September 2015 – Bitch Flicks

Call For Writers: Violent Women

In the month of Halloween, we’ll be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Our theme week for October 2015 will be Violent Women.

In the month of Halloween, we’ll aptly be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. In many cases, the viewer experiences the violence of female characters as empowering. Revenge and self-defense are frequent motivations for violence, which are often coded as justified, and audiences can bathe in the cathartic violence of Kill Bill‘s Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) taking vengeance on her rapist and those who betrayed her and left her for dead. We can cheer on Ripley in Aliens or Laurie Strode in Halloween because they are acting from the basic animal instinct of self-preservation.

Many women glory in the model presented by the physically capable, self-assured women of sci-fi and action genres like pre-apocalypse soldier and mother Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and secret agent extraordinaire Mallory Kane in Haywire. Films like these give women the opportunity to revel in strong female bodies and in women who take charge.

Sometimes, though, violent women are coded as frightening and unknowable. They violate cultural mores. They cannot be contained within society and must, therefore, be destroyed. The eponymous heroine of Carrie is a young, timid woman who comes of age and finds enormous power inside herself, but such a power cannot be controlled or understood; it has no other choice but to obliterate itself. The film Monster, represents Aileen Wuornos, a real-life woman who had every hard luck in life, as a woman who takes revenge too far until she’s an out-of-control serial killer who must be executed. On the other hand, through the desperate and violent shenanigans of its heroines, Thelma & Louise accuses the world itself of being an ill-equipped place for women who refuse to play by rules that only subjugate them.

What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Oct. 23, by midnight.

Carrie

Under the Skin

Foxfire

The Matrix

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ginger Snaps

Basic Instinct

Foxy Brown

Battlestar Galactica

I Spit on Your Grave

The Exorcist

Underworld

American Horror Story

Game of Thrones

Hard Candy

Duke of Burgundy

Haywire

The 100

Jennifer’s Body

Single White Female

Misery

Mad Max: Fury Road

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Halloween

Alien

Sin City

Batman Returns

La Femme Nakita

Planet Terror

Aliens

Gone Girl

Friday the 13th

Kill Bill

Monster

Mommy Dearest

Thelma & Louise

Audition

‘Viaje’ and ‘Love Between the Covers’: Women Who Aren’t What We Expect

What will surprise no one who reads ‘Bitch Flicks’ is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or are released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

Going to film festivals means watching the sometimes dispiriting process of which films get picked up for distribution and which ones languish: the best documentary I saw last year, One Cut, One Life didn’t get its brief, limited theater run until this spring, 13 months after I’d seen it. At the same time, an offensive piece of pap like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (which shared some of the same elements with One Cut, One Life) was everywhere, at least until word-of-mouth could debunk the puzzlingly rapturous reviews it received.

What will surprise no one who reads Bitch Flicks is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or to be released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

Writer-director Paz Fábrega’s Viaje (non-Spanish speakers: say “bee-YAW-hey”) which plays the London Film Festival Oct.11 and Oct. 15, is the more realistic counterpart to Sleeping With Other People (which I enjoyed in spite of its conventionality) in its portrayal of how couples meet, pass the time and get to know each other. Shot in lustrous black and white (by Esteban Chinchilla) the film follows two Costa Ricans in their late 20s, Pedro (Fernando Bolaños) and Luciana (Kattia González) from their first drunken encounter in the city waiting for the bathroom during a costume party (Pedro dressed as a bear, Luciana as a schoolgirl: at first she’s not interested but then returns to where she left him) through a shared taxi ride in which they both agree (and high-five) on the best way to have a family. Luci says, “I think I could have kids if I could raise them with one person, but could still go on dates sometimes and it wasn’t an issue.”

Pedro, always the joker, then suggests, “Let’s have a kid together… you can go out on Fridays and I’ll go out on Saturdays.” When they discuss the advantages of sharing parenting with a queer couple, the cab driver (whom we don’t see: the choice of shots in the film is often quite shrewd–and its stills are beautiful enough to fill any coffee table book) cannot resist interrupting and berates them for not wanting the traditional family life that he and his wife have. Pedro and Luci don’t argue and resist rolling their eyes: we’ve seen they had to wait forever for this cab.

The “trip” of the title is on a bus to a national park situated around a volcano, where Pedro has work studying biology for his graduate degree and a hungover Luciana (still in her costume, with no luggage other than her purse) has spontaneously agreed to accompany him. The film has a leisurely pace, especially once they are in the wilderness (in spite of its 70-minute length I found myself nodding off a couple of times) but its pleasures (the beauty of the Costa Rican landscape and the chemistry between Bolaños and González, whether their characters are about to have sex or are just shooting the shit) and surprises (this film might seem like loose, funny improvisation at first but by the end we see it’s cleverly scripted) are genuine ones that many will recognize from their own lives–and which rarely, if ever make it into the movies.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6xxvVuWra4″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

On Oct. 14 and Oct. 16, Mill Valley Film Festival in California will be showing writer-director Laurie Kahn’s Love Between The Covers, a feminist, bad-ass, diverse documentary about the successful authors of romance novels. The women (most of whom attend romance novel conferences and other similar get-togethers shown in the film) talk about a “pay it forward” philosophy in which each explains how veteran writers helped her out at the beginning of her career and so she now helps writers who are just starting out.

Every time I expected this film to let me down it proved me wrong. When I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be all straight women,” it included as one of its main players a queer writer, Radclyffe (Len Barot) a former surgeon who writes about queer women. When I thought the film would be all white women it included, again as part of its main focus, Beverly Jenkins, a Black woman whose novels feature Black protagonists. We also see other women of color and queer women in one-off scenes and interviews. And nearly everything the women tell us in this film is a revelation. As Jenkins says of the romance sector (which includes its legions of fans) “You have nothing like this in science fiction. You have nothing like this in fantasy. You have nothing like this in mysteries. We are the shit.”

For those of us who aren’t romance novel readers, the film is not only a pretty good case to reconsider, but also has Nora Roberts, a superstar of the genre (she employs at least two men in her immediate family as part of her empire) setting straight those who might dismiss romance novels as “formulaic.” She tells us most genres adhere to a formula, including mysteries: for a whodunnit, the author had better reveal who the murderer is at the end!

Other genre fiction doesn’t get the flack romance novels do, namely because romance novel readership is nearly all women–and romance novel sales are what support more literary writing (which sell just a small fraction of books) in the publishing industry. As one author says, “We’re the ones who keep the lights on.” Another interviewee tells us it’s not unusual for a romance fan to read a book a day.

Although the writers are in the business of Happily Ever After (HEA) stories, they aren’t under the thumb of traditional gender roles and family life: more than one woman says that she started writing because of how bored and frustrated she was as a stay-at-home Mom. They also show no hesitation in cutting lose men who don’t respect their work: two of the authors (who also write together) divorced their husbands and then decided to move in (platonicly) together. We also see how hard the women work: in-demand authors are expected to write more than one full-length book (sometimes many more than one) a year, every year and they (or their assistants) are expected to engage with fans on their own websites, on social media and in person as well. Love Between the Covers is my favorite documentary of the year so far and could easily turn out to be the best one I see in 2015. Go to the theatrical showings of these films while you have the chance.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwABHUXofhY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Tribe’: Navigating the Beauty and Horror of Silent Children

The film moves through arcs of pity, empathy, and then downright horror. Violence is abrupt and can come from anyone. I was blessed to watch the film with an audience that was one third deaf, and the experience of witnessing visceral scenes with the sounds of hands pounding, slapping, moving around me with frantic finger blurs of American Sign Language made the viewing electric.

“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and noises. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema. They are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.”

Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock, by François Truffaut

Writer/Director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky said in an interview that he was inspired to write his film The Tribe because he attended a school that was near a school for the deaf when he was younger. (Incidentally, Slaboshpitsky filmed The Tribe at his old school.) There were fights from time to time between students from his school and the deaf students. He carried these memories for many years, finally unleashing them in a film that has gathered both praise, and in some places, ridicule for being a gimmick film, a one-trick pony only being celebrated because it is a story told completely in Ukrainian Sign Language.

There are no subtitles, no voice-overs, no music or sound design. The only sounds we hear are natural noises around the actors–à la dogme films— when they move within rooms slamming doors, are in cars, are outside walking in snow, or the excited vocal inflections emitted from an agitated signer who often uses sharp finger pokes and hand slaps to catch the attention of people not looking them in the eye. Viewing the film is pretty close to Hitchcock’s idea of “pure cinema.” Viewers don’t even know the names of the characters because our eyes have to do all the work, and we are basically resorted to assigning actors descriptive traits for names like New Kid, Kingpin, Boss Man, Blonde homegirl, and Brunette homegirl to track folks. (After viewing the film, I had to go online and check to see if the actors were even assigned names.)

Not since the silent films during the pre-sound era assigned to me during college have I experienced a film where I had to work at understanding and interpreting human interactions with visuals only. The fascinating part of Slaboshpitsky intentionally making viewers work at comprehension is that my interpretation of the film might be completely different from someone else.

