rewrite the racial legacy of the past while recovering a mythic vision of ‘whiteness’ associated with purity and innocence (138). Richard Dyer explains that in America to be sexual has long meant to be like a black person as envisioned by racists, a bestial being who preys upon others without reason or restraint (White 26). Because the sexually active were conceptualized as dark and dirty, tainted with the savage immorality attributed to minoritized races, and purity was code for whiteness, the intensity of traditional American racism energized the media’s new mission to discourage sexual adventurism.

By the end of the millennium, the rights of virtuous (white) women—and adolescents—were considered by many Americans to center on protection from involvement in others’ sexual expression that was seen as synonymous with exploitation. Desire was reinterpreted as assaultive, the desire to spoil purity. The impact on popular media has been extensive and is perhaps most obvious in changes in the usual story lines of genre films so that the pursuit of sexual pleasure outside marriage is now often portrayed as indicative of emotional illness or predictive of physical illness. The most striking example of the new attitude toward sex displayed in film is provided by the Twilight franchise, based on the novels written by Stephenie Meyer. In earlier vampire films, a vampire’s virtue was shown by its resistance to the urge to kill people by drinking their blood, as is illustrated by Louis (Brad Pitt) in Interview with the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan, 1994). In the Twilight films, as in the young adult novels on which they are based, although the romantic hero Edward (Robert Pattinson) has given up murdering for blood, what establishes his virtue is his insistence on strict sexual abstinence until marriage (Siegel, "Twilight of Sexual Liberation" 270). The bad vampires are promiscuous, which indicates their subhuman status. In other blockbusters about teens, such as the Hunger Games franchise, chastity is also the premier signifier of virtue, and sexual interest in others is the sign of villainy. But chastity (as abstinence before forming a long-term relationship and monogamy thereafter) is not presented as being only for kids. The Jason Bourne spy series, in contrast to the old James Bond films, is almost as negative about casual sex as the young adult films. And speaking of James Bond, in Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) Daniel Craig (who was only forty-four at the time) plays him as a worn-out old man who has sex only once that we are shown and possibly on another occasion, while his nemesis Silva (Javier Bardem) signifies his evil nature by referring enthusiastically to the pleasure he finds in a wide-ranging sex life that includes female-dominant S/M (sadomasochism). Science fiction heroes, like Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010), are often paired with attractive female costars, but no extramarital sex transpires, because they remain true to their one great love. Apparently only bad guys can find sexual comfort in casual encounters. While the Julian Assange bio-pic, The Fifth Estate (dir. Bill Condon, 2013), steers clear of addressing the rape charges against him, it depicts his interest in casual sex as a profound character flaw that casts doubt on his credibility.

If male heroes cannot be sexually free and still heroic, women certainly cannot. Linda Ruth Williams documents the frequency with which American films in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century show a nonmonogamous woman punished by death for her erotic excesses (Erotic Thriller 401). Cinematic and television depictions of women pursuing sexual pleasure with multiple partners frequently frame this activity as excusable because it is necessary to hunting down a wealthy husband, as in the television series Sex in the City (1998–2004) and later films Sex and the City and Sex and the City 2 (both directed by Michael Patrick King, 2008 and 2010). If it is not excusable, it is often punished by the promiscuous woman developing cancer, as happens in Y Tu Mamá También (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), and, of course, Sex and the City. The last TV season of the HBO series features as a major plot element Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the most sexually uninhibited of the women characters, being diagnosed with cancer and beginning a committed romantic relationship as a response to her new emotional neediness. While the relationship she forms is based on sexual compatibility, including a shared interest in experimentation, this is implicitly related to the more normative resolution of the sexual and romantic problems of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the heroine, through the willingness of Mr. Big, the man she adores, to rescue her at long last from the need for casual sex or affairs. Henceforth, her sexuality will be domesticated and restricted to their relationship. In an article defending Sex and the City, Emily Nussbaum concedes that Carrie’s marriage to Mr. Big at the end of the series pulled its punches and showed a failure of nerve in its submission to conventional romantic expectations (67). But even this disappointing conclusion is less typical of the trend in representing sexuality in visual media in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. The way the 2008 film version of Sex and the City centers on Carrie’s wedding to Mr. Big is typical of how most relatively recent films contain sexuality within marriage. We see less representation of affectionate and pleasurable consensual sexual intercourse outside marriage and more