Tiger Beatdown

Ha, well, I was feeling pretty self-conscious about that Isaac Brock post! It was rough. Then, I clicked on the links in Smadin’s comment! Specifically, a link to a post by Jaclyn Friedman on the Yes Means Yes! Blog.

So, apparently, Ben Roethlisberger, a football player, has been accused of rape. When the woman who accused him reported this to her boss, he apparently told her that “most girls would feel lucky to get to have sex with someone like Ben Roethlisberger.” (See also, this statement about the Isaac Brock incident, by Pete Ritchey of Up Records: “It’s not like he had to make somebody have sex with him. He could have sex with anybody he wanted. [The Stranger] were like sharks going after him.” ) And then, there’s this:

And now, as these details emerge, ESPN has instructed its entire team of reporters to not report any of this information. [Update: ESPN may be easing its ban, but it’s still unclear how much and what will be reported.] Yes, the same network whose sideline reporter is currently being exploited all over the ‘net in a peeping tom video. You’d think that would make them more sympathetic to the sexual exploitation of women just trying to do their job, but they’re too focused on protecting access to the star athletes who are their cash cows to even do their basic job as journalists. That’s rape culture. When our media won’t talk about rape, people think it doesn’t happen, and the rapists face no consequences.

YEP! The Brock post stands.

*FOR THOSE WHO REQUIRE AN EXPLANATION: The Don’t Give Isaac Brock Money game has to do, not solely with the fact that he was accused of rape, but with his complicity in creating rape culture in his statements after the fact, or lack thereof, especially his statements about how he USED to be an anti-rape activist, but now he knows that WOMEN LIE, and he has been HOUNDED and BETRAYED and THE POLICE KNEW SHE WAS MAKING IT UP and maybe it’s unclear how exactly he’s been ruined by this given that he is still a FAMOUS ROCK STAR, but whatever. The narrative we accept is that the accused is the victim and the accuser is the victimizer, and this is is how rape culture works, and Isaac Brock is participating. Give the dude your cash, if you feel like his vocals are awesome enough to serve as an excuse.

So, apparently it is possible to make a decent rape-revenge movie. Or about half of one, anyway. 

You guys! I did not intend for this to be such a rape-scene-heavy feature! My plan was to cull the vast field of potential candidates down to a few movies that represented different lady-based fears. It went as follows: Ginger Snaps, fear of periods; Teeth, fear of the vagina; Ms. 45, fear of rape; Rosemary’s Baby, fear of pregnancy. Such was the plan. But then Teeth had all the raping in it, and then it was time to watch Ms. 45, and then I was like, “geez, I really don’t want to watch or think about or write on the topic of rape any more; thank God Rosemary’s Baby is coming up next.” 

Then I remembered that Rosemary’s Baby also has a rape scene in it. Rosemary’s Baby (Which She Is Going To Give Birth To Because She Has Been Raped By Satan) would be a more appropriate title for that picture! 

Yes, if there is one thing I have learned, over the course of my studies in lady horror, it is that people who make horror movies focused on female experience just love to spice things up with a rape scene or two. Which is problematic, given that women are far more likely to be sexually assaulted than they are to have werewolf sisters or vagina teeth or apartments that they lease from Satan. The rest of it is fun and games, but rape is real. And it’s scary. 

What’s strange is that that Ms. 45, the rape-revenge exploitation pick, and the one movie from this list that I fully expected not to like, turned out to have one of the best takes on sexual assault, and on the fear and trauma that results from rape, that I’ve seen yet. For a while, anyway. 

It is, however, an exploitation movie, and concerned with amping things up as much as possible. You can tell because it begins with its lead character, Thana, experiencing two – count them, two – separate stranger rapes over the course of an afternoon. The first happens when a man pulls her off the street, into an alley. She doesn’t fight back, and she gets out alive. Then, while she’s still reeling, she stumbles into her apartment. There’s a strange man there. His intentions are not good. 

If rape scenes trigger you, you will be triggered by this movie. I was. It’s not Irreversible – the scenes are relatively brief, and free of gory details – but it’s still terrifying. (From a review on Evil Dread, which seems to encapsulate what your average rape-revenge fan wants, and gets, from films of this genre: “the actual rape scenes are not graphical at all, we don’t get to see anything… take I Spit on Your Grave or Irreversible were [sic] the rape scenes are really drawn out… [it] adds more to the whole outcome. Unfortunately it’s too ‘nice and quick’ here.”).

