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Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
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Reviewed by David James
Rating: 
Who could resist a title like Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself? Written by Bella Heesom (and performed by her and Sara Alexander) the show is about a woman's relationship with her genitals and finds its subject perched on the intersection of biological urges and societal pressure.
The basic structure is an (I assume) semi-autobiographical tale which begins with Heesom's earliest sexual awakenings and takes us to the present day, stopping off along the way at key moments that shaped her sexuality. That's overlaid with a dialogue between her brain and her clitoris, through which we observe how societal conditioning has messed up her capacity to experience true pleasure.
The show wears its heart on its sleeve, at times preaching directly to the audience about feminine empowerment, anger at patriarchal expectations and an often incandescent sense of fury that the centre of a woman's sexual pleasure is stigmatised, mocked and belittled. The rear of the stage is taken up by a gradually evolving projection that sums up the status quo they're battling against, showing slogans like "Female Genitals are Gross", "You Are A Sex Object" and "The Female Orgasm Is A Bonus"
The show is aimed squarely at cis women (at straight Western cis women if you wanted to get precise), with the majority female audience cheering and clapping at the more insightful lines of dialogue. But, and I cannot stress this enough, Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva... is so good that audiences of all genders and sexual preferences can and should check this out.
The quality of the writing is superb, the structure of the show is tuned to perfection, the production values are well above average. Best of all, it's absolutely hilarious. Heesom's cerebral and nervy character is in a classic straight-man/comic partnership with Alexander's innocently and (adorably) upbeat clitoris. The show is funny to a level that the pair often have to wait for the audience to finish laughing before they continue - always a good sign.
Beyond the laughs, the show has an emotional core which transcends a simple polemic against the miseries of the patriarchy and becomes something more universally uplifting. I don't want to diminish the show's laser-precise focus on female sexuality, but no matter who you are you'd have to have a heart of stone not to feel a rush of emotions at the show's remarkable climactic scenes.
These theoretically are sex-positive times. Open a glossy lifestyle magazine or Sunday broadsheet and you're likely to find columnists espousing sexual freedom and female emancipation. But though things are undeniably an improvement on the past, there's still a huge culture of prudishness and shame caked on top of the ways we approach sex and specifically female genitalia - I mean, why is a "cunt" the absolute worst thing you can call someone?
Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva... (and other similarly inclined cultural objects) are gradually chipping away at all this. Late in the show, the title is explained: it's a line from a poem about 4000-year-old Mesopotamian sex goddess Inanna, whose vulva was widely revered as a holy place. It's a story reminds us that the stigma we see all around us isn't inevitable. Changes like this don't happen overnight, but this production is contributing to a slow shift in perception for the better.
Perhaps there's an argument that shows like this are preaching to the converted. Judging from the audience when I was there, people attending this will be politically switched on and smart women. The people actively promoting the status quo wouldn't go near a fringe show with a name like Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself in a million years. But, Heesom argues that women must not just defeat the misogynist leering at them from a building site, they must also evict the one society has lodged in their own heads.
I had a great time. Heesom is a genuinely insightful writer (I similarly enjoyed her previous show My World Has Exploded A Little Bit), her partnership with Sara Alexander fizzes with comic chemistry and Donnacadh O’Briain’s direction is fantastic. It's the full package and is a show destined to go far.
Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself is at Ovalhouse until 25 May. Tickets here.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
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Whether you're after hetero-vanilla glossy L.A. action or furtive brown-bag fetish ultraporn Madame Roxy's Erotic Emporium has you covered. Snugly nestled in a Soho back alley, the bulging shelves showcase a kaleidoscope of fetishes, from cheeky uniform kink to pregnancy porn to scat to snuff. If you're looking for toys, there's paddles, butt-plugs, vibrators - even an autodildonic motorised fuck-throne! There's even a peep show theatre in the basement, complete with the standard stained carpets and reams of tissue.
Truly Madame Roxy's is everything anyone could ever want in a sex shop.
A felt sex shop anyway.
Madame Roxy's is the latest project from one of my favourite artists, felt-wrangler extraordinaire Lucy Sparrow. I first saw her the 2013 Whitecross Street Festival, where her felt Rose West in the style Andy Warhol was drawing loud abuse from angry passers by. I figured any artist whose work inspires public threats to burn it is someone to pay attention to.