Sergey (Grigoriy Fsenko) is a deaf high school student who tries to fit into his new boarding school and becomes ensnared in a criminal enterprise ran by a gang of older male students and a woodshop teacher. They are into everything. Petty theft, burglary, prostitution, bullying, and assaults on other students. These kids are the poster children for Thug Life Ukraine.

For the first ten minutes of the film, we are forced to orient ourselves. What may appear to be a slow and tedious start is really narrative time designed to acclimate and settle hearing viewers into leaning on visual cues full throttle. We become Sergey trying to figure out the place and its pecking order. Sergey is given instant sympathy because he has no idea what he is getting himself into. He can barely find a room and a bed to occupy before he’s pushed around and forced to sleep in the hallway on his first night. Eventually Sergey is jumped into the “gang” and the film branches out to the other characters. We are witness to the evening prostitution where two teen-aged girls, who are part of the crew, are driven off campus to truck stops by the woodshop teacher and a student handler/pimp. The girls have quick hook-ups inside the trucks, the teen handler/pimp collects the money, and at the end of the night, the woodshop teacher drives them all back to school.

There are only two main female characters in The Tribe, a blonde and a brunette who are dorm roommates and apparently best friends. It would be easy for me to write that they are just objects used throughout the film. They are. But all the underlings in the gang are objects. All bodies are commodities used for profit, from the elementary-aged boys sent out to sell cheap souvenirs on the trains and streets (while also lifting a wallet and a purse or two), to the crews that roam the streets at night to roll over some unlucky citizen walking home at night with groceries.

Unfortunately for this film, the female presence is only used for sexual exploitation. The females are not calling any shots and aren’t bossing any underlings around. They are there to pleasure men. Perhaps it would be different if there were some teen-aged boys also being prostituted along with the girls when they were dropped off at the truck stop. Or at least more girls participating on the stroll and other girls involved in different parts of the criminal enterprise other than prostitution. At least there would be a balance and a sense of “it is what it is.” (I’m not advocating that seeing more girls pimped in the film makes it better in that world, but it might give a semblance of business is business and the female characters were there to make money and have agency for themselves too.) This shouldn’t deter people from seeing the film, it’s just my observation that sometimes screenwriters stick women in scripts for titillation purposes and not as fully realized characters integral to the plot.

There is a lot of sex in the film that isn’t romanticized. People fuck. And not for love. This leads to one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Anya (Yana Novikova) completes a night of sex work and Sergey (her new handler/pimp) walks her back to their dorm. As handler payment (a reward given to the guys who escort the two girls at night to the trucks), Anya hikes up her skirt inside a cold dirty room, bends over and offers her backside to Sergey to do what he will. It’s very clinical, no foreplay, just stick your penis here boy and be done. Sergey flips the encounter on Anya and makes a pallet on the floor and mounts her missionary style so he can see her face. He tries to kiss her, but she protests and turns her head. Eventually they switch positions again, and while sexually spooning her, he manipulates her clitoris and Anya appears aroused and surprised that a male would take time to pleasure her during the act. We watch everything in real time (and full nudity), and when they climax, Anya kisses him. It’s a lovely scene because the sex moves from a passionless unfeeling payment fuck for Anya, (although Sergey is clearly in love with her) into a tender moment where we witness the first sign of emotional connection between anyone in the film. It’s a plot point that eventually spirals the film toward a cringe-worthy abortion sequence and then onto its horrific conclusion.

The sex added a layer to Sergey’s character that I wasn’t expecting. The audience assumes from his earlier awkwardness that he was just a virginal follower, clumsy with girls, and knowing nothing. But watching their sex scene I was struck at how insistent he was at touching Anya in a particular way, moving her into positions not with awkward fumblings, but with an experienced need to please her. It was the first clue Sergey wasn’t what he seemed. Later in the film we find out that we were wrong about him from the start.

The conclusion of The Tribe reminded me of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. It is brutal and heart-wrenching in its abrupt closure. The film stays with you. I spent a few days trying to process what it meant to me as a viewer. Was my interpretation of the events correct? Did my eyes deceive me? What social clues did I miss because I don’t know Sign Language? The Tribe was pretty close to pure cinema. It has a seventies realism that I miss in movies today, and the actors look like regular people, not Hollywood augmented look-alikes. The cast is made up of deaf untrained actors who do a hell of a job bringing this world to life. It’s not a film for everyone, but I hope people will step out of their comfort zone to watch it. It will haunt you.

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja can be heard co-hosting Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room (the latest episode featuring Empire TV series writer Carlito Machete). Her most recent Sci Fi short story is in Uncanny Magazine, and she can be found on Twitter lurking in the tags #SaturdayNightSciFi and #FridayNightHorror @LisaBolekaja

‘Family Guy’ and Sex Positivity…or Lack Thereof

So the only difference between Meg and Lois is that while Lois is forthcoming about her sexuality, she is attractive so it’s OK to see and hear about it because the audience (and creators) can shame her for it later, whereas Meg is presented as ugly/unattractive and therefore we don’t even want to hear or see her in any sexual way unless it’s making fun of her.

This is a guest post by Belle Artiquez.

Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy is a massive hit show that has gained popularity over the course of its ten odd seasons. Even with this immense following, the show portrays the idea of sex positivity in a solely masculine light. It passively portrays a kind of controversial sexism that appears as a joke, but still perpetuates existing problematic topics of concern for women and the Queer community. A Public Display of Misogyny is one that is sometimes done in a playful manner, but with full intention of insulting women, while at the same time making it look like said women can’t handle a simple joke. When in reality, women are quite simply fed up with the constant sexism that is rampant in today’s society but considered less than important. Other times it is done to look sexy: often seen in advertisements or music videos where women are seen in a suggestive pose surrounded by more than one half naked man. These are the kinds of misogyny that Family Guy hurls out in nearly every episode. The creators of the show attempt to normalize this behaviour and make it appear acceptable, because again, it is done in a comical, whimsical light, so… where’s the harm?

Quagmire, a character who’s only ever portrayed as a pervert, kidnapper, sexual abuser and quite frankly disgusting human being (to those of us sane enough not to laugh at the jokes associated with his behaviour) is presented in a humorous way, an outrageous and exaggerated way, but for comedic effect all the same. Even this kind of repulsive sexuality is considered acceptable to MacFarlane, because it’s funny. Female sex positivity and anything Seth MacFarlane creates do not mesh, they don’t belong, and that’s due to MacFarlane’s hyper masculine idea of sexuality being something only (straight) men can truly own and have agency in. Any depiction of male sex, no matter how perverse, is set in a positive way; this is why Quagmire is saved from serving actual jail time for his (hundreds of) sex crimes in the episode “Quagmire’s Mom.” The one episode where viewers thought that finally there was going to be some retribution for his despicable behaviour–but we couldn’t even have that, he gets away scot-free–and continues with his extremely violent sexual assaults even blaming his behaviour on his promiscuous mother (because its always the mother’s fault!) but it’s OK, because it’s all fun and cartoons. So Quagmire can really do no wrong, he won’t lose his friends when they see half naked Asian women run from the boot of his car, he won’t be reported to the police when he blatantly date rapes a woman, his sexuality is accepted in Quahog because he is a straight male.

We see women in Quagmire’s trunk numerous times throughout the show before they run for their lives.

With female sexuality and sex positivity though we have a total different story. Lois Griffin is portrayed as the extremely attractive married woman, but she is completely sexualized and fetishized throughout the show. It’s almost her only characterization, other than the nagging wife. We see her multiple times in the role of dominatrix, a few times with Peter, and once even with her own son Stewie. She is often very aggressively sexual, and some might argue that this is due to her owning her sexuality which is totally sex positive and body positive too, but I see it differently. When we see her in these roles it’s played for laughs, for shock value, that a mother and wife would have such a sexual history and violent fantasies. And this is all connected to the idea that she is presented as the Bad Mother archetype. We see her in this role quite a lot, but most often (in nearly every episode) when it comes to Meg, her daughter. She is only ever presented in this light, and it’s not hard to see why she fits this bad Mother role; she constantly laughs at meg and belittles her, she diminishes Megs sexual experiences and laughs them off, she literally steals one of Meg’s Boyfriends, insults Meg (and her appearance) and is constantly trying to control Meg’s love life, and those are just the examples that involve Meg. These are not the qualities of a mother who loves her children. So, I’m not saying that I disagree with Lois being so open about her previous and on-going sex life, or even that I have problem with her being into BDSM, I don’t think Lois is a “slut,” as she has affectionately been called on many Family Guy forums; however, I do have a very serious problem with the way in which her sexuality is directly presented to make her look bad, to make her look like a horrible woman/mother/wife.