I suppose if what you’re looking for is extremely brutal, detailed rape simulations, Ms. 45 is not the movie for you. Yet these scenes are terrifying, because they happen like rape happens: out of nowhere, with no warning, changing everything forever. Also, Thana is mute; she can’t scream. 

This is when the movie twists and barrels into full horror. During the second rape, Thana manages to grab a weapon (first a paperweight, then an iron) and kill her attacker. Going to the police never seems to occur to her; she just hides the body in her bathtub. It’s this, the way her life quickly spins completely out of control in a sequence that plays like an extended bad dream – first you’re raped, then you’ve killed someone, then you’ve got a dead rapist in your tub, then you’re cutting up the dead rapist, then you’ve got a refrigerator full of dead rapist, then you’re trying to dispose of the dead rapist parts, then you’re killing people more or less in self-defense because they might find out about the dead rapist parts that you’re trying to dispose of – that I really admire. It feels, weirdly, like having been raped: having a big, ugly, gory, unbelievable secret that you have to hide at all costs. Thana’s muteness is a big, clunky symbol, but it works – the girl literally can’t talk about it. 

A word, here, on how Ms. 45 played to male audiences at the time of its release: 

Personally, I was with Thana throughout. This is pretty easy, given that the filmmakers actually spend some time on her trauma, and that Zoe Lund conveys it beautifully. She has panic attacks at work; she can’t take her clothes off to shower because she flashes back to the attack (there’s a shot in this scene that I believe was repeated almost verbatim in Teeth); she’s falling apart, and every time a man comes on to her (they’re all, it seems, coming on to her – including her creepy, patronizing boss) she’s sick and terrified.  

So, eventually she just starts killing them. More and more of them. Indiscriminately. And this is where the movie gets goofy. 

Not all of the goofiness is bad! Some of it is funny! The scene in which Thana delivers sweet justice to one of those dudes who hits on you in the street and won’t go away (“hey, I just want to talk to you!”) is a delight, as is the scene where she finally figures out how to reconcile her rapist-disposal needs with the fact that her neighbor’s dog is always hungry. Yet it’s hard to reconcile the tone of these scenes with the unmitigated terror of the early parts of the movie. The violence transitions from being real and scary to over-the-top and campy. And the scene in which she tarts herself up to go on a killing spree in the Neighborhood of Racist Stereotypes – she nabs, in one night, a black pimp, some black gang members, and a wealthy “sheik” – is just, well… no. NO, is all I have to say to that scene. 

Thana becomes a monster. She’s a serial killer; she’s unhinged. It’s that transition that bothered me most – how the movie goes from portraying her fear to fearing her. Yet, to deal with that, you have to deal with how very ’70s this movie is. Even though it was released in 1981! There are Plato’s Retreat references; there is the depiction of Manhattan as a wasteland of random violence; there is the freaking title of the movie, for God’s sake. “Ms.” was a title with very specific connotations, when Ms. 45 was being made. 

The movie, actually, seems to be about dealing with the implications of feminism. In one vastly offensive yet somehow moving scene, a man describes to Thana how his wife’s case of the Feminine Mystique (“she was getting antsy, she wanted something to do – I said, ‘No wife of mine’s going to work'”) led to job-having and, eventually, lesbianism. (Ain’t that the way?) Thana seems to hesitate to kill him; he collaborates in the act. 

It’s a scene that seems to sum up most of the movie: we’re asked to feel for Thana, and also encouraged to fear Thana, because men (and this movie was made by, and for, men) just didn’t know what to do about the whole “feminism” thing. (They still don’t know, actually, but back then they talked about it.) Like, here are all these women, right? And they’re angry. Too angry. Scary angry. But, then again: haven’t they been put through a lot of shit, these women? What if they have a reason to be angry at you? What if you deserve it? 

Who, really, is the problem here? 

What are you afraid of? 

Say, you know what you probably shouldn’t put in your movie? COMIC RAPE SCENES!

“Oh, but Sady,” you are saying, “I am a highly respected Artist of the Cinema! I like to Push the Envelope with my Cinematic Art! And the rape envelope is the one I wish to push more than any other! For example: rape scenes are always so serious. Why? Why not add some light comic touches to what would otherwise be a total downer of a rape?”

