Indie Sex

(Photo found here.)

Violet Blue has a mini-review of the new IFC series that debuted this weekend - Indie Sex. Ms. Blue is an author, blogger, and sex educator. Given her sex positive pedigree, it's not surprising that found it riveting. I too have watched it and found it informative as well as entertaining but I just can't gush over it like Ms. Blue.

One thing that struck me came in the last episode when John Cameron Mitchell was discussing his film Shortbus. He described it as being about a group of sexually dysfunctional New Yorkers and it occurred to me that many of the folks interviewed were from New York. When I shifted my mind from the flesh on my TV screen and looked at the show critically, I felt it was overly pedantic. There are times when it feels like the program bombards the viewer with the pontificating of film critics from New York. If you are a reviewer from the Village Voice or The New Yorker, then your opinions about sex and its role in life & art are privileged or sacrosanct. I agreed with most of what was said but it got old hearing the same people espousing essentially the same point of view over and over and over. I think the lone voice outside of the film community was Dita von Teese, a burlesque performer and you've got to be shittin' me if you think I'm going to accept her commentary as being typical vox populi. There were no dissenters, not even someone saying, "I think sex certainly has a role in art generally and film specifically but this particular movie was crap."

Watching a critic in his late 20s give an encomium for Porky's made me acutely aware that virtually everyone was fairly young. This guy was shitting his pants when the film came out and this brings up another criticism. With the emphasis on younger interviewees, there was an overload of comments about how this person or that saw a particular film as a youth followed by how the experience made the person feel and react. I wasn't expecting a bunch of octogenarians to give their perspectives on blue movies from the 1930s but how hard could it have been to find folks who were mature adults in the 1980s to talk about the teen sex flick? How difficult could it have been to find an older person who could give a first hand account of watching the portrayals of sex and sexuality in films change from, say, the 1950s up to the present? I felt like yelling at the television, "There are still people alive from back then, you know. You don't have to have someone born in the mid-1960s up there talking about the period as if it were ancient history!"

While the series is to be applauded for taking a serious look at topics that don't get a lot of attention and some of which are taboo, it is easy to watch and think of it as white people talking about white people who make movies about beautiful white people having sex. For all the lip service paid to the notion that indie films portray sex and sexuality in ways that are more realistic and more like the experiences of real folks in the audiences at theatres, there were sure a ton of groups of real people excluded. The only instance where there was an abundance of people of color came during the "Teens" episode in which one film about black teenage girls was discussed - Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.. That's it, as far as I can recall. And the films discussed to the exclusion of one featured thin people who conformed to the popular notions of beauty. The only instance of someone who is overweight being featured was again in the "Teens" episode with the French film À ma soeur! (Fat Girl). Have films never addressed the sexuality of an overweight adult? The vast majority of people in the films discussed were stereotypes of physical beauty. The women were thin as were the men and, at least in newer films, the gents were all perfectly fit and hairless.

I can see why Violet Blue was riveted by the series and can understand that she saw a portrayal of sex & sexuality in the films featured in which she can see her experiences reflected. After all, she is young, white, thin, and conventionally pretty. The Indie Sex series broached an interesting and important topic – of that there's no doubt. But it was unable to justify its claim that indie films give a reflection of the sexual experiences and sexuality of the average Janes and Joes who populate theatre audiences. The program was too white, too pretty, and relied too much on the opinions of younger, cosmopolitan New Yorkers.