This is not the only time her sexuality is presented in a negative light. “Mind Over Murder” is an episode that sees Peter opening up a bar in his basement. After Lois ends up singing one night, she finds that she really enjoys it so decides to make a regular appearance singing and dancing giving a jazzy feel to the bar, she feels confident and sexy but more importantly she is happy. Peter on the other hand finds the attention she gets from his male friends too much to handle and demands she stop, because it’s her fault the men don’t know how to control themselves around a woman showing a bit of skin. But also, how dare she be in control of her own sexuality. It’s fine for her husband, Quagmire, and even her son Stewie to place her in a sexual role, but for her to put herself there is outright unacceptable. She refuses to stop, giving a middle finger to slut shaming, and continues, enjoying the spotlight and attention (since she gets neither in her marriage). Her happiness does not last long, and again her sexuality, with which she is in control of, is depicted in a negative light. Soon the women of the town have a problem with her too, seeing her as a threat to their relationships with their husbands. This entire idea is meant to say that it’s a woman’s fault for men looking at her, Lois is put down, belittled and slut shamed, all because these women’s husbands don’t know how to respect women. Peter doesn’t want anybody seeing her as a sexual being because once you are married you should lose all sexual appeal to other people. That’s not sex positivity, that’s female sexual oppression and it’s extremely unfair.

Lois Griffin is extremely sexualized to the point of it being nearly her only consistent characteristic.

And that’s with a character that is considered conventionally attractive. Poor Meg is depicted as the eternal joke purely because of her appearance. Because she is frumpy, she should never have a boyfriend, she should never, ever marry an attractive boy (even though she had to lie about being pregnant in order to get down the aisle), and most of all she should never be in control of her sexual experiences. We see her in one episode making out with a guy who turns out to be Chris in a closet at Halloween, and she is depicted as so desperate for any sort of sexual attention that she will even wonder if he is going to text her the following day, she also ends up making out with Brian, a dog, but even he doesn’t want her, then another extreme, becoming obsessed with a married Joe. All these scenarios have one thing in common: they all make her out to be so starved of male attention that she will literally kiss a dog, try to take a married man or even want a sexual relationship with her own brother, so we have bestiality, incest and delusional husband stealing. These most certainly are not sex positive experiences. What’s even more infuriating is MacFarlane could have actually made a positive statement with Meg’s character; there are many teenagers who feel neglected, isolated, unattractive and ignored, who wholeheartedly understand what Meg goes through, and yet the fact that her feelings and experiences are invalidated with a simple “Shut up Meg” by the very people who are supposed to want her to be happy, turns her into another punching bag for the sake of it. It turns all of these teenagers isolation into nothing more than a joke. Meg has so much boy trouble and is even turned into a transgender man purely as a joke that she is not feminine, not attractive and not wanted. This transgender issue isn’t even explored in the show, it’s a one off joke…it the she’s not feminine, so she must want to be a man hetero-biased argument that is extremely offensive.

This basically sums up Meg’s life. Always the physical and metaphorical punching bag for her family.

This is all based on heteronormative sexuality, and as anybody who watches Family Guy knows, there are a lot of representations of the LGBT community in the show. But does MacFarlane depict these in positive ways? Absolutely not. The presentations of queer sexuality are deeply stereotypical: gay men are extremely feminine and lesbian women are masculine. One episode that really stands out, but is not even nearly the only episode, concerning this issue is “Quagmire’s Dad” (I feel like Quagmire and his family are the centerpiece of sex misrepresentation in the show). Quagmire’s father, a war hero veteran, comes to town to visit his son, and very suddenly characters are remarking on how “gay” he appears, because he drinks cosmopolitans and his voice isn’t the low masculine they expected of a war hero. Stereotyping, it appears, is rampant when it comes to the discussion of gender identity. As it turns out, Quagmire’s father is not gay, but transgender–he wants to transition into a woman. He describes wanting to change his future his future not his past and how he has dealt with these feelings for a long time, this so far is not a negative portrayal of trans folk and their experiences, but the sympathetic portrayal ends there. In the hospital for his operation, Lois refers to the entire thing as a “circus,” the conversation revolves around the chopping off of his penis and there is basically no actual support for this man who is about to go through a life changing transition.

Stewie showing how transphobic the characters (and show) are.

After the transition, Quagmire’s father, now known as Ida, is treated with contempt by everyone, Lois throws out a pie Ida makes and Peter asks inappropriate questions about Ida’s breasts and lack of penis. Everyone is wholly unaccepting of Ida, until Brian meets her at a pub, and instantly falls for her. They end up spending the night together and Brian is absolutely smitten with this wonderful woman he met the night before. That is until he finds out who she is , then he vomits everywhere, forgets about the “wonderful” woman he met the night before and is totally focused on the fact that she was a man. It’s important to note that Brian is used on numerous occasions to highlight the “sexually unwanted” aspect of numerous characters. It’s the “not even a dog would have you” theme. Unfortunately for Ida, her sexuality is thus seen as something wrong, disgusting and unpleasant. Yet again Family Guy fails to interpret very real experiences in a way that is not exploitative. And that’s just one transphobic episode that seemed dedicated to being just that, unaccepting and a massive joke. There are plenty of transphobic references throughout the show, one recurring joke includes Stewie, who is presented as increasingly Bisexual (since he appears to have relationships with girls, loves dressing as a woman, hits on gay men, and has sexual fantasies of his teddy bear Rupert) as the show progresses. His sexual identity is as confusing as a cat that barks: we know that he has to be gay, in the very least, as he enjoys seeing the male body, relaxing in gay bars etc. However, on numerous occasions we see him either date or kiss girls (also babies just in case you were wondering) which could either be Stewie trying to fight his homosexual nature, which just doesn’t seem plausible because he appears to be quite open about it, or he is in fact bisexual. Whichever it is, this is played for laughs, and is not in any way an accurate representation of a child growing up under the spotlight that is patriarchy’s hatred of anything but hetersexuality. Instead we have cheap laughs at Stewie dressed as a woman, acting as a stereotypical gay or even spying on unsuspecting men in the shower (similar to Quagmire’s behaviour).

Stewie often dresses as a woman, and enjoys the occasional relaxing night at a gay bar.

So MacFarlane’s definitely not sex positive when it comes to women or anybody of the LGBT community, but is somehow accepting of a hyper-masculine rapist/pervert’s sexuality! Logical? No not at all. Offensive? Absolutely. And hey, that’s all Family Guy strives for–to be as offensive as possible regardless of how it portrays its sexual minorities.

Belle Artiquez graduated from film and Literature studies in Dublin and since has continued her analysis and critique of film, TV, and literature (mainly in the area of gender politics and representations) as well as cultural and societal critiques on such blog spots as Hubpages and WordPress.

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: It’s Torture!

There’s only one more episode left this season, and the ratings are dropping, maybe because people like their zombie shows about bad parents to have more zombies in them, and less teen angst. Season Two is going to be 15 episodes, so they’ll have to come up with a lot more story, or take another six scripts and stretch them out the way the parent show does.

There was some hope last week that AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead might actually be getting interesting, that perhaps we’d written it off too quickly as a crass and shoddy cash-grab capitalizing on the astounding success of the original show. But then it took The Walking Dead itself four full seasons before it turned into a compelling drama. We should have known better. This week’s episode, “Cobalt” (once meant to be the title of the series), was possibly the weakest yet, and exacerbated the show’s representation issues, introducing another morally repugnant Black character (the flashy, beguiling Strand, played by Colman Domingo, who played Ralph Abernathy in Selma) and revealing that its most prominent Latino character is actually a psychopath.

On top of that, the only undead we got a good look at was some slacker donut shop zombie who apparently still felt enough residual sense of responsibility that she didn’t want to leave the store.

It starts in a holding pen at that mysterious medical facility, where they apparently put potential troublemakers like Nick (Frank Dillane, disappointingly subdued this week), Strand, and poor Doug Thompson (John Stewart), the muscle car nut who had the breakdown last week. After goading Doug into freaking out, so that he’s carted away, Strand sets his sights on Nick. Sadly, he doesn’t try to drive Nick crazy. He apparently senses that Nick has ninja skills or perhaps zombie-imitating talents that will come in handy, so he bribes a guard to prevent Nick from being carted off. Strand’s appearance is brief, but he manages to surpass both creepily cheerful Lt. Moyers (Jamie McShane) and quietly psychopathic Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) as the most interesting character on the show.

Back in town, Ofelia (Mercedes Mason) is raising a ruckus, throwing bottles at the chainlink fence that separates her from the National Guard, demanding to see Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spindola), who was dragged out of their temporary home for “medical treatment.” Eventually, her guardsman beau Adams (Shawn Hatosy) shows up, and convinces Ofelia to let him take her home.

This turns out to be part of Daniel’s bizarre plan, and the next time we see Adams, Madison (Kim Dickens) finds him tied up and gagged in the basement, with Daniel preparing to torture him. See, it turns out that Daniel was not an innocent kid back in El Salvador, but a torturer for the government. Sure, he was young, and sure, he claims they forced him to do it, but seriously? Are we still supposed to root for this guy? Even though he slips right back into torturer mode at the first sign of trouble? Daniel tells Ofelia some cockamamie story about trading Adams for Griselda and Nick, but really Daniel just wants information. And he gets it! Who says torture doesn’t work? Weak-kneed liberals, that’s who! It turns out “Cobalt” just means that the military is going to evacuate the L.A. basin the next morning, “humanely terminating” everyone left in the medical facility. Or in all of L.A. It’s not clear. Still, nothing that drastic seemed imminent, so it’s a good thing Daniel still remembered some things about torturing people, right?