To you, I say: SETH ROGEN, STOP E-MAILING ME RIGHT THIS SECOND. Ha, no! What I actually say is that this is, quite literally, the stupidest idea that anyone has ever had. It is so stupid that it boggles the mind; so stupid that I cannot even begin to explain to you how and why it is stupid. It would take, basically, an entire seminar class on Why This Is Stupid, with several guest lecturers and many pages of required reading, for me to begin to unpack precisely why your urge to present rape as a fun, funny, non-serious thing is as stupid as it is. Even then, I might not be able to communicate it to you, because of how stupid you are. Right now, there is a kid somewhere in the Midwest trying to see if he can stick a fork into his toaster whilst jamming the other end of it up his nose, and this idea, stupid though it may be, is actually both more understandable and smarter than your idea, if your idea is to make a movie in which there is a comic rape scene.

So, it’s really a shame that Teeth has several of those, because otherwise it would be a pretty decent film.

So, the plot, first. The movie opens with a scene of a very young toddler, Dawn, being bullied by her slightly older stepbrother. He asks to see her vagina, then he puts his finger into it. When he takes his finger out, it’s bleeding. Cut to several years later: Dawn is now a high school student, and an abstinence counselor.

At this point, I was still fairly impressed. They drew a connection between a woman’s choice not to have sex and a history of abuse that may make sex legitimately scary and problematic for her! Way to not make the easy joke, movie! Teeth is actually fairly good at showing us how Dawn feels, in a way that instinctively makes sense: why would she want to have sex, when boys are harassing her in school hallways about “popping her cherry,” and her brother is always bringing over girls who end up crying about how they don’t want to do it “that way?” (“That way,” for the record, is anal.) Abstinence education, in real life, is awful – but for Dawn, as for a lot of girls, it feels safer than the alternative.

Then, of course, she goes on a date with a fellow abstinence counselor and he rapes her. And she accidentally severs his penis, mid-rape, with the fangs that are apparently hidden in her vagina. And the movie starts to go downhill really, really fast.

Because, after a fairly realistic interlude in which she goes into post-traumatic shock (which then veers off into an interlude that is, I guess, sort of realistic, but also terrible, in that she expels herself from the abstinence movement because she is no longer “pure” – geez, yeah, the fact that YOUR RAPIST died in AN ACCIDENT which fortuitously prohibited him from RAPING YOU SOME MORE is totally your fault) we learn that Dawn, unlike basically every rape survivor anywhere in the history of the world, doesn’t have to spend a long time dealing with PTSD or trust issues or an entirely understandable aversion to sex or anything like that.

Nope, now that she’s been raped, she’s totally into sex! All she needs is a new boyfriend, who can show her that sex is awesome! By, um, giving her tranquilizers first?

Oh, but first she has to be sexually assaulted some more. By her gynecologist, so that she can take his hand off. In a scene that is played for laughs.

Oh, and did I mention that the stepbrother who molested her continues to make gross, scary, predatory sexual advances toward her for the rest of the movie? And that she eventually decides to sleep with and/or castrate him as a means of getting “revenge?” And that the “revenge” is ALSO played for laughs?

Yeah.

And yet, certain moments within the film are really good! There are some hilarious scenes, it has a wonderful lead actress (Jess Weixler – she’s quite convincing, given the fact that almost none of her character’s actions or decisions make any sense whatsoever), and at certain moments it even seems to be making some decent points. There are the makings of a solid horror comedy in Teeth. It’s hard to tell where it went wrong. If I had to guess, though, I’d say it was all the raping.

Personally, I blame Camille Paglia! Of course, I blame Camille Paglia for everything, but this time I have some grounds: the movie was apparently inspired by her lectures on the vagina dentata. (A scene in which Dawn reads aloud from an unmistakably Paglian speech on the subject – “the man must battle the woman, the toothed creature, and break her power… sex becomes a hero’s epic journey back to the dark cavern of the womb” – while steadily getting more and more freaked out is particularly good; I think we’ve all felt that way, when reading Paglia’s overblown prose poems about genitalia.) But Teeth shares two of Paglia’s fatal flaws: first, a radical misunderstanding of what does and does not constitute female “power,” and second, an insistence on casting men – sometimes really awful, criminal men! – as victims.