Sparrow really hit the big time with last year's Cornershop, recreating the contents of a local newsagent entirely from felt. All the big media cheeses weighed in, from The Daily Mail to Buzzfeed. Open for the summer, it was impressive in every regard, from the inspiration to the effort to the execution. At the time I wondered how Sparrow was going to top it - surely she's taken felt just about as far as it can go?
Not even close. Madame Roxy's is a quantum leap forward in felt - a punky, political, precision constructed art experience - something that makes the mind boggle the moment you step inside. Though made of felt, the shop has an instant verisimilitude - so much so that, on the first day of opening, an embarrassed businessman crept inside and tried to buy Viagra, the staff having to carefully explain that this is an art installation and not an actual sex shop.
First and most obviously, seeing graphic sexual acts rendered in fabric is funny. Felt is inherently unthreatening; recalling primary school arts and crafts or grandmotherly Christmas presents. A buttplug, normally plastic, shiny and rubbery, becomes huggable, the spanking paddles more likely to tickle a partner than sting them. Sparrow takes the invitingly tactile quality of felt as far towards perversion as it's possible to go; even felt watersports rendered in gold glitterpen and 'Vomit Vixens' ("The most revolting centrefold EVER!") land on just the right side of sweet.
It'd be easy to stop there, but scattered amongst the shelves are works that seriously prick an audience's liberal consciences. "Some like it Hot.. Some Like it Sweet.. Some like it VIOLENT" depicts a man strangling a naked woman, "Snuff films presents: DEATH BY BEHEADING" shows two men slitting a young girl's throat and, in the most disturbing one I spotted, "No Legs. No Arms. Amputee Porn." appears to show a limbless, decomposing corpse.
It's in these unnerving titles that Madame Roxy's marks itself as truly special. Without them it'd be easy to level criticism that Sparrow is merely making a cute n' cuddly sex shop experience. Nobody wants to go into some bubblewrapped, self-censored fantasy slum designed for well-to-do middle classers who wouldn't dream of treading the cum-stained corridors of a genuine Soho establishment.
That reticence, coupled with the dominance of internet porn, threatens the neighbouring (not felt) sex shops with extinction. After all, these days people prefer to pleasure themselves behind locked bedroom doors rather than popping into central London and furtively stuffing a brown paper bag under their coat. In the interests of research I popped over the road from Madame Roxy's and had a nice chat with the proprietor of Up West British Adult Shop. She was over the moon with the popularity of their new neighbour and called my attention to the fact that depicting many of the sex acts on Roxy's shelves are now illegal in this country (not, apparently, in felt form)
The two interiors make for a fascinating contrast, Sparrow's furry friendliness seems all the more amusing in comparison to the sea of glistening cellophane DVD wrappers and silicone rubber phalluses. Sadly these shops are probably going the way of the dodo, stamped out by a combination of online porn and skyrocketing rents. Soho, for decades an oasis of counterculture in the heart of London, is becoming gradually crushed under the weight of luxury flats and chintzy bespoke cakeries.
Madame Roxy's reminds us that these places are a crucial part of Soho's psychological fabric - the seasoning that gives the neighourhood its distinctive atmosphere. Free from prudery, moral judgment and entirely sex positive, Madame Roxy's might be the best site-specific installation I've ever seen, ultimately the value of these establishments. It's a good thing too there's precious few people who'll publically sing their praises.
But primarily, Madame Roxy's is entertaining, hilarious and, surprisingly, often kinda arousing. There's something for every persuasion on these carefully crafted and curated shelves. It's only open for a week, so I urge you to check it out as soon as possible. There's nothing else like it in London.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
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In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to measure willingness to obey authority. The volunteers for the experiment were asked to quiz a person hooked up to an electro-shock generator. Every time the person being questioned answered incorrectly, the volunteer would be instructed to give them an electric shock, increasing in voltage for every question they got wrong. A third person, a scientist, kept instructing the volunteer to shock the subject, even as the volunteer feebly protested. As the shocks increased in voltage, the subject began to scream in pain, or bang on the walls. If the volunteer wanted to halt the experiment, the scientist ‘running’ the experiment would verbally prod them saying phrases like “The experiment requires that you continue” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
If the volunteer subject repeatedly stated his desire to end the experiment, then after four verbal prods the experiment was halted. If they chose to continue, the experiment ended with the volunteer administering a massive 450v shock three times in succession, with no response from the subject, who the volunteer could expect to assume they have killed. Milgram and his colleagues expected a tiny percentage of volunteers to progress beyond 300v shocks, yet to their surprise 65% of the subjects administered the final ‘fatal’ shocks. These volunteers were barbers, telephone workers, salespeople and businessmen, ordinary people who were apparently prepared to kill on command for $4.00 (plus 50c carfare).