Madison happens upon all this while she’s looking for her teenage daughter, Alicia (Alycia Debnam Carey), who has run off to get into mischief again. Of course, Madison promptly forgets she has a daughter once she gets involved in Daniel’s nutty plans. Alicia recruits Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie), Travis’s (Cliff Curtis) equally forgotten son, on a little day trip to the wealthy part of town, where she tries on a sexy evening gown (the closest Carey’s gonna get to Emmy’s red carpet, I’m afraid) and the two of them smash up the place because nothing matters anymore and now they are rebels without a cause. You would think they could at least make trashing a rich people home look fun, but it all seems kinda pro forma.

Travis has the most exciting adventure, convincing Moyers, who has a rather capricious attitude toward his protective duties, to take Travis to the medical facility, with a couple of key pitstops. First, Moyers tries to goad Travis into blowing away the aforementioned donut shop zombie with a high-powered sniper rifle. Travis declines. What a wimp, this guy. Though I have to say it was pretty gutsy of him to even approach the military after essentially witnessing them gunning down civilians at the end of the last episode. What was the point of that scene if Travis didn’t learn anything from it? In any case, next up, the squad Travis is riding with gets called to help out a SWAT team pinned down at the local library. That turns into a clusterfuck, all off-screen, Moyers vanishes, and some other guardsmen bring Travis home. Sorta anticlimactic.

Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) is at the medical facility, helping out Dr. Exner (Sandrine Holt), patching up wounds and such, and hey, while you’re at it, would you mind shooting Griselda in the head with this captive bolt pistol (normally used to put down cattle) after Griselda suddenly dies of septic shock from her ankle injury. Liza gives lip service to caring about what happened to Nick, but mostly seems like an adaptable sort. She doesn’t really flinch at the notion that this is how things work nowadays. She’s apparently a good little soldier, just like Daniel was, back in El Salvador, all those years ago.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

“Fear the Walking Dead: The Black Guys Die First”

“Fear the Walking Dead: Liberals Try to Stop Zombies with Words!”

“Fear the Walking Dead: I’m From the Government, and I’m Here to Help”

Dysphoria Dystopias in ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Glen or Glenda’

However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, ‘Glen or Glenda’s explicit gender dysphoria with ‘The Matrix’s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.

“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You felt it your entire life.” – Morpheus, The Matrix

Though Lana Wachowski’s coming out should not be an excuse to limit interpretation of the Wachowski siblings’ most iconic film, The Matrix, to a closeted discussion of gender dysphoria, yet it is a film that is profoundly concerned with psychic dysphoria as sci-fi dystopia: with jarring disconnects between perceived reality and actuality, embodied in a heroic struggle for the reimagination of the self against escalating systems of social control. Ed Wood Jr.’s cult 1953 B-movie, Glen or Glenda, explicitly harnesses classic science fiction to dramatize the psychology of gender dysphoria. As was fictionalized in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, Wood was a self-accepting crossdresser who approached the topic of gender dysphoria with an empathy almost unique for his era, clumsily advancing enlightened opinions that would later become orthodoxy. There may be deceptive cunning underneath Wood’s film’s rough surface. Assigned to create a cheap, B-movie freak-show exploitation of the notoriety of Christine Jorgensen’s sex change, Wood delivers a freak-show of random mad scientists, mischievously accuses the cismale audience of suffering from pattern baldness due to their failure to wear women’s hats, creates a surreal nightmare of social conditioning, and then allows his transgender subjects to be islands of humanity within this freakish world. He effectively delivers a transgender freakshow in which the transgender are never freaks. On the surface, Wood’s film and the Wachowskis’ could not be more different: one is the cheap and amateurish product of a man popularized by the Golden Turkey Awards as “the worst director of all time,” while the other is a slick blockbuster considered a milestone in special effects, that has spawned serious, academic debate over its philosophical meanings. However, comparing Wood’s deeply personal product with the Wachowskis’ deeply polished one, Glen or Glenda‘s explicit gender dysphoria with The Matrix‘s allegorical dysphoria reveals parallels that illuminate both films.

Dystopia, Now: Contemporary Reality As Sci-Fi Nightmare

“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” – Morpheus, The Matrix

The most fundamental parallel between The Matrix and Glen or Glenda is their shared concept of present reality as a creation of sci-fi dystopia. In Glen or Glenda, Boris Karloff’s mad scientist is positioned as a creator-figure, who performs sex change transformations with a wave of his hand, while omnisciently supervising all life. Though Karloff’s never-really-specified relationship to the film’s realist narrative, complete with weirdly hovering intrusions over the action, are celebrated ironically as symptoms of Wood’s incompetence and oddness, yet Karloff’s role in Glen or Glenda mirrors that of the machines in The Matrix: he enables a dual discourse of irresistible predestination and faulty creation. Karloff’s “pulling of the string” drives surges of wildebeest like irresistible animal impulses, which place Wood’s hero as a puppet who must “dance to that which one is created for” while recognizing that “nature makes mistakes, it’s proven every day”, just as Neo struggles to accept that he is not in control of his own life through the guidance of his re-creator Morpheus.

Using a nightmare sequence of mobbing crowds and mocking variants of the schoolyard chant “slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails, that’s what little boys are made of, sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” Wood dramatizes the sinister power of social conditioning in a way that would be considered Lynchian surrealism, if he wasn’t dismissed as the worst director of all time. Where Wood uses a nightmarish dream sequence, the Wachowskis use body horror, in the violation of flesh-penetrating bugs and the imposed silence of a mouth literally sealed shut, to expressively dramatize the sinister power of their Agent “gatekeepers” over the hero’s most intimate body and self. Wood’s visual vocabulary for expressing the internal experience of gender dysphoria is drawn from James Whale’s Frankenstein, a queer lexicon of absent nurture and flawed divinity. The Wachowskis’ visual vocabulary in The Matrix is drawn from Ghost In The Shell, a cyberpunk anime that explores gender identity through a dystopia where characters can explore their identity by “plugging themselves in” to superpowered new bodies (or “shells”) of any gender. The effect of both texts, however, is to code lived reality as a profoundly unnatural and imposed nightmare that is essentially dystopian and demands the psyche’s resistance, symbolized for the Wachowskis by re-Creator Morpheus’ red pill.

Wood’s decision to open his film with a trans* woman’s suicide, narrated through her suicide note of repeated arrests for cross-dressing–“let my body rest in death, forever, in the things I cannot wear in life”–underlines the seriousness of the psychological crisis of gender dysphoria. Wood’s dramatization also recognizes the individual nature of each trans* experience, from the “transvestite,” who was conditioned by the environment of early youth to value femininity over masculinity and yearn to express his feminine side, to the “pseudo-hermaphrodite” Anne, who seems to correspond to a trans woman in her description as “a woman within… indeed meant to be a woman.” Anne challenges gender stereotypes by excelling as an army officer, before choosing a sex change operation. The “removal of the man and the formation of the woman” is represented onscreen by Bela Lugosi’s scientist blessing the new incarnation in a pseudo-religious ceremony.

The Holy Trinity: Variations And Incarnations

“You’ve been living two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson… the other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo”… One of these lives has a future and one of them does not.” – Agent Smith, The Matrix

When Keanu Reeves’ hero, hacker Thomas Anderson, is introduced, he has constructed an imaginary identity and vicarious second life as “Neo” that is confined within the cyber-realm. The basic plot of the first film is Anderson’s gradual embrace and embodiment of “Neo” as his true identity, while realizing his imposed identity of Thomas Anderson as a fictional construct. It is Hugo Weaving’s sinister Agent Smith of the social-conditioning “matrix” who continually imposes the (explicitly masculine) identity of “Mr. Anderson” onto Neo. It is when Neo finally resists and asserts “my name is Neo!” that he frees himself from the inevitability of his defeat. It is Neo’s allies who affirm his true identity, with Trinity’s iron belief in his potential self, embodied as a kiss, acting as the catalyst for his final awakening into unbounded liberation. Many commentators have pointed out that Neo can be read as a Christ allegory. Fewer have highlighted that Trinity’s name evokes the Holy Trinity’s conception of a single being’s incarnation into multiple forms. If Morpheus functions as a Creator/Father mentor to Neo’s Christ-figure, Trinity must represent his Holy Spirit. Her kiss is therefore not only Mary Magdalene’s handmaiden witnessing Christ’s resurrection, but the descent of the dove/spirit as agent of his baptism and awakening to mission.

The film’s iconic uniform of black leather, slicked back hair and shades visually codes Carrie-Anne Moss as a female variant of Keanu Reeves’ hero, reimagining the patriarchal Holy Trinity of the Christian religion as a transracial, transsexual one (the theme of transracial incarnation would later play a controversially race-bending role in the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas). While the dizzying complexity of the Matrix sequels are beyond the scope of my study, it should be noted that they center on Neo’s battle through ever complicating systems of social control and predestination to avoid the compelled sacrifice of Trinity. A traditional feminist reading would bemoan that Trinity serves as yet another apparently Strong Woman reduced to damsel-in-distress. However, reading Trinity as Neo’s liberated alter-ego enables an interpretation that is more coherent and thematically rich. Trinity is introduced before Neo – demonstrating her super-strength and desirable mastery over laws of nature, she is his ultimate goal throughout the films.