First things first: basically, Dawn’s amazing “power” doesn’t work – CAN’T work – unless some rapist has actually succeeded in raping her. So, there have to be a lot of rape scenes in the movie, just to show how it works. We’re told that her vagina represents the next stage in vagina evolution – the tables have turned, the prey has become the predator, something something Paglia something – but I can’t help but notice that this adaptive development doesn’t prevent Dawn from being sexually assaulted more than once in the space a few days. Being able to stop a rape is nice, but not being raped would be much nicer. As a self-defense tactic, a vagina dentata ranks below a can of mace.

Let’s go back to that first rape scene, the one with the boy from her abstinence group. It’s pretty nasty – not only in execution, but in spirit. At one point, Dawn’s rapist snaps that he “hasn’t even jerked off since Easter.” We’re meant to infer that the rape is a direct consequence of the chastity: if girls won’t put out, boys will have to take it from them by force.

Men, this movie seems to imply, are naturally rapists – almost every single male character in the movie attempts or commits some form of sexual assault. (It’s trickier when we come to the case of her boyfriend, because the movie clearly doesn’t want us to see their sex as anything other than consensual – still, he has sex with her under false pretenses, while she’s sedated, which is predatory at the very least.) It’s an old, old message: male sexual desire has to be gratified, by any means necessary, and it’s a girl’s job to protect herself from it. This is untrue – you can, as it turns out, pop a boner without immediately sticking it into the closest available orifice – but it’s widely taught, and it’s why rape is so often excused, overlooked, or swept under the rug. What else was the guy supposed to do? Not get off?

And the movie follows through by portraying Dawn’s attackers as victims. The predatory, incestuous brother at one point confesses that he abuses Dawn because he’s “in love” with her. One review called Teeth “the most alarming cautionary tale for men since Fatal Attraction;” it was reprinted on the movie’s poster, and was featured in its trailer. Which is odd, since Teeth is only a “cautionary tale” if you need to be “cautioned” against putting your penis into somebody’s vagina without her permission.

By the end of the movie, Dawn has come fully into her “power.” What this means, in practice, is that she is now going to have consensual sex with men who would otherwise rape her, so that she can rip their dicks off. There are about a million legitimate ways to actually claim power – she could take a self-defense class, she could work at a rape crisis hotline, she could EVEN, unbelievably, teach a class for young men on how to recognize predatory behavior in themselves and their friends, and how to oppose it – but this is the route she chooses, the route the movie wants us to believe is her best option. She’ll fight sexual violence with sexual violence. Because this particular vision of sexual politics is a closed system: prey or predator, victim or victimizer. There’s no third option. There’s no way out.

So: when I was young, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, my favorite thing to do was to get my lady friends together for an overnight party and watch three or four horror movies in a row.

I could never watch horror movies alone – it was too boring – but I loved watching them with other girls. We’d scream at all the same moments; we’d talk about which scenes were the most fucked-up; we’d try to outdo each other with the movies that we chose. There was something about the act of watching and enjoying the movies that felt transgressive. Even though horror movies have always been aimed at teenagers, we felt that we were seeing something forbidden, something that offered us a knowledge of the world that we weren’t supposed to have.

Then I grew up, and actually experienced some of the world. After that, I didn’t watch horror movies any more.

I am telling you this for a reason, as it turns out! I am telling you this because it is, I have learned, impossible for me to be totally objective about Ginger Snaps. It is made, I think, specifically for women who used to be awkward teenage horror fans, and have ingested a substantial amount of feminist theory since then. When something caters so specifically to your experiences and your concerns, it is hard to tell whether it is any good. Then again, I realize, dudes must feel this way all the time!

So: a bit about the movie. It is about two sisters, Brigitte and Ginger. When we meet them, they are in that awful teenage sex-and-death place – a place it was probably particularly easy to access in the ’90s, but which has been around as long as there have been teenagers (“Leader of the Pack”) and will be around as long as there are teenagers in the world (um, BrokeNCYDE? For some reason). Ginger likes to play with knives and stage gory fake suicides for art projects; Brigitte, who is younger, goes along with it. Ginger plans to commit suicide (it’s “the ultimate fuck you,” she says) by the age of sixteen if she hasn’t managed to escape the suburbs; Brigitte goes along with that, too. They wear mall-Goth clothes and enjoy thinking up elaborate, violent death scenes for popular girls. You know the drill.

