Apropos of a season of sexploitation films running at London's BFI Southbank, Guardian film writer Xan Brooks interviews Ray Greene, director of SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies. Greene defines the sexploitation genre as films that were "selling sex," and in which filmmakers "had to, had to, had to, whether they wanted to or not, show naked women, and show sexual situations that were very risqué for their day." Greene also says the genre began with a movie called The Immoral Mr. Teas, which, if the Guardian's clips are any guide, showed some pretty ridiculous "sexual situations." The movie apparently made a lot of money, meaning 1959 audiences were turned on by a woman scrubbing a table wearing only an apron, while a guy in a straw hat verrrry sloowwwwwly ate a watermelon.

Less surreal, but maybe more sociologically interesting, were a pair of exploitation subgenres that emerged: "nudie cuties" and "roughies." "Nudie cuties" were set at nudist camps because of a Supreme Court ruling that found these settings "educational," and thus exempt from ordinary nudity laws. Greene describes these films as "bright, sunny, mostly silly films that actually show the trace elements of American burlesque." The "roughies," meanwhile, arrived in the mid-60s when sexploitation films "moved into darker subject matter." Greene says these movies are "very, very disturbing to watch for a lot of people." While they showed less nudity than the "nudie cuties," these movies "substitute violence, usually directed against women [...] for sex." A creepy clip from an example called The Defilers shows a kidnapper saying of his victim, "Look at her. If I don't feed her, she goes hungry. She belongs to me."

The interesting thing about the progression from sex to violence that Greene describes is that it's never really been reversed. It's been well-documented that the MPAA rating system is much more lenient toward violence than towards sex, even in language — a PG-13 movie can include the use of the word "fuck" in anger, but not to refer to actual fucking. But it's somewhat surprising to learn that the "substitution" of violence for sex, as though they were simply interchangeable methods for shocking or thrilling audiences, started in the middle of last century. It's a little played-out to complain about puritanical Americans who let their kids watch shootouts but don't want to see an erect dick, and few people these days think the ratings system is awesome. However, it's still interesting to consider why roughies supplanted nudie cuties, given that nudity laws didn't actually grow more stringent. Did Americans begin to prefer dark sex to "bright, sunny" sex, even if it meant seeing fewer actual boobs? Do they still? What is it about American culture that makes violence against women an easy substitute for sex? And given the fact that these films are currently screening in England, not America, does this substitution have a universal appeal?

Sexploitation Films: 'You Had To Show Naked Women To Make The Exercise Viable' [Guardian]

His piece starts out a little annoying: "Mistresses," he says, "is conceived, structured and run by women. I am a man who largely does as he's told (which not only reflects the reality of the rest of my life, but that of most men I know)." This women-really-run-the-world stuff is pretty tired, and it's also a way for men to curry favor with women without supporting any changes to the status quo.

Warlow goes on to say that in dramas centered around women, "there's a particular soul and strength, toughness and vulnerability that wouldn't be afforded by the presence of men." This is a little gender-essentialist, but it's true that a heroine offers the writer different opportunities than a hero, especially if that heroine is situated in a society like ours, where gender is still such a fraught issue and being a woman can be uniquely dangerous. Warlow cites The Silence of the Lambs, and it's easy to see how Clarice's isolation in a nearly all-male world of criminal investigation made that film all the more powerful and chilling.

Warlow writes,

Most men I know, even the gay ones, are obsessed with women. I think that gives us a compelling qualification to write about them. I'm sure we indulge our own fantasies, preconceptions and hang-ups. I know I do. But isn't that what writing is about? The fact that we're not women may be what gives male dramatists' writing curiosity and passion. Our perspective might not always be as insightful as that of a female writer, but it's just as valid - and hopefully just as entertaining.

Not all men I know, even the straight ones, are "obsessed with women." But it is interesting to see our gender portrayed from the outside. The compelling thing about Madame Bovary (another example Warlow cites), isn't the accuracy of Flaubert's portrayal of a dissatisfied, self-absorbed, status-obsessed woman. It's Emma Bovary as a fictional character, a fake woman written by a man and thus unlike any woman you'd ever actually meet. A fictional woman created by a man is always going to be different from one created by a woman — or from women in the flesh — just as men written by women will never match up with flesh-and-blood males. But the cool thing about fiction is that it's different from reality, and hopefully more entertaining. So stick with it, Warlow — and don't let us women tell you what to do.

When a man writes a woman [Guardian]

She says:

We culled the stats for every centerfold from December 1953 (Marilyn Monroe) to January 2009 (Dasha Astafieva), then calculated each woman's body-mass index.