Glen Or Glenda describes the relationship of “Glen” and “Glenda” as “not half man, half woman, but nevertheless man and woman in the same body,” evokes the idea of multiple incarnation of a unified being. A kind of trinity is established between Glen, Glenda and the supervising creator Karloff, similar to that between Morpheus, Trinity and Neo.

The Blue Pill: The Lure Of The Cure

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” – Morpheus, The Matrix

In The Matrix, the “blue pill” represents returning to the “prison for your mind” that is coercive social conditioning. The character of Cypher represents the lure of the cure, in rejecting the “desert of the real” with its lack of comforts, its isolation and its persecution by patrolling machines, in order to resume a pre-programmed, conforming life where he forgets his past and betrays the team because “ignorance is bliss.”

Neo is dissuaded from his own instincts for comforting conformity by Trinity, the empowered alter-ego who gives him strength to resist his moments of doubt with her own certainty: “You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” In Glen or Glenda, Barbara becomes the strengthening image, with her willingness to accept and love Glen, even if he never abandons women’s clothing, being the catalyst for his mental freedom. While insisting that a sex change is a happy ending for Anne, Glen’s happy ending becomes his reabsorption into a standard male role by finding his cravings for loving femininity fully answered by Barbara. This ending satisfies the mainstream audience’s urge to “cure” Glen, but only if they can grant the trans* audience’s demand that Glenda be accepted as she is, as a part of Glen, as a crucial precondition of the cure.

Gender policing limits the opportunities for full self-realization of all people, though their realized selves might take many forms across a wide spectrum of gender identity. In Lugosi’s words, “one is wrong because he does right. One is right because he does wrong.” Paradoxically, the mainstream audience are the obstacle to their own liberation, because of their mental indoctrination into an ideology of gender policing. As The Matrix‘s Morpheus puts it, they are “the very minds of the people we are trying to save, but until we do these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.” Or as Glen or Glenda has it: “You Are Society – JUDGE YE NOT.” In the struggle to envision a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries, the self-actualization of all people is implied. As long as their matrix of policing thoughts and ingrained prejudices exists, the human race will never be free. What an everyday nightmare.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vUoSPJm5w0″]

Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

The Top 5 Most Feminist Moments From the Emmys by Anita Little at Ms. blog

Viola Davis’s Emmy Speech at The New York Times

An S&A Recap of the Historic 67th Primetime Emmy Awards and a Look at Next Year’s Possibilities by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

50% of Amazon’s Next Pilots Created by Women; Tig Notaro, Anna Camp, Christina Ricci to Headline by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Shonda Rhimes on Power, Feminism, and Police Brutality by Robbie Myers at Elle

The New Stonewall Film is Just as Whitewashed as We Feared by Leela Ginelle at Bitch Media

He Named Me Malala Shows the Making of an Activist Icon by Anita Little at Ms. blog

‘The Keeping Room’ Movie Review: Badass Women Star In A Feminist Western by Kaya Payseno at BUST

WATCH: Octavia Spencer and Crissle West Depict ‘Drunk History’ Of Harriet Tubman’s Union Spying by Sameer Rao at Colorlines

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Sex Positivity: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Sex Positivity Theme Week here.

Virtue, Vulgarity, and the Vulva by Erin Relford

The equality of men and women on the basis of healthy and consensual sex is sex positivity according to the Women and Gender Advocacy Center. Thus, to desire sex positivity is to be inherently feminist.

Clitoral Readings of The Piano, Turn Me On, Dammit, and Secretary by Brigit McCone

But how can female arousal be visually expressed? If women stereotypically prefer to read literary erotica over watching porn, with erotica’s descriptions of the interior sensations of female arousal, is that because many women imagine that female performers of porn are uncomfortably simulating their pleasure? Can there be a clitoral cinema of female arousal, and what would it look like?

Let’s Talk About Sex (Positivity for Women) in Animated Comedies by Belle Artiquez

There are animated shows that do present female sex positivity and appear to subvert the current patriarchal control of female sexuality in media. Archer and Bob’s Burgers are both refreshing examples of portrayals of positive female sexuality.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries: Killing the Stigma of Sex by Emma Thomas

Besides occasional sex jokes, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries features episodes about vibrators, abortion, and women’s rights. It also highlights a wealth of one-night stands, and while the men are attractive, the camera glances over the bodies of Miss Fisher’s lovers as lovingly as it does her gorgeous outfits. It is, in an odd way, the perfect combination of the male and female gaze.

Yas Queen!: In Praise of Female Friendship and Sex Positivity on Broad City by Alexandra Shinart

As emerging adults, Abbi and Ilana are free to explore their sexuality as they choose. Choosing to be sexually active means the women have the possibilities of exploring love and sex, casual or within a relationship, in a way that best serves them as 20-something single women. Although Abbi and Ilana each explore their sexuality differently, the women share a common mentality- that they will embrace the many sexual adventures they embark on and support and empower each other every step of the way.

The Audacity of Sex and the Black Women Who Have It by Reginée Ceaser

Being Mary Jane provides the dialogue and the safety net in saying out loud ,”I see you, I’ve been there too and you are not alone.” The embracing of positive sexuality of Black women on television is not progressive feminism. It is the hope that future depictions of such will not be labeled progressive, but just as common as the stereotypes that have lingered for too long.

Slaying Dudes and Stealing Hearts: The Tell-All Sexuality of Mindy Lahiri by Shannon Miller

Sex positivity, for instance, is frequently presented in an oversimplified, inaccurate package of rampant promiscuity and generally assigned to a side female character, like a free-spirited best friend or sister. Meanwhile, the main character frequently serves as the antithesis to said behavior who is later rewarded with “true love.”

The To Do List: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For by Leigh Kolb

And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton.
Yes. This is it.

Concussion: When Queer Marriage in The Suburbs Isn’t Enough by Ren Jender

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and will be will direct an episode of Transparent this coming season), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze.

The Day Mindy Lahiri Ate Seashells and Called Me Immature by Katherine Murray

I like Mindy Kaling and I like her show, but the season premiere demonstrates how, like many series, The Mindy Project has ambivalent feelings about what kind of sex is OK.

To Boldly Go: Star Trek: The Next Generation Explores the Limits of Sexual Attraction in “The Host” by Swoozy C

Once Beverly decides that so little of her attraction to Odan was wrapped up in his host body, the floodgates of sex, sexuality, gender, and physical attraction were wide open.

The Fosters, Sexuality, and the Challenges of Parenting While Feminist by Stephanie Brown

In Stef and Lena’s case, they face the much more complicated question of how to talk to their kids about sex in a way that balances their feminist ideals of sex positivity with their parental need protect and discipline their kids. Two scenes in particular stand out to me as exemplars of the ways in which Lena and Stef strive to make sure their kids are not ashamed of their sexuality while simultaneously conveying the importance of being safe, ready, and responsible.

Starlet and Tangerine: A Look At the Sex Work Industry Through the Lens of Chris Bergoch and Sean Baker by BJ Colangelo

Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch are spreading an important truth with their films: that sex does not have to be definitive. Tangerine and Starlet are two monumentally groundbreaking films, and they should be required viewing for all.

“I Want to Slap His Hideous, Beautiful Face”: Sexual Awakenings and First Crushes in Bob’s Burgers by Becky Kukla

Honestly, Tina Belcher is the role model young girls have been waiting for, and I’m so glad she’s finally arrived. However, “Boys 4 Now” – the episode that made me really believe Bob’s Burgers is *probably* the best show I’ve ever watched – deals with Louise getting her first crush. Rage-filled, insane, absolute genius Louise gets a crush on a boy. Unsurprisingly, she does not take this news well.

How the CW’s The 100 Is Getting Sex Positivity Right by Rowan Ellis

In fact, it’s the aspect of love and intimacy, rather than lust and sexuality, which makes Clarke’s part in Finn’s demise so difficult–the show plays with the idea that human connection, whether it’s through friendship, family, alliance or romance, is painful because it matters, not because it is fundamentally wrong.

Sex Worker Positivity in Satisfaction by Cameron Airen

Normalizing all sexual fantasies seems to be one of the main themes of the show. ‘Satisfaction’ offers a lot of varied sex positivity onscreen that centers on women. The show sets an example for what more television shows and films could portray when it comes to women, sexual desires, and sex work.

The Honest Sexcapades in You’re The Worst by Giselle Defares

Gretchen leaves Jimmy and states, “Well as my grandma used to say, ‘It’s only a walk of shame if you’re capable of feeling shame.’ See you later, thanks for doing all the sex stuff on me.”