Brigitte and Ginger, like lots of teens, are into death because they think that makes them special. It seems like a way of being above-it-all, naughty, sophisticated, knowing. People are scared of it, so they pretend not to be; people don’t talk about it, so they do. It’s a mode of behavior particularly favored by those who haven’t fucked yet: all that fascination and fear of the body and its messy potentialities can be channeled into something that conveniently allows you to avoid thinking or even talking about sex.

Brigitte and Ginger are fifteen and sixteen, and neither one has ever had a period.

Ginger gets it first. (“You kill yourself to be different, and your own body betrays you.”) She gets it, unfortunately, on the very same night that she is attacked by a werewolf. Brigitte manages to beat the thing off of her, so she lives; however, when she gets home, both she and Brigitte are forced to confront some unpleasant facts about Ginger’s Changing Body.

One of the major strengths of the film – which a lot of people have commented on – is how it manages to portray incipient werewolf status as, more or less, identical to puberty. Ginger’s razors are filled with an ungodly amount of hair; she’s withdrawn and moody; she can lapse into unhinged, frightening rage at any time and for no reason, and she seems particularly testy about people who impinge on her bathroom time. Brigitte and Ginger seem just as freaked out about the fact that Ginger is bleeding out of her crotch as they do about the fact that she’s slowly becoming a serial killer; a scene in which they discover that tufts of hair are growing out of the claw marks on Ginger’s chest is interrupted when Brigitte notices that she’s dripping onto the floor.

Yet it’s easy, most of this – maybe too easy: a scene in which they visit the nurse to ask whether “hair that wasn’t there before” is normal is particularly broad, and not very smart. These girls must have had to sit through a sex ed class, or at least a talk from their mother. And it quickly moves into very problematic territory, when we learn that becoming a werewolf also means wanting to have sex.

Yes, Ginger starts making out with boys: publicly, and enthusiastically, and ferociously. She also starts dressing in a way that makes boys want to make out with her (although she still looks unappetizingly mall-goth, if you ask me; the layered necklaces are a particularly icky touch). This is when we learn that Ginger is evil. This is when Brigitte becomes the movie’s hero.

When I say that I don’t like Brigitte as the focus of the movie, this doesn’t mean that I don’t like Brigitte. She’s one of the better female leads I’ve ever seen – and also one the least conventional. Most “ugly,” “awkward” girls in movies are neither ugly nor awkward: Brigitte has a wonky nose, and doesn’t pluck her eyebrows, and her hair is always in her face, and she has trouble making eye contact, making her one of the more realistic girl geeks in memory, even though she hugely overplays the geekiness in the early scenes. You also get the sense that, although she is always – and willingly – overshadowed by Ginger, she’ll make a better grown-up than Ginger could. She’s smart, and practical, and she has a strength of will – a coping ability – that Ginger lacks.

Girls like Ginger flame out early: they want the world to change for them, and when it doesn’t they’re sometimes destroyed. They give up, whether “giving up” means doing too many drugs or joining a sorority. Girls like Brigitte change to fit the world, because they have to, because everyone has to, but they manage to keep themselves more or less intact. Watching Brigitte come out of her shell, and out of Ginger’s shadow, is one of the most moving parts of the film.

Still, Brigitte, although wonderful in many ways, is more or less defined by her fear of being a woman: her fear of femininity, of sex, of just plain growing up. She keeps herself wrapped up in bulky clothes, pushes away a guy who is clearly interested in her, and always, always, always talks about sex or puberty or other, girlier girls with queasy, angry distaste. At a certain point, you realize that she lets her hair cover her face, not because she doesn’t know better, but because it’s a statement – a way of telling the world that she’s not going to let it in. And while I’m totally thrilled that there’s a movie out there which doesn’t oversimplify this kind of girl or turn her into a punchline or give her a miraculous makeover that leads to true love, I feel that the movie elevates Brigitte at Ginger’s expense. And Ginger deserves your affection.

