So Much Wasted Potential...

 
By Mireille Miller-Young

When “Blue Is the Warmest Color” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival [last] year, it ignited a controversy about the nature and value of explicit sex scenes in cinema. The author of the graphic novel on which the film is based, Julie Maroh, accused the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, of turning an intimate encounter between the film’s lesbian protagonists into “porn,” insisting that the inauthentic presentation of lesbian sex was all too easily consumed by men “feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

"Sex on screen can teach us about more than sex. But mainstream Hollywood opts for racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, heteronormative messages."

Maroh’s concerns speak to anxieties about the larger problem of stigma and invisibility for queer people. In mainstream Hollywood, it’s uncommon to see two women in an ecstatic (and prolonged) sexual encounter – but similar representation of masculine-identified women, gay men and transgender and transsexual people is even more rare, or absent altogether. Sexual representation matters now more than ever – with struggles for marriage equality in both France and the U.S., and with high stakes for sexual minorities politically, economically and socially.

Even when we do see queer representations, they are often appropriated and misused. Think of the appropriation of African-American cultural expressions like hip-hop by white suburban youth, who have no understanding of the struggles that hip-hop emerges from. Similarly for queer people, appropriation means that mainstream audiences get to consume “everything but the burden.”

Feminists have long worried about how women, queers and people of color are made outsiders in media, and how our images can be used against us. So much of our culture is invested in stereotype, myth and misinformation; it reflects a bigger interest in making a profit than in expanding erotic representations and sexual rights.

Sexual representations in movies must be seen as part of political discourse, and many of the portrayals today treat sex as a social danger. Sex educators, therapists, activists, scholars and sex workers have said time and again that sex education in our country is a public health crisis. Our national commitment to sexual silence – in the form of abstinence-based education, censorship and criminalization – means that we have no way to understand and teach young people about how to give (or not give) consent for sex, how to not be a silent witness to sexual violence, and why the culture of “slut shaming” must end. Moreover, our culture’s anxiety around sex leaves us with no language and skills to understand what we see on screen and to decide for ourselves what makes a good sex scene or a bad one.

As an academic who has been tracking the emergence of “the feminist porn movement,” I’ve seen the importance of the filmmakers, performers and activists who bring a political consciousness to sexually explicit media. Sex on screen can teach us about so much more than sex. At the recent Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, Mia Gimp and Clark Matthews won “sexiest short” for their entry “Krutch,” shot on an iPhone 5 on the streets of Midtown Manhattan. The film tells the story of a disabled woman who, faced with the challenges of navigating a world made for able-bodied individuals, finds solace and erotic pleasure with her crutch. For depictions that push against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableist, heteronormative beauty ideals – as it turns out, porn is now the place to look.


Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of the forthcoming manuscript “A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography” and a co-editor of “The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.”


http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/16/making-love-in-the-movies/sex-scenes-in-movies-are-a-wasted-opportunity