Unity Through Differentiation: The Radical Sex Positivity of Sense8 by Emma Houxbois

The net effect, woven throughout the series, is a sex positivity that both embraces differentiation and recognizes the universal experiences that can work to close gaps of gender, orientation, and race that routinely stymie the discourse.

Living Single and Girlfriends: The Roots of Sex Positivity for Black Women on TV by Lisa Bolekaja

There were never any shows that centered happy, single, child-free Black women that prioritized good sex as part of successful living. That is until two television shows came on the scene, Living Single (1993-1998, created by Yvette Lee Bowser) and Girlfriends (2000-2007, created by Mara Brock Akil).

‘Living Single’ and ‘Girlfriends’: The Roots of Sex Positivity for Black Women on TV

There were never any shows that centered happy, single, child-free Black women that prioritized good sex as part of successful living. That is until two television shows came on the scene, ‘Living Single’ (1993-1998, created by Yvette Lee Bowser) and ‘Girlfriends’ (2000-2007, created by Mara Brock Akil).

Women in the African diaspora have had a hard time claiming healthy ownership of their own bodies. From slavery to the present, Black women (and Black girls) have endured the stigma of having their bodies shamed and sexualized in ways that have been physically, psychologically, and spiritually damaging (see the history of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman). They had not been afforded healthy representations of Black female sexuality. The Black female body has been viewed as naturally wanton, lascivious, or “fast-tailed” because of sexual exploitation during enslavement. If the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s liberated White women to explore their bodies with abandon, this sex positivity didn’t free Black women from the baggage of their inhumane body history.

Historically in U.S. film and television, Black women have never been allowed to have sexual agency without stigma. If Black women actually showed up in the media, typically she was boxed into several known stereotypes— the Mammy (the asexual being who fixes white people problems while neglecting her own), the Sapphire (angry Black woman or Sassy Black woman), Tragic Mulatto (the light-skinned Black woman who can’t seem to fit into the White world because of the stain of Black blood), or a Jezebel (the hypersexual, loose woman, known today as a THOT—that hoe over there), and even the Respectable Negro (a Black woman who is married/widowed, often pious, and successful based on selfless motherhood. She often places judgment on other Black women who don’t fit her mold).

From the earliest days of television featuring Black characters, shows like Beulah, The Amos ‘n Andy Show, Julia, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and right on through Gimme A Break, and 227, Black women have played riffs of the traditional stereotypes. The emergence of Claire Huxtable, the successful attorney and mother of five children on The Cosby Show, fashioned a new type of Black woman we hadn’t seen before (although low-key, she could be sassy and gave off a whiff of subtle respectability in some episodes), and yet she was still bound up in family life. There were never any shows that centered happy, single, child-free Black women that prioritized good sex as part of successful living. That is until two television shows came on the scene, Living Single (1993-1998, created by Yvette Lee Bowser) and Girlfriends (2000-2007, created by Mara Brock Akil).

These two shows revolutionized Black female sexuality on television by giving Black women sexual agency without falling back on tired tropes. They also opened the door to later shows featuring Black single women who embraced sex as a part of good living without stigma (Half and Half, Single Ladies, and Scandal). Two characters in particular stood out from both series that became the precursors for sexually carefree Black women:

Maxine Shaw (Erika Alexander) and Lynn Searcy (Persia White)

Living Single

Living Single followed a group of four female friends and their two male neighbors living in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment. They were upwardly mobile in their careers as lawyers, magazine owners, stockbrokers, and independent building maintenance handymen. The show gravitated around rap star Queen Latifah’s character, Khadijah James, and each week found the crew in various complications related to their jobs, love lives, and each other. It was rare to see a show dominated by Black professionals. Finding “Mr. Right” is often the end goal for women-centered shows, but thankfully Living Single didn’t spend too much time having the women lament about not having found “the one.” One character, Régine (Kim Fields), was painted as a gold-digger, but she was the only one who had a hint of desperation in terms of having a relationship based on material comfort. Khadijah’s cousin Synclaire (Kim Coles) was the naïve, sweet-natured friend who dripped with positivity and wholesomeness. But it was Maxine, the high-powered attorney who was the standout favorite.

From her shaved head with braids, gorgeous dark skin, and power suits, Maxine had healthy sexual relationships without strings. She dated often, and was typically the one to cut relationships short when men wanted more serious (and more monogamous) relations. Some women who watched the show faithfully wore their hair like Maxine as well as imitating her fashion sense. She lived her life on her own terms (she was not a roommate with the other women because she had her own place), and she had the income to do as she pleased. She was verbally assertive, and was quick to challenge men, especially her epic battles with Khadijah’s neighbor and friend, stockbroker Kyle Baker (T.C. Carson). Their verbal spats underscored the sexual tension and attraction they really had for each other. When they get drunk one night and slept together, they choose to keep the relationship a secret, with Maxine pushing to keep the hot sex in the realm of platonic fuck buddies.

Unlike Black women from previous TV shows, pleasure and freedom was the goal for Maxine. This didn’t mean that marriage or motherhood, or some form of connection wasn’t a possibility for her, it just wasn’t the ONLY goal in her life. Her career and her friendships meant just as much as having a man, or dreaming of a family. After finally revealing their sexual connection to their friends, Kyle accepts a job in London and asks Maxine to join him. Kyle was the best sex partner Maxine ever had. He was successful, gorgeous, and her equal in every way. And yet Maxine turned him down because she valued her autonomy and wasn’t willing to give up her life and lifestyle to follow him. She didn’t try to convince him to stay (even though she really wanted him), and they parted as lovers who respected each other’s decision, even though it was a difficult one. Maxine had such a sense of self that she allowed her dream man to leave without a fight. That was a revelation to the core audience.

Unfortunately, in the last season of the series, Maxine was shown to miss Kyle, and had the wild idea that her life would have meaning if she had a baby. She goes to a sperm bank and inadvertently gets inseminated with Kyle’s sperm. In the series finale she reconciles with Kyle and we are left to believe that they will be happy raising their baby together. It is a cliché happy ending, especially since Maxine had been presented as the ultimate carefree Black woman. However, the fans loved it, and on some level, it was nice to see her get the partner she deserved, one who was as sexually uninhibited as she was, and one who respected her choice to be that way. She owned her beautiful Black body. Maxine offered Black women watching the show an opportunity to embrace their sexual sides with humor and much needed positivity.

Girlfriends

Much like the template of Living Single, Girlfriends followed the humorous trials and tribulations of four young success driven Black women living in Los Angeles. In this world, attorney Joan Clayton (Tracee Ellis Ross) was the main protagonist who set the pace for her three friends– Maya Wilkes (Golden Brooks) her Compton hood girl personal assistant, Toni Childs (Jill Marie Jones) her college roommate and a high end real estate agent with a taste for expensive things, and Lynn Searcy (Persia White), another former college roommate with several post graduate degrees and counting, but no real job because of her unsettled bohemian lifestyle.

All the women on Girlfriends were sexually active and enjoyed good sex (although Joan had a ninety day waiting period for her beaus prior to sex which became an issue with some), but it was Lynn who was the most sexually experimental. She openly discussed her sex toys and personal sex tricks (The “Lynn Spin”), ménage à trois, group sex, sex swings/chairs, and same-gender hook-ups. There was no sexual experience she hadn’t tried or was afraid to engage in. She even had her own fuck buddy arrangement with the clique’s mutual male friend, the lawyer William Dent (Reggie Hayes).

Lynn essentially stepped up the sexual freedom of Maxine on Living Single, and overall, the women of Girlfriends were a little more nuanced in their performances than the characters of Living Single (except for Maya, who took some time to lower the hood shtick she displayed in earlier episodes). Both Maxine and Lynn brought a refreshing and openly accepted sexuality that had never been present in Black female television characters. These two women were the ones viewers like me wanted to sit around with holding glasses of wine and listening to the details of their sexual exploits.

None of the women from either show carried the stigmas of the past that haunted the Black female body. They revealed to the world the Black Female Gaze in sexual matters which upset some critics (including Bill Cosby, and Spike Lee who accused them of being oversexed embarrassments). Like most new shows, it did take time for Living Single and Girlfriends to hit their stride, and each had their corny struggle moments to figure out their voice. However, in the end, they brought forth Black women with positive and healthy sexual pursuits. They left the sexual baggage and shaming in the past in order to present Black female sexuality in a healthy new light.

Staff writer Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room, and her latest speculative fiction short story “Three Voices” can be read in Uncanny Magazine. She divides her time between California and Italy. She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja lurking in the hashtags #SaturdayNightSciFi and #FridayNightHorror

Unity Through Differentiation: The Radical Sex Positivity of ‘Sense8’

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

Sex positivity, as a movement and concept in general, is open to a great deal of interpretation and criticism because of the multitude of forms that it’s taken over the years. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the heated debates that formed what are alternately described as “the feminist sex wars” and “lesbian sex wars” in establishing where the boundaries between legitimate self expression and exploitation lie in areas like commercial pornography and BDSM lie.