Because Ginger is rage, pure rage, a kind of rage you rarely see in the movies: the rage of being female. Here is this thing that’s happening to her body, this process she has no control over; here is this hunger of hers that nobody understands, and that makes people hate her, even though boys are lining up to feed it. There’s a scene in a car, where she’s making out with a boy, and he gets overwhelmed and tries to slow her down. “Who’s the guy here?” he says. She cocks her head back, snarls the line back at him (“who’s the fucking guy here?”) and, basically, mauls him. The movie slips up in its characterization of Ginger, and eventually just makes her into a standard-issue Crazy Slut, but here’s the thing: Crazy Sluts don’t normally get scenes like this. It’s a good scene. I wish there were more like them in this movie.

I’m talking mostly about characters, because it’s mostly a movie about characters. For a horror movie, it’s not very scary: it gets a little bloodier and faster in the final act, but even then it’s not exactly visceral. It’s also, unfortunately, not very good at handling characters who aren’t Ginger and Brigitte. Her parents are cartoons; the other kids at school are high-school-movie cliches. (The Popular Girl is very mean! The Jock is very gross and sexist! The Rebel is unexpectedly sensitive; also, sexy!) This is exacerbated by the fact that, although Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle are pretty good actors (Isabelle, as Ginger, has some terrific comic timing), nobody else in the movie can act in the slightest, including the film’s only recognizable actor, Mimi Rogers. (Yeah, I said it. And what, Mimi Rogers? I ask you: and what?) One boy werewolf, who shows up in the middle of the movie, is notable mostly because the actor made the, um, distinctive choice to portray him as a sort of coked-up, sleazy Mark-Paul Gosselaar.

And yet, and yet: even though Ginger Snaps is too willfully “indie” and quirked-up to be a real horror movie, and too trashy and steeped in horror conventions to be a real indie movie, it may be worth it, just for the relationship between the girls.

Relationships between teenage girls (and teenage girls’ relationships with themselves) are hard to pin down or portray accurately and honestly, because they are – how to phrase this tastefully? – totally fucking insane. Those girls I watched horror movies with: I was closer to them than I ever have been, or probably ever will be, with any other friends. I was closer to them than I have been to most of my boyfriends. There’s a weird, overwhelming, mind-meld effect that takes place sometimes between girls: you live in each other and through each other, always trying to figure out how you are the same and how you are different, and loving both the differences and the sameness. Then comes sex, and The Patriarchy, to fuck everything up. Suddenly, you’re in competition with each other. If another girl is prettier than you, skinnier than you, more popular with boys, then she’s worth more. Everyone says so. And how can you love someone when you have to hope she doesn’t succeed – when her success makes you worth less?

But you love each other! But you hate each other! But you love each other! So you go ahead, doing both. The scenes of Brigitte and Ginger fighting – Ginger’s a monster! No, Brigitte’s just jealous! – are the best in the movie, primarily because we’ve seen how close they used to be, and we want them to be that close again. For that reason, it’s disappointing when the movie succumbs to horror conventions and makes Brigitte into Ginger’s nemesis. One of their final moments of bonding is also one of the goriest moments: the scene in which Ginger tests Brigitte by inviting her to drink a boy’s blood. What she’s asking for is solidarity – something all of the women in the movie, at one point or another, say they want – and a world where the girls can be together, and the same, and boys will only be relevant insofar as the girls need them for one reason or another.

Brigitte can’t do it. No-one can blame her. Entering a werewolf separatist commune is not exactly a healthy lifestyle choice. But there’s a showdown. And it’s not scary so much as it is terribly sad.

I’ve been running the movie’s final scene through my head for a few days now – trying to figure out if it’s right, or fair, or if it matches up with what the movie seems to want to say. The more I think about it, the better I think it is. Ginger gets her wish: she gets to be different. She gets to tear the town apart and leave it behind. Brigitte, on the other hand, will have to grow up.

* I had to do it! I HAD TO. It was A COMPULSION.

Uh-oh, you guys. The sexy teens are at it again!* 

I know about this, you see, because I read the Internet. Specifically, I know about it because I read Tracy Clark-Flory’s piece over at Broadsheet (which was written up by Miranda at Women’s Glib in a post that was cross-posted at Feministe and also quoted at Feministing: look, the Internet is complicated) about a pamphlet published in the UK by National Health Services, entitled (yikes!) “Pleasure.” 