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| Dreama Walker as Becky |
It’s impossible not to think of the Milgram experiments during Compliance, a film that shows us men and women meekly submitting to assumed authority and sexually abusing a teenage girl. The film is set in a generic KFC/McDonalds-alike fast food restaurant called ‘ChickWich’. In the middle of a busy day the manager, Sandra (Ann Dowd) receives a phonecall from a man identifying himself as Officer Daniels. He explains that one of her employees has been accused of stealing from a customer, and gives her a vague physical description. Sandra identifies this ‘thief’ as Becky (Dreama Walker), and summons her to the managers office. The vast majority of the rest of the film takes place in this office, as, under telephone instruction from 'Officer Daniels', employees and friends strip, humiliate, sexually abuse and rape Becky.
Of course, 'Officer Daniels', isn't a police officer at all. The whole thing is an impossibly cruel prank phone call, a term that barely seems able to cover the scope of what happens. As you watch these fast-food workers abandon first their autonomy and then their morality you begin to wonder just how moronic these people are. The call begins plausibly, but by the time you’ve been instructed to bend a naked, crying teenage girl over your knee and spank her surely - surely - you’d think something was up?
The apparent stupidity of these characters is immensely frustrating, but you have to watch this with the knowledge that all of this really happened. The first image of the film is: “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. The white on black text takes up the entire screen, as if to impress the truthfulness of the film upon us from the very beginning. That the film rigorously sticks to the facts is key to what makes Compliance worth watching, and more importantly, means you’re able to watch it without feeling like you're getting prurient voyeuristic thrills.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing this film. I was already familiar with the incident it dramatises, and having done some cursory research I was worried it was going to be uncomfortably exploitational. I got an email prior to the press screening informing me to “please note that this film contains scenes of forced nudity, sexual manipulation and implied sexual violence. I wouldn’t recommend it for a Valentine’s Day date movie.” I reckon I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for watching disturbing films, but frankly, the idea of sitting through what sounded like a 90 minute rape scene on Valentine’s Day didn’t exactly fill my heart with joy.
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| Ann Dowd as Sandra |
Fortunately, Compliance treats its subject matter with careful sensitivity. Dreama Walker’s Becky is an attractive woman, but watching her shivering and naked under cold fluorescent light makes you feel guilty for not looking away. The humiliations she endures are never framed to arouse; they focus on hands pressed against greasy floors, her tear-streaked cheeks or the cardboard boxes of branded condiments around her.
To some degree it’s arguable that Zobel has shot the film to make us identify with Becky. I think it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s easy to forget that ‘Officer Daniels’ never sees what’s happening, he’s left to imagine everything, constantly asking for descriptions. The audience becomes his eyes, dispassionately observing the events. Most of the characters in this film are so blindly moronic in their devotion to authority that’s it’s difficult to sympathise with them. Worryingly I even found myself getting a little frustrated at the passivity of the victim. All of this leads to ‘Officer Daniels’ being the only person who knows as much as we do, making the audience queasily complicit in his crime.
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| Set designers! There are other colours than blue and orange! |
But it’s the restaurant manager Sandra that becomes the most complex character. Expertly played by Ann Dowd, she embodies much of what Compliance is trying to tell us about the dangers of submitting to authority. In most circumstances she’d seem perfectly nice, if a little dull, but her critical flaw is the notion that being polite and pleasant is enough to get through life and that questioning authority is inherently a bad thing. In the rigid hierarchy of fast food this mindset works well. At the start of the film we see her pointedly telling her staff that they need to stick to ChickWich operating procedure to make it through the day. Worryingly, we also catch her shooting annoyed looks at Becky, raising the disturbing point that at least subconsciously she wants to see this girl being taken down a peg.