Discussions of power, privilege, and control typically remain central to the topic of sex positivity, and they’re vitally important when considering film in particular, a medium where female expressions of desire are more often than not conceived of and executed by men. While these discussions are vital, they can also stand to be expanded into what sex positivity can look like when it moves beyond the idea of liberating self-expression to recognizing and understanding other people’s desires.

Prior to the debut of Sense 8, Lana and Andy Wachowski were not typically considered to be filmmakers with a particularly sex positive agenda, but the roots of their broad and inclusive conceptions of sexuality in their Netflix series (co-created with J. Michael Straczynski) go all the way back to their debut Bound, a heist flick that starred Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as lovers. At the time, the Wachowskis reached out to erotica writer and famed proponent of sex positive femininity Susie Bright to offer her a cameo in the film as thanks for her work’s influence in creating the film. Bright, who fell in love with the script, countered with a readily accepted offer to be their consultant on film and provide direction on how to film the sex scenes between Gershon and Tilly.

It’s an under-discussed part of the Wachowskis’ career that Bound, through arrangements made by Bright, had its debut at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival at the Castro theater, establishing a queer context to their work years before Lana came out as transgender. However it’s easy to see a recapturing of the spirit of their collaboration with Bright in Sense8, as they expand from the lesbian romance of Bound to expand into a multitude of simultaneous expressions of sexuality.

Key to much of the conversation around the series and its depiction of sex is how central, and explicit, the relationship between Nomi, a trans woman, (played by Jamie Clayton) and her girlfriend Amanita (played by Freema Agyeman) is. In and of itself it’s a tremendous victory for trans representation that scores the unheard of trifecta of a trans woman character being played by an actual trans actress, recognizes that trans women experience same gender desire, and doesn’t construct her sexuality around deception of any kind. The Wachowskis clearly communicate their triumph in this with the close up shot of a well-lubricated rainbow dildo dropping to the floor at the close of their first sex scene together, but Sense8 sets out to accomplish far more than just a sex toy mic drop.

In addition to Nomi and Amanita’s relationship, the series develops the romance between closeted Mexican actor Lito Rodriguez (played by Miguel Angel Silvestre) who is among the seven other characters Nomi shares an empathic bond with, and his boyfriend Hernando, as well as blossoming heterosexual romances between other members of the group. Nomi and Lito’s relationships are given the bulk of the development as the series progresses, but the Wachowskis use that focus as an opportunity to build a conception of sex that celebrates differentiation while also tapping into the universal aspects of sex and intimacy that everyone experiences regardless of gender or orientation.

This is primarily and most noticeably achieved in a sequence in the sixth episode where enough of the emotional energy of the sensates is focused on sex to trigger a full blown orgy between several of them, including Nomi, Lito, and two of the straight male characters. The focus and direction of the sequence, which was described by Silvestre as Lana Wachowski yelling directions from the sideline, which sounds much like what Bright believed her role in Bound’s production would be interpreted as. (“I think they imagined that meant I stood over Gina and Jennifer with a riding crop, snapping, “Deeper , Harder, A Little to the Left!”) But the scene does also communicate the same language and visuals that Bright intended for Bound:

“There were two main ideas on my mind. One, unlike most Hollywood lesbian scenarios, this movie shouldn’t insinuate oral sex– that’s not the kind of characters we were looking at. BOUND is about getting inside someone very fast, trusting them with everything-these women had to be fucking each other. Penetration was the act we wanted to imply. Yet obviously we weren’t going to get away with gynecological or hardcore shots in a movie that was headed for America’s shopping malls.”

“My idea, stolen from the ‘Kathy’ footage, was that we show a woman’s legs, straining and squeezing, and that we see that her lover’s forearm between her thighs. We dwell on that arm for a moment, moving back and forth in a fucking rhythm, looking sure, steady and unrelenting. Then, instead of following her arm all the way up to her lover’s pussy, we would cut to her stomach, fluttering like a little butterfly in that spasm we all recognize as orgasm. I loved the idea of eroticizing a woman’s belly like that. A lot of men making sex movies try to show a woman’s sexual pleasure by focusing the lens on her cleavage. Maybe that’s what they’re looking at, but hey, there’s a lot more going on!

“The other key idea was to eroticize the women’s hands whenever they were flirting or making love with each other. ‘A lesbian’s hands are her cock, they’re the hard-on of the movie, that’s what you want to follow,’ I said, like some veteran pornographer. When I see Corky’s hands on screen, I want to imagine how they would feel inside me. They’re the metaphorical substitute for the genital shots that you won’t be showing.”

Eroticizing the hands is the technique most keenly felt that follows through from Bound, but toward a somewhat different purpose in Sense8. Bright was looking for a way to get the idea of the kind of sex she imagined being most relevant to the plot and character beats of Bound across without being able to use explicit detail. She wanted to communicate genuine queer female desire to an audience who had never seen it presented in a manner equal to the depiction of straight sex in mainstream film. In Sense8, the first thing that focusing on eroticizing hands and grasping does is communicate the universality of desire across characters who identify as gay, lesbian, and straight. It depicts a physical element of sex that everyone, no matter their gender or orientation, can easily grasp and identify with. What it also does, just as Bright sought to evoke penetration in the sex scenes as part of the overall themes of Bound, is communicate how the individual sensates have been grasping toward each other in the series, trying to reach an understanding of their circumstances and who each other are.

Differentiation cannot be overlooked as being a major component of how the series presents and celebrates sexuality, despite the centrality of the “orgy” sequence that communicates a universality to human desire. Immediately following that sequence is a conversation in which Nomi tries to make sense of why she shares an empathic bond with the others, stating that it would seem more logical to her if the others were closer and not further from her identity and experiences. The response from Amanita’s mother is that she teaches the importance of differentiation through her classes on evolution. The implicit idea is that if differentiation is a key catalyst in biological evolution, it cannot be overlooked when considering the evolution of attitudes around sex that include queer and trans experiences.

Elsewhere in the series we see the critical importance of differentiation outside of sex, most notably as Lito and Wolfgang trade places in each others’ lives at the climax of their individual storylines. Lito, having pushed the situation with his blackmailer as far as he can by acting, falls back on Wolfgang to literally finish the fight. Then Wolfgang, having reached the limits of his skills as a thief and fighter in dealing with his rival, allows Lito to step forward and ply his trade as an actor. Each facet of the characters’ lives and experiences are as vital to the others’ towards their shared survival whether it be Sun’s martial arts skills, Capheus’ driving abilities, Lito’s acting skills, or Nomi’s computer wizardry.

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

‘The Fosters,’ Sexuality, and the Challenges of Parenting While Feminist

This guest post by Stephanie Brown appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

In my frequent lectures to friends about why they should take time out of their busy television (and real life) schedules to watch ABC Family’s drama The Fosters (2013-present), I usually refer to an exchange from the season two episode “Mother Nature” in which Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) have an argument born out of a season-long simmering tension over their respective parenting roles:

Stef: Please stop making me feel like I have to the disciplinarian dad in this family.

Lena: That’s awfully heteronormative thinking.

The first time I watched this episode, I actually paused the show to process my excitement over the fact that a TV show ostensibly for teenagers included a casual reference to the social construction gender roles. Can you name many other shows on basic cable in which you could hear the word “heteronormative” being thrown around? Though, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Over its first three seasons, I’ve been impressed many a time with the range of complex issues thoughtfully addressed by The Fosters, from societal issues of racism, the broken foster system, addiction, and religion to familiar teenage issues like friendship, school, and rival dance teams.

The Fosters, if you aren’t familiar, centers around Stef and Lena and their brood of biological, adopted, and foster children. I will admit that the title of the series is a little (OK, very) on the nose, but I’m willing to forgive it a series that, as you may have gathered, features characters and stories that we don’t usually get to see on TV. The inciting incident for the pilot is that Stef, a cop, and her wife Lena, a high school principal, decide to foster Callie (Maia Mitchell) and her younger brother Jude (Hayden Byerly) after they have been through a series of abusive foster homes. The Adams-Foster family also includes Brandon (David Lambert), Stef’s son from her previous marriage to her police partner Mike (Danny Nucci), and twins Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) and Jesus (Jake T. Austin and Noah Centineo due to a Roseanne-like recasting situation) who were adopted by the family when they were toddlers.

The Foster-Adams family is a big, loving, messy group, which fits well into the network’s “A New Kind of Family” brand. Since ABC Family rebranded in 2006 with this new slogan, they have produced several engaging, interesting, underappreciated dramas. From Greek (which Entertainment Weekly once referred to as “better than it has any right to be”) to Switched At Birth, a show in which scenes are frequently shot completely in sign language, the network frequently spotlights characters and storylines you won’t find anywhere else on television. Of course, as with most pop culture associated with teenage girls, the network’s innovative storytelling is often banished to the world of non-serious TV (a fate that befell the WB, UPN and now the CW as well).