Yes, this pamphlet is about the fact that sex feels good. And it was handed out to the teens! Who were no doubt corrupted by their early exposure to this top-secret information! Here is a sample of the terrible and pornographic knowledge contained therein: 

Oh, dear! So, you can totally see why certain UK newspapers are up in a huff about it, saying (as Clark-Flory notes) that it is telling “schoolchildren” to have orgasms every day and so forth. Clearly, had this pamphlet not been published, no UK teenagers would ever masturbate, and the world would be a far safer and more wholesome place. 

Say, you know what else comes from the UK and is of interest to the sexy teens? Harry Potter, and specifically the Harry Potter series of films starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and that one homely kid! (“Rupert Grint?”) Salon published a piece about that, too, and specifically about the fact that Emma Watson, who is 19, is posing for sexy photos, has been the victim of an upskirt shot, and has a legion of devoted fans who would really, really like to see her naked. They furthermore note that plenty of people have already had the opportunity to see Harry Potter himself naked, as 19-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and his naked penis had a starring role in Equus not so very long ago. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that at least two of the Harry Potter kids grew up to be really, really hot. (The other one is Rupert Grint; also, that Malfoy kid, who now has THE FACE OF A MONSTER.) It’s also a fact that we got to watch it happen – and, as anyone who has spent any time on the weirder and less comfortable portions of the Internet can tell you, a lot of people were very invested in that process. 

On the topic of Naked Harry Potter, Joy Press notes that “Since it was for a serious role in a serious play (Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”), Radcliffe was feted for artistic credibility and bravery (especially after he talked in interviews about the shriveling effects of a live audience on the male member)…. I doubt many people actually wanted to glimpse Harry Potter’s wand.” Actually, a whole lot of people did, and they were all on the Internet; also, they were at the showing of at least one of the Harry Potter movies I attended (can’t remember which one! It was about wizards, if that’s helpful). In that movie, an underage Naked Harry Potter was shown slipping into a large tub – the scene really only showed his back, but one contingent of grown adult women started to cheer and hoot in a wild and excitable manner. I was rude, and turned around to stare at them, because I had simply never seen women do such a thing. I kind of thought hollering at naked teenagers was for guys! 

But I do, in fact, smell what the Salon article is cooking. Its point – that young women, especially, are pressured to be sexual as soon as they reach “legal” age, and sometimes before, and that this can have a major impact on whether they’re perceived as Artists or just spectacles – is a good one. 

We eroticize teens all the time. The “Twilight” series is popular among teens and adults basically because it is entirely about one teenager wanting to fuck the living daylights out of one specific non-teenage dude (but not doing it, because it will DESTROY HER) and apparently conveys the feeling of wanting to fuck that dude very effectively. It manages to play to both sides by devoting thousands of pages to horny teens whilst telling a story about how sex will, literally, kill you. 

It shouldn’t be that revolutionary to note that teens eroticize each other, or to educate them about how to do that in a way that’s not unsafe, cruel, or otherwise disastrous. Yet we’re more comfortable with sexy teens as spectacles – spectacles for adults, no less – than we are with them as subjects. It’s a predatory dynamic: we want girls (and also maybe Daniel Radcliffe) to be pure, asexual, not enthusiastic or assertive about sex in any way, but we also want the freedom to slaver over them at will, to sexualize them whether they want us to or not. 

Of course it’s never OK for grown-ups to pursue sex with non-grown-ups, even if those non-grown-ups are teenagers who have sexual feelings: it’s a desire based on a profoundly unequal power dynamic, one that’s about exploiting young people’s “innocence” or trust or respect for adults, and it’s often profoundly abusive. Yet the idea that acknowledging teenagers’ sexuality is somehow invasive or un-OK or will lead to a vast wave of statutory rape (or just forbidden teen sex) is completely wrongheaded. 

The fact that the dynamic is so very much about ideas of “innocence” or “purity” is precisely what makes educating teens about pleasure so subversive. If they’re not “innocent,” if they’re not “pure,” if they’re just people with bodies like the rest of us, who are trying to figure out how those bodies work and how on Earth one integrates the fact of sexual desire with the demands of polite society, the entire dynamic crumbles. And then we might realize that they’re kids, and that they have a lot to work out, and that they deserve our support in the matter. 

“Support” is kind of incompatible with “sneakily taking pictures of someone’s underpants,” by the way.  

* I am just now realizing that every single post this week will be about sex in one way or another. Didn’t plan it that way! Oh well, enjoy your cheap titillation. Meanwhile, I will try to get my hands on a copy of Ginger Snaps.