Try to count the examples of female-centric sex scenes in films, where a woman’s desire leads the encounter, where a woman achieves orgasm. Try hard. Chances are, you haven’t filled an entire hand. In film, sexuality and desire are still mostly coded as male.
“Women feel desire all the time; it’s just not represented in film,” says Sarah Barmak, author of Closer: Notes From the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality. “Sexy women have been a building block of cinema since the silent era, but women’s experiencing pleasure or, God forbid, an orgasm in film, is much more rare…. Mainstream film is a reflection of the language our culture has around sexuality. In the narrative now, men push sexual encounters forward, and women are the objects of sexual desire.” Or as director Dee Rees sums it up: “A woman’s pleasure is always framed as her submission.”
The studios founded what is now the Motion Picture Association of America in 1922; its ratings board self-regulates movies in lieu of government interference. Most films that get released in theaters are rated by a panel of primarily anonymous reviewers—all of them parents—who Joan Graves, chairman of the ratings board, says are representative of America. Filmmakers aim for PG-13 or R ratings (the more explicit NC-17 limits audience size and financial success). The board has one rule around sexuality: “Any sex-related nudity is usually an R rating,” says Graves. But otherwise, she says, “there are no written guidelines.”
Critics of the ratings board say it has a double standard—favoring male pleasure over female, heterosexual sex over same-sex sex (which Graves denies). “I don’t see them as evil, but I don’t see them as trying to change anybody’s mind, either,” says Jon Lewis, distinguished professor of film studies at Oregon State University, who has studied the ratings board. “They are a reflection of American values.”
And the ratings process impacts what makes it to screen. Let’s start in 1999: That year, two first-time female directors put out boundary-breaking films about female sexuality and faced pushback. Director Jamie Babbit says the ratings board suggested she trim down a fully clothed masturbation scene in her comedy But I’m a Cheerleader, about a teen who goes to gay rehab. (She made edits so that she could receive an R rating.) “It’s very discouraging,” she says, “when you’ve made a movie to target women like yourself so they can feel OK about their bodies and about themselves, and you basically get told, ‘Actually, we don’t want to let them know any of this is OK.’”
Director Kimberly Peirce faced similar obstacles during the rating of Boys Don’t Cry, which explored the life of trans teen Brandon Teena. Peirce says the ratings board gave her three major notes to move her film from NC-17 to her contractually required R. Top of the list: They didn’t like that Brandon wipes his mouth after going down on his girlfriend Lana. “I burst out laughing,” Peirce said. “That’s what you do! There’s nothing offensive about that—that’s just cleanliness.” (Let’s remember that a year earlier, in There’s Something About Mary, Ted’s cum appeared in his date’s hair.) She said the ratings board also thought Lana’s orgasm went on too long. “I was like, ‘Damn straight, that was my goal,’” says Peirce. “During filming, I was asking, ‘Is there a special camera where we could go inside her mouth, inside her desire, inside the orgasm? Who has ever been hurt by an orgasm that lasts too long?’” By contrast, she says, the ratings board didn’t weigh in on the film’s violent murder. Peirce trimmed down both sex scenes for the R rating. “I began to realize,” she says, “that the world is scared of female desire.”
Like with LGBT women, seeing black women as fully developed sexual beings in film is rare—which made director Dennis Dortch’s 2008 film, A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy, groundbreaking. It opens with a black woman spinning like a record in orgasmic rapture. The camera observes her face, making us think she’s self--pleasuring. After two whole minutes a man’s head appears. He’s been eating the woman out, and now she wants her sleep. But he persists, and she orgasms a second time. “Black and sexy in the same sentence was a problem for some viewers,” says Dortch, who has two daughters. “This is the way I raise my kids, to be authentic. No reason to be afraid of us. Sexuality is part of us.”
In certain ways it could seem the culture, and thus film, is changing: Female directors like Marielle Heller, who helmed 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, keep portraying female sexuality in new ways. In the opening scene of her film, the narrator, age 15, announces, “I had sex today.” “It’s so rare,” Heller said, “that a young woman is the real protagonist of a sexual story. More frequently we see the Lolita story, where she’s some type of receptacle for male desire.” Graves argues that the ratings board’s attitudes toward sexuality have evolved with the times; Babbit, for her part, believes that enough has changed that But I’m a Cheerleader would be rated PG-13 today.
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