A clear trend emerged: While real American women have steadily eaten their way up the BMI slope - just like American men - Playmates have gone from a sylphlike 19.4 to an anime-ideal 17.6.

In fact, the average BMI for an American woman has gone up at a much faster rate than the BMI of a Playmate has gone down (luckily, since it would have begun to approach anorexic-levels otherwise). But it does create an increasingly disparate gap between the women Hugh Hefner sees fit for his readers to wank to and the women they're (somewhat) likely to actually get to have sex with in real life.

And that's not even talking about the fake ta-tas.

On the touchy subject of implants, Playboy's policy seems to be don't ask, don't tell. We plotted each model's bust size (chest circumference at the fullest points) and cup size (breast volume) for all years that data were available (early '90s to now). While busts have shrunk faster than your 401(k), cup size has remained a buxom C or D. We don't think evolution can explain this phenomenon.

For those not catching the difference, that means even as the women have gotten skinnier and their chests thinner, their individual breasts have not, which isn't exactly how nature works.

The takeaway? The models in Playboy are as increasingly out of touch with the reality of American women as Hugh Hefner's harem is with the reality of American relationships.

Infoporn: Today's Playmates Are More Like Anime Figures Than Real Humans [Wired]

Winger, who was a leading lady in the 1980's, quietly left Hollywood to perform on stage throughout the past 15 years or so, dividing her time between plays, her family, and her job as a professor of Literature of Social Reflection at Harvard University. She was thrust back into the spotlight after Rosanna Arquette, using Winger as an example of Hollywood's cruelty toward actresses who dare to age, based a documentary, "Searching for Debra Winger," around her. Winger apparently was not pleased. "I was interviewed for it when it was called something else, and I said to Rosanna at the time, this is your question," Winger says, "I had no idea what she planned on calling the film, and she made me the poster child for something I was not talking about. I didn't give a shit [about what Hollywood was going to do to me]. I was just tired of it."

Winger, who is currently getting rave reviews for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, also takes a swipe at actresses (she refers to them as "boiled faces") who cave to the pressure, citing Nicole Kidman's permanently frozen face as a prime example: "Scary. They go in [to see their doctors] saying: make me look like myself - or like myself 20 years ago. But you know, I have a movie out now and I can't bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it's not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it's like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it's a thing. I don't want to be the poster child for wrinkles, and that's what they make you if you speak out about that whole culture. So I don't, mostly. But it has gotten so ridiculous as a job. [At the film festivals] the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going 'look at this!' instead of the movie being the thing, and they're just there to support it. It's a case of: 'Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and ... oh, by the way, there's a movie here, too!'

In the end, however, Winger admits that she thinks the only way women are going to get good parts in Hollywood is if women actually start writing them: "Roles for women. There aren't any. They've been saying that since the 1920s, and it's true. [My theory is that] women don't write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?"

Winger, who has just written a book, Undiscovered, has a point, yet it's a bit unfair to put the burden on female screenwriters alone, knowing that many of them wouldn't have final say over casting, anyway. Still, Winger has a point, and it is a point that has been made over and over and over again: Hollywood needs to understand that women do not fade out at age 25; they do not stop falling in love or messing up or being interesting or sexy or creative or troubled or worth watching. They do not all become a variation on a wacky Diane Keaton overbearing mother. And with Hollywood's A-list actresses all aging up, despite the amount of Botox they may try to use to fight it one wonders if Hollywood will finally begin creating more roles for what will be a representative of much of our population. As Winger notes, there are many actresses just waiting to bring real women to the screen: "In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman."

Rachel Cooke Interviews Debra Winger [The Guardian]

While for some women like Jenna Jameson, Candida Royalle, Nina Hartley or Danni Ashe the way up the executive ladder started in front of the camera, many other women went into the business like any other executive — through the front door and way behind the camera. Samantha Lewis, who co-owns Digital Playground, started out in real estate and invested in a profitable business; Joy King, vice president of special projects at Wicked Pictures, started out working in film distribution for children's movies; and Susan Colvin, who owns California Exotic Novelties, planned to go into public administration. Diane Duke, the executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, which advocates for adult companies' rights, was an executive at Planned Parenthood. They might not like porn — many of them don't even watch it — but they think it should exist and that it can be made better for the women in front of the camera.

One of the problems in the porn industry that everyone identifies — and that some female executives are trying to fight — is the problem of using inexperienced and ill-prepared actresses.

