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FLICKING THE BEAN ON THE SILVER SCREEN: WOMEN'S MASTURBATION AS SELF-DISCOVERY AND SUBVERSION IN AMERICAN CINEMA
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This article reviews what is currently known about how men and women respond to the presentation of visual sexual stimuli. While the assumption that men respond more to visual sexual stimuli is generally empirically supported, previous reports of sex differences are confounded by the variable content of the stimuli presented and measurement techniques. We propose that the cognitive processing stage of responding to sexual stimuli is the first stage in which sex differences occur. The divergence between men and women is proposed to occur at this time, reflected in differences in neural activation, and contribute to previously reported sex differences in downstream peripheral physiological responses and subjective reports of sexual arousal. Additionally, this review discusses factors that may contribute to the variability in sex differences observed in response to visual sexual stimuli. Factors include participant variables, such as hormonal state and socialized sexual attitudes, as well as variables specific to the content presented in the stimuli. Based on the literature reviewed, we conclude that content characteristics may differentially produce higher levels of sexual arousal in men and women. Specifically, men appear more influenced by the sex of the actors depicted in the stimuli while women's response may differ with the context presented. Sexual motivation, perceived gender role expectations, and sexual attitudes are possible influences. These differences are of practical importance to future research on sexual arousal that aims to use experimental stimuli comparably appealing to men and women and also for general understanding of cognitive sex differences.
Book synopsis: An introduction to feminist film theory as a discourse from the early seventies to the present. McCabe traces the broad ranging theories produced by feminist film scholarship, from formalist readings and psychoanalytical approaches to debates initiated by cultural studies, race and queer theory.
Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga explores this question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms "the paradox of negative emotion" and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. He describes the sensual nature of the movies and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He uses cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver a similar emotional charge for diverse audiences.
The ratings handed down by the Motion Picture Association of America, the filmmaker argues, are just so much alphabet soup. Rather than inform parents and protect children, they serve instead to chill freedom of expression, and mostly just penalize independent filmmakers whose out-of-the-mainstream takes on sexuality and other adult matters are slapped with the ultra restrictive "NC-17" rating. This Film is Not Yet Rated, which includes interviews with filmmakers who have been confronted by this arbitrary and puzzling system, is intended to punch a hole through the operations of the Ratings Board, whose membership is itself a closely guarded secret. Dick describes his own run-ins with the MPAA, the use of guerrilla tactics and animation to make his points in the film, and his own prescriptions for the ratings system.
Richard Dyer's classic study of movie stars and stardom has been updated, with a new introduction by the author discussing the rise of celebrity culture and developments in the study of stars since publication of the first edition in 1986.
This introduction to American independent cinema offers both a comprehensive industrial and economic history of the sector from the early twentieth century to the present and a study of key individual films and film-makers. Readers will develop an understanding of the complex dynamic relations between independent and mainstream American cinema.The main argument revolves around the idea that American independent cinema has developed alongside mainstream Hollywood cinema with institutional, industrial and economic changes in the latter shaping and informing the former. Consequently, the term ‘independent’ has acquired different meanings at different points in the history of American cinema, evolving according to the impact of changing conditions in the American film industry. These various meanings are examined in the course of the book.The book is ordered chronologically, beginning with independent filmmaking in the studio era (examining both top-rank and low-end independent film production), moving to the 1950s and 1960s (discussing both the adoption of independent filmmaking as the main method of production for the Hollywood majors as well as exploitation filmmaking) and finishing with contemporary American independent cinema (exploring areas such as the New Hollywood, the major independent production and distribution companies and the institutionalisation of independent cinema in the 1990s). Each chapter includes a number of case studies which focus on specific films and/or filmmakers, while a number of independent production and distribution companies are also discussed in detail.
This article takes the recent success and notoriety of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006) as the occasion for an overview of “real” sex as a recurring motif and practice of commercial, nonpornographic cinema of recent years. Diverse in their generic modalities and, even more crucially, in their national and cultural origins, these films constitute a cinematic “counterpublic” along the lines Michael Warner prescribes for human and textual communities, recalibrating the relations among sexuality, visuality, and representation as they play out for public audiences and in the emphatically public, innately collaborative medium of cinema. “Counterpublic” also emerges as an apt descriptor of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, and indeed, Shortbus owes much of its uniqueness to its overt (indeed, explicit) interbraiding of New Queer tropes and intertexts with the formal and political dispositions of other “real sex” films. If, however, the film's felicitous coalition of these two lineages accounts for part of its utopian merriment and subversive zeal, Shortbus also reprises some of the cultural and political myopias (particularly in relation to gender and race) that the New Queer movement often had trouble transcending. The complex reflections and critiques of an American public that are embedded in the film's script, mise-en-scène, and processes of production are essential to the film's compatibility with other “real sex” films, where the invocation and interrogation of the “real” so often bears national and social as well as sexual weight. At the same time, in its very internationalism and stylistic heterogeneity, this cinematic counterpublic refuses any single model of the public, the political, the sexual, or the real, and sets ever-new horizons for the subversive potential of sexual images in cinema.
Presents a cultural history of masturbation. The ancient world cared little about masturbation; it was of no great concern in Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, as the author shows, solitary sex as an important medical and moral issue can be dated with precision: the idea of masturbation as a solitary vice, self-pollution, or self-abuse came into being at around 1712. Masturbation first worried not conservatives--for whom it has long been but one among many sins of the flesh--but rather the progressives who welcomed sexual pleasure but struggled to create an ethics of self-government.
This book explains how and why masturbation became the evil twin of individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and imagination, abundance, and desire. It shows how a moral problem became a medical one, how some of the most famous doctors of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were convinced that soliatary pleasured killed or maimed. In the early twentieth century, Freud and his successors transformed this tradition: masturbation defined a stage in human development. Finally, in the late twentieth century, masturbation became for some a key element in the struggle for sexual, personal, and artistic liberation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined the MPAA's assertion that sexual and violent content are treated equally when rating a film. It was hypothesized that sex and violence are not treated equally based on a content analysis of 210 sequences from 13 films consisting of material present in unrated or NC-17-rated—but not in R-rated—versions of the same film. It was hypothesized that more sexual sequences than violent sequences would be removed from R-rated films. The findings supported the hypotheses.
The Social Organization of Sexuality reports the complete results of the nation's most comprehensive representative survey of sexual practices in the general adult population of the United States. This highly detailed portrait of sex in America and its social context and implications has established a new and original scientific orientation to the study of sexual behavior. "The most comprehensive U.S. sex survey ever." âUSA Today "The findings from this survey, the first in decades to provide detailed insights about the sexual behavior of a representative sample of Americans, will have a profound impact on how policy makers tackle a number of pressing health problems." âAlison Bass, The Boston Globe "A fat, sophisticated, and sperm-freezingly serious volume. . . . This book is not in the business of giving us a good time. It is in the business of asking three thousand four hundred and thirty-two other people whether they had a good time, and exactly what they did to make it so good." âAnthony Lane, The New Yorker New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
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- Kirk Honeycutt
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