As the abuse gets worse, Sandra’s position becomes more entrenched. She strips a clearly distressed Becky, apologising to her all the while but never once considering that she could just not strip her. She willingly deludes herself into believing that leaving a naked Becky alone with a man she barely knows is the sensible thing to do. In the disturbing epilogue to the film we see Sandra being interviewed about her complicity in Becky’s abuse. She considers herself absolved of responsibility, slipping into easy, mindless small-talk to try and deflect questioning away from disturbing questions. Clearly she has learned nothing.
It’s incredibly tempting to condemn Sandra outright(and, by extension, the real woman she’s based on), but what both this film and the Milgram experiment demonstrates is that a desire to submit to authority is a very human trait, one that to some degree is present in all of us. What Milgram realised, and what the events of Compliance demonstrate, are that when ‘normal’ individuals feel they have surrendered responsibility for their actions to an authority figure, they can be made to do the most monstrous things. Though Compliance may be almost documentarian in its rigorous approach, the restaurant setting also serves as a neat microcosm for society as a whole. Sandra is a perfect example of someone who has completely surrendered herself to a series of stacked systems; the franchise rules for operating her restaurant; the wider corporate environment of fast food and the justice system. Her decisions are not her own: she doesn’t think about her actions, she just follows set procedure. And as the film effectively demonstrates, when someone exploits their knowledge of those procedures and systems of authority, they can get Sandra, or anyone for that matter, to do almost anything.
Despite my misgivings going in I quickly began to, if not enjoy, then appreciate Compliance. It’s coolly and intelligently directed, making excellent use of what I assume is a relatively limited budget. There’s too much blue and orange in the set, prop and costume design but aside from that the film conjures up a believable corporate environment from thin air. All the performances are great, a few bordering on brilliant. The sense of tension and dread once the phone rings rivals anything I’ve seen lately, and the film just about sustains it throughout its perfect, concise 90 minute running time. It’s not a movie for everyone, but as an expose of the dark side of normality it’s succeeds brilliantly.
So, go and see it. No, really, go and see it when it comes out. You’d better do what I say or I’m going to have to call in my superior. You’ve got two choices here; go and see it, or there’ll be trouble. And you don’t want trouble right? Of course not, you’re a good person. So go and see it. Trust me.
****/*****
‘Compliance’ is released 22 March 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
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‘The Sessions’ is about a sweet and awkward guy trying to lose his virginity. He’s a poet, he’s sensitive, he’s thoughtful, and he's pretty good looking. It’s the stuff of a thousand feel-good romantic comedies with one difference: our hero is paralysed from the neck down and lives inside an iron lung. The film unflinchingly grasps this thorny problem, examining the emotional and physical practicalities of sex for the severely disabled. And it does this while being absolutely hilarious.
This is a true story, adapted from a 'On Seeing a Sex Surrogate', an essay by polio sufferer Mark O’Brien. He could only spend a few hours outside his iron lung each day, yet graduated from UC Berkeley and worked as a journalist, poet and disabled rights advocate. He’s played by John Hawkes who immediately imbues Mark with a mordant, self deprecating humour. It’s a hell of a role to play, spending the entire film unable to move anything except your head puts some pretty big restrictions on what an actor can and can’t do.
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| John Hawkes as Mark O'Brien |
Restrictions like these make the part initially feel like pre-packaged Oscar-bait, and comparisons to roles like Christy Brown in ‘My Left Foot’ are inevitable. Mark’s dignity and self-assuredness as he struggles not to let his life be entirely defined by his condition are powerful, moving and inspiring. But, smartly, ‘The Sessions’ isn’t a 'big and important' film, it’s self-contained, light-hearted and frequently overtly farcical. This is a film that’s not afraid to look the elephant in the room square in the eye: a man who can’t move his body is going to have a difficult sex life.
The sessions of the title refer to Mark's visits to his ‘sex surrogate’, Christy Cohen-Greene, as played by Helen Hunt. She’s a fascinating character, someone who treats sex and eroticism in an extremely matter-of-fact way yet never without intimacy and warmth. From her first visit with Mark she informs him that she’s got a husband and children, and that they can only have six sessions with each other, both tactics presumably decided to try and avoid any emotional entanglement.
