This morning’s stat check shows an inbound link from Spaced Cowgirl. As a matter of course I followed it back. That’s what you do. You follow the link, leave your thanks in the comments, look for a pull-quote for a blog post. But this morning I got more than I expected.

My husband is the only person I have ever had sex with, so my relationship with him is my only reality in terms of partnered sex. In other areas of life where I wonder “how it is” for my friends or acquaintances, it’s usually possible for me to either ask directly, or to peer (when invited) into their homes and relationships and gain some insight to help answer my question. I may not know what it’s like to be a parent or divorced or to have a partner who is constantly absent or at work, or how others experience more mundane aspects of life such as food preparation and housework, or just what life is like in general for another couple or family, but I can experience firsthand at least the most superficial features of these differences from my own life, if not gain a complete understanding. By contrast, the nature of how other couples relate to one another sexually is opaque to me. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not something I would “like” to see; I do not actually want an altered reality where it would be appropriate or desirable to intrude on the most private, intimate moments of my friends or neighbors or random people in the grocery store. But lately for some reason I have been longing to know, to understand, the essence of what it means for other couples to relate to each other physically. What do they do that they call “sex”? But more importantly, why does that work for them, and what role does sex play in their lives? How does their attraction to one another manifest itself? How can it be that even couples who don’t outwardly seem to like each other much still find physical connection to be an important and necessary part of their lives?

I think this wondering explains my recent fascination with material like these films (I haven’t seen any of them in their entirety, and definitely NSFW). Certainly no film or narrative can truly explain what sex is or what it means, but I think these documentaries might be more “true” than traditional porn or sex tips in Cosmo. Mainstream sources might help me understand the purely mechanical ins and outs (ha!) of what society-at-large defines as or believes (or at least what they say they believe) to be “sex,” but don’t really answer my questions. For example, the fact that as a society we are mostly on board nowadays with oral sex and the clitoris is a great thing, but simply knowing how to get yourself or someone else off doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will be able to have sex that you consider great or meaningful, now or in the future. And while knowing how to give a better blow job (though preferably based on your partner’s input, not a how-to article) might be a positive thing for both of you, this improvement is unlikely to be the profound center of your sexual relationship as a couple. Perhaps the general fact that you want blow jobs to be better for your partner is a better outward expression of the essence and meaning of sex in a relationship.

Our films are unashamedly graphic; the mechanical details of sex, as Walter Murch puts it, “closely observed” and celebrated too. I think sex – in all it’s lovely pinkness – is beautiful!

Our films are also unabashedly erotic. There are none of the usual art-house tropes; none of the justifications and prevarications that directors routinely employ to answer inevitable question: Is it art? Or is it porn?

There is this idea that when depicting sex, a filmmaker has to choose between being explicit and being cinematic, between erotic heat and emotional weight. (Mike Nichols, “I think sex in a movie is boring… Sex is very powerful as part of a fantasy… But to stare directly at it is to be wasting most of what’s available in drama and in film.” John Cameron Mitchell, “We tried to de-eroticize the sex to see what kind of emotions and ideas are left over when the haze of eroticism is waved away.”)

All well and good, but what about the motions and ideas that are carried off with that haze that Nichols, Mitchell, and other filmmakers seem so eager to “wave away”? What about  the beauty there is to be seen when we “stare directly” at sex? How is it that Spaced Cowgirl, a woman who’s only ever had sex with her husband, is open to this reality, but Nichols, Mitchell, and our society as a whole seems to closed off?

That question has a thousand answers. It’s the biases, built consciously or unconsciously into Google. It’s Justice Woolsey’s 80 year old decision in US v Ulysses. It’s Paypal’s TOS. And on and on and on. It’s a thousand things, big and little, designed to keep erotic depictions of sex “in their place”.

But if there isn’t a place in cinema to explore and celebrate sex, not even in the context of love and commitment. Where does that leave us? What is our route to understanding our sexual selves? Pornography and Cosmo sex-tips articles? (I’ll add art-films that inevitably present explicit sex in a negative contexts to Spaced Cowgirl’s short sad list.)

As much as any other reason, it’s the paucity of those choices that makes making these films mean so very much to me. It’s the paucity of those choices makes me fight, sometimes quixotically, to make a place “at the grown-up table” for for these films.

There is something about what Spaced Cowgirl calls “the mystery of sex” that is almost completely unaddressed in cinema, and that being able to “see” that mystery, without actually having to intrude on your neighbors helps us see ourselves a little more clearly. And whatever name you want to give to that, I think it’s important.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.