Of course, as you might expect from a show that centers on a family with five teenagers, sexuality is a prevalent theme in The Fosters. Not only do the teenagers on the show deal with issues like having sex for the first time, sexual assault, the questioning of their sexuality, and love triangles, but refreshingly, Stef and Lena also deal with their own adult sex life. While same-sex couples are often desexualized (see Modern Family), Stef and Lena are given storylines that revolve around sex. In one such episode. Lena and Stef have frank discussions about the effect their busy lives and big family is having on their physical relationship and Lena’s fear of succumbing to “lesbian bed death” (2. 16). Stef and Lena not only talk about sex, they’re also shown cuddling post-sex, kissing, and generally showing physical affection for each other. Not only does the series treat sex as a multifaceted an integral aspect of adult relationships, it of course, also normalizes lesbian sex, which has historically either been ignored or relegated to the realm of the salacious male gaze.

The other notably refreshing aspect of Stef and Lena’s on-screen parenting is the way in which they often have to navigate their dual roles as feminists and parents of teenagers. As a woman who doesn’t have kids, I can’t identify with complexities of parenting while feminist, but as a feminist I can absolutely identify with the complexities of living in the world while feminist. To this point, the series raises important questions about the often challenging task of applying our deeply held feminist ideals our messy, everyday lives. I know, for instance, that the unholy alliance between advertisers, the beauty industry, and patriarchal constructions of gender and beauty have combined to make me think twice before leaving the house without putting on mascara. And yet.

In the season two finale, “The End of the Beginning” (2.21), 13- year-old Jude confides in Lena that he and his friend Connor had made out in their tent on a school camping trip. When he breaks down crying out of a mix what is likely fear, relief, and guilt at having lied to his parents about what happened, Lena makes sure he understands that he has nothing to be ashamed for acting on his attraction to Connor, while reminding him that school-sanctioned trips are not the place to fool around. Similarly, in the summer finale of season 3, “Lucky” (3.10), Lena and Jude have the sex talk after Connor’s dad finds him and Jude making out in Connor’s room:

Jude: So, I’m not in trouble?

Lena: No. No, but you’re probably going to wish you were. I think it’s time we had the talk. I’m really happy that you found someone as wonderful and as kind as Connor. I really am. And when sex is shared between two people…

Jude: OK, OK. Connor and I are not having sex.

Lena: Oh, OK, good. Good. Um, so. When any kind of physical intimacy is shared between two people who care about it each other. It’s a beautiful thing. I mean, OK look, if I’m being honest, I don’t really know a whole lot about the logistics of two men being together, but I definitely want you know how to take care of yourself, and to be safe when the time comes. Which hopefully won’t be for quite some time.

Again, Lena walks the line between reassuring Jude that sex is wonderful and normal, while at the same time making it clear that she hopes that he waits until he is mature enough emotionally, physically, and mentally.

In Mariana’s case, the conversation with her parents happens after she has already had sex for the first time, though under less-than-ideal circumstances. Mariana had planned to have sex with her boyfriend, but when he asks her to wait until he gets back from his band’s tour, she takes his delay as a rejection and ends up hastily having sex with Callie’s ex-boyfriend (“Wreckage,” 3.1).

After harboring a guilty conscience for several episodes, Mariana finally comes clean to her moms in “Going South” (3.5). Throughout the initial conversation, Mariana is defensive of her choice as her moms struggle not to shame her while simultaneously trying to understand her decision.

Stef: Losing your virginity at 15 is a big deal, Mariana.

Mariana: I thought you guys were feminists

Lena: Don’t play that card. We said the exact same thing to your brothers.

Stef: I don’t understand why you think that this is some kind of race.

Mariana: Well I did, OK? And I’m not a virgin anymore, so.

Lena: Honey, I think what your mother’s trying to say is that we love you and we just want to understand your choices.

There is tension not only between Mariana and her moms, but also between Stef and Lena as they negotiate how to handle the situation as parents and feminists. Mariana, knowing her moms well, goes so far as to play the “feminism” card, seemingly daring them to make her feel ashamed of her decision so she can claim the moral high ground by calling out their hypocrisy. In a follow-up conversation, the issue is resolved as Stef and Lena reassure Mariana that she should not be ashamed of having sex or of making a mistake.

Stef: I wasn’t trying to shame you, Mariana. I wasn’t.

Lena: But sex is a big deal. Every time you have sex it’s a big deal. You’re sharing a vulnerable and precious part of yourself. You should always make sure you feel good about it.

Similar to Lena’s conversation with Jude, the goal of the “sex talk” isn’t to scare or shame their kids away from sex, but rather to encourage them to take sex seriously and wait until they’re ready. Stef and Lena also want to assure Mariana that they love her unconditionally, and that our mistakes don’t make us bad people, they make us human:

Stef: My love you know what. We all do things we wish we hadn’t. But we learn from them. And if we manage not to repeat them, man, it feels really, really good.

The talks that Stef and Lena have with Mariana and Jude about sex are emblematic of the way the series treats a range of sensitive subjects with care, warmth, and complexity. As with every situation, Stef and Lena strive to ensure that their kids feel, above all else, unashamed, supported and loved. Of course, The Fosters is by no means a perfect show. It can veer into sentimentality and overwrought melodrama, but I will happily take being manipulated into tears (I was a fan of Parenthood, after all) when it comes with a side of progressive storylines about family, sexuality, and gender. As one of the few shows my mom, my sister and I all watch, The Fosters is a series I hope families across the country are also watching and enjoying together.

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiast working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. You can follow her on Twitter or Medium @stephbrown.

‘Starlet’ and ‘Tangerine’: A Look At the Sex Work Industry Through the Lens of Chris Bergoch and Sean Baker

Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch are spreading an important truth with their films: that sex does not have to be definitive. ‘Tangerine’ and ‘Starlet’ are two monumentally groundbreaking films, and they should be required viewing for all.

This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

When I was 19 years old, I was living in a shoddy dorm room in the middle of nowhere and absolutely desperate for cash. There were enough strangers on the Internet sending me requests for “topless video blogs” about horror films already, and so began my short-lived stint as a personal session cam girl. What I did or didn’t do is frankly, no one else’s business but my own, but this “dirty little secret” of mine is still something I struggle with every day regarding whether or not I tell people how I managed to pay for all of my books despite being a broke college student. Had I not written this paragraph, there would be plenty of people I know that would have never guessed this is something I had done in the past. Unfortunately, there are those that have known me for years but will see this short-lived moment in my life, this minute aspect of my personality, and choose to solely define me for it. Sex workers, porn stars, and cam girls are often defined exclusively by their professions.

This is where Chris Bergoch and Sean Baker’s stunning films Starlet and Tangerine come into play.

Tangerine has been generating quite the buzz around the indie circuit. The film follows Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two transgender female prostitutes in Los Angeles on the day of Sin-Dee’s release from prison as she discovers their pimp (and Sin-Dee’s boyfriend) Chester (James Ransome) has been cheating on her with a cis-gender prostitute named Dinah. The majority of the characters featured in this film are either sex workers or consumers, and never once is the audience meant to see them as anything less than people. A married cab driver with a desire for pleasuring transgender prostitutes is never meant to be seen as a monster, and the women who provide him his pleasure are always seen as women just doing their job. There is no shame in the game for anyone rolling the dice, and if anything, the people we are to see as villainous are simply those that refuse to accept that they’ve already lost the game before ever trying to play.

We are given access to see an authentic look at the world of sex workers, one that isn’t littered with Showgirl glitter or Taxi Driver moral dilemma. It’s an honest and sincere look at people who work in the sex industry for reasons other than rehashed storylines from Law & Order: SVU. Tangerine is centered on sex workers, but this isn’t a movie about sex working. Sure, we see our actresses turn a few tricks, but that’s like saying Clerks is about the convenience store industry. Just because we’re watching these women do their job, does not mean that they are their job. Being a sex worker doesn’t define their characters, it just happens to be what they hold for a job. Sin-Dee is shown as an excellent negotiator and furiously funny, and Alexandra is presented as levelheaded and a gifted vocalist. Being a sex worker is something they do, but it isn’t everything they are.

Before Tangerine, Bergoch and Baker made another indie flick called Starlet, a tale of a young girl named Jane (she also answers to Tess) who finds an unlikely friendship with an elderly woman named Sadie. For nearly an hour of the film, we watch this non-traditional friendship blossom between the young, vibrant, and leggy Jane (played by Dree Hemingway) and the bitter old Sadie (first-time actress Besedka Johnson), before we are made aware of what Jane does for a living, and why she also answers to “Tess.” Jane, as well as her roommates Melissa and Mikey, all work in the porn industry. There’s no emotionally depressing reveal and it’s never used a shock tactic. In fact, the porn industry is presented as any other business one could work within.

Jane’s work in pornography is such a non-vital aspect of her personality, she could have easily been a waitress and this film would have still had the same effect. This isn’t a story of a “whore with a heart of gold” nor is it a film showing a redemption arc for a “troubled girl who made poor choices.” No. Jane works in pornography, and she’s also befriending an older woman simply because she enjoys her company. Yes, Jane works in the porn industry, but she’s also an avid garage sale enthusiast. Starlet isn’t trying to make a “porn stars are people too!” sort of film, it’s a genuinely interesting film about the way we relate with other people, and one of the characters just happens to work in pornography. Jane is not defined by her profession, and she isn’t demonized for it either.

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.