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| Helen Hunt as Christy Cohen-Greene |
From the first session she has with Hawkes she embodies a kind of relaxed, easy intimacy that is rare to see in film. She strips in a practiced, efficient manner, yet is still sexually potent. Hunt is conventionally beautiful and looks great naked, but what's most disarmingly attractive is her warmth and easy friendliness. Hunt’s character tries to define herself as an ‘all-woman’ to her patients, embodying mother, lover, best friend and therapist. She's expertly conscious about how Mark perceives her, knowing how he feels better than he does. Her problem is that while she clinically and accurately documents Mark's emotional state through the sessions, she ignores her own growing attachment to him.
Sex is primarily a vehicle for titillation in film, shot from a voyeuristic, prurient male gaze, artful, graceful and aesthetically pleasing. It isn’t like this in real life (well.. unless I've been doing it wrong..). It’s a jumble of tangled limbs, falling off beds, unexpected cramps, bashing your head on stuff and seeing people making some very strange faces. It’s sometimes farcical, sometimes clumsy, sometimes slightly embarrassing but (nearly) always great fun. It’s rare to see a film capture this so honestly and even though we giggle throughout most of the sex scenes, we also understand that they're serious moments of character development.
It's refreshing to see sex dealt with like this, and you’re quickly disabused of any notion that the film is being in any way gratuitous. ‘The Sessions’ treats sexuality and sex as essential components of the human being, stating quite bluntly a life without them is a life not fully lived. There’s a snag here though, namely that our protagonist is a devout Catholic, struggling with his own desires versus a doctrine that bans sex before marriage. This spiritual debate is shown through conversations between Mark and his priest, Father Brendan (William H. Macy). It would have been incredibly easy to make Father Brendon the antagonist in the film, a character unfairly preaching mind over matter to someone who wants to be more than just ‘mind’. But this is a positive portrayal of Catholicism and Christianity as an accommodating, religion with a God that will “give you a free pass on this one”. It’s weirdly novel to see organised religion as so empathetic and helpful to our hero’s quest.
Much of this positivity is down to a brilliant performance by William H. Macy. He’s a rare creature, a priest with a genuine desire to help and comfort rather than hector and chide. Although he spends time grappling with whether he’s able to recommend a course of sex therapy as compatible with Catholicism it’s clearly a one-sided fight. This is a person who’s struggling to fit what he already knows to be the right and kind course of action into his entrenched dogma.
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| William H. Macy as the impressively maned Father Brendan |
'The Sessions' is a film stuffed with well thought-out, pleasant characters like these. If there is an antagonist in the film it’s something as straightforward as our hero’s lack of self-confidence or his misbehaving dick. While Hawkes, Hunt and Macy get big, attention-grabbing dramatic moments, everyone slots seamlessly into the cosy, supportive world that’s conjured. Standouts are Moon Bloodgood’s ‘Vera’ and Annika Marks’ ‘Amanda’, both of whom convey a feminine saintliness without ever feeling like unrealistic wish-fulfilment figures. We explore these women's lives outside of Mark's social sphere, something that allows us to see them as smart, capable people with agency of their own.
The fact that everyone in the film is so damn nice and pleasant is perhaps a slight failing of the film. While we're interested and involved with their various problems there is little urgency here. You can't help but agree with the message that denying disabled sexuality is an insulting mistake, but the lack of any dissenting point of view to frame this message against slightly dilutes it. Aside from this, the attempts to ratchet up the tension in the film don't really work. While we're explicitly told that Mark's reason for wanting to have sex is a a result of a sense of impending death, this isn't exploited as a kind of time limit.
Ultimately, keeping the stakes low keeps our focus tightly on Mark and the people in his orbit. This is that rare thing, a genuinely inspiring story that doesn't rely on cheap emotional tricks or manipulating the audience with sappy cinematic romance. There is an unfortunate societal tendency to infantilise the disabled, to treat them as if their minds as well as their bodies are impaired. 'The Sessions' disabuses us of this notion, telling us to consider them as adults with the same desires and urges as anyone else. This results in an unembarrassed, clear-headed look at sexuality, making this one of the most emotionally mature films I've seen lately.
****
'The Sessions' is on general release from 18th January 2013
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