[The Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation's Sharon] Mitchell, herself a former actress, told the authors said that agents “are now recruiting people from, literally, the middle of the country [who] are 18 years old who haven’t remotely had any type of sex, let alone the type of sex they’re probably going to have tomorrow.” Too often, she said, “agents run them into the ground” signing them to make too many sex scenes, and that can lead to STDs.

Female directors, producers and owners know all this and say they work to fight it, partly by turning away young women they think are ill prepared. A few have suggested that producers should hire women who are at least 21, rather than 18.

The women in the business are less inclined to see women mistreated, partly because they are women and partly, as performer Lorelai Lee pointed out to Violet Blue earlier this year, it's simply not sexy to watch someone doing something they don't like.

What none of the women — in front of or behind the camera — like is being stereotyped as anti-woman, or anti-feminist. They point out that while some women are being taken advantage of, others are freely choosing to show their bodies and perform sex acts for money and the pleasure of others. They tend to think it's pretty narrow-minded (and un-feminist) of scholars to assume that the women who perform sex acts on camera could only do so because they are fucked-up women who have somehow been coerced.

University of California Santa Barbara film studies professor Constance Penley, who studies the adult industry, agreed. Name an industry that’s different, she said. Because porn involves sex it is subject to what Penley calls “exceptionalism.” It is not judged in the bigger cultural context. But it should be. “You have to ask: Does it have more drug abuse or more suicides, more incidents of girls being sexually abused as children, more cosmetic surgery than Hollywood, TV, the recording industry?” she said. The answer, she pointed out, is probably not. So why pick on sex movies?

Feminists talk a lot about owning our bodies and making our own sexual choices, but when it comes to women who choose to work in the sex industry, we tend to get a lot more narrow-minded about it. Just ask Joy King, the Wicked Pictures exec — when she was featured talking about her company on the local news, her son's best friend's mother refused to let him come over to play anymore because King was one of "those" women.

Women On Top: Female Execs Rise In Porn Biz [MSNBC]
An Inside Look At A Female Porn Executive’s Life [MSNBC]

Related: Sex For Money, Not For Love [San Francisco Chronicle]

Clark-Flory writes about to a case where a 34-year-old man took a picture up a 16-year-old girl's skirt but saw his case dismissed because she was in public — and she was practically flashing her cooter by standing in such a way that a man could dive across a floor, and shove a camera between her thighs, so she wasn't entitled to any legal remedy:

Rep. Pam Peterson, R-Tulsa, introduced a bill making it illegal in Oklahoma to take unauthorized photos of someone's private areas in public; it went into effect earlier this month. For the same reason, nearly half the states have had to enact similar laws

The men who take and wank to these pictures like to claim that these are "unsuspecting" or "accidental" photos of women — and most, apparently, don't like the ones to which women have actually consented because it's all about the force involved.

Susan Gallagher, a professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Lowell who teaches classes on gender, privacy and politics, points out, "One of the tricks in pornography is that the target is unaware, because then you have power." She says upskirting presents a lesser sexual challenge than, for instance, the "Girls Gone Wild" franchise, that indefatigable chronicler of the spring break rite of boobs and booze. The essential difference here is that candid photographers — rather than the female subjects, in the case of breast-flashing coeds — are able to be the sexual aggressor but without actually having to confront a woman.

Ever feel like a guy was undressing you with his eyes and felt nauseated at the thought? This is that but with pictures to share, taken without your knowledge or consent just because you happened to be in the proximity of one of these freaks.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon doesn't pull any punches in responding to the subject Clark-Flory's article: she calls it tantamount to assault, and she's right.

No, upskirt shots are about appealing to something else, and there’s no other way to state this, but it’s the desire to force yourself on a woman. Without coercion, the upskirt shot means nothing. Fans not only admit this, but in the company of what they assume are only men who share their loathing of women (and women’s autonomy), they revel in it.

Because, let's be honest, these aren't unsuspecting women who don't know that they are inadvertently showing something they ought not to show; these aren't accidental nip slips; these aren't whatever bullshit justification these perverts try to claim when discussing their coercive fetishes. These are women who went out in public fully and decently clothed and, because creepy fuckers can twist themselves into knots to look up skirts or down blouses, have been forcibly made into sex objects. Upskirting isn't just some dude noticing something that gives him a hard-on, these are organized groups of men who are, in effect, forcibly undressing unconsenting women in public and posting pictures of the assault. And, in half the states, they have every right to do it to you.

Porn In A Flash [Salon]
Creative Misogynists Still Unable To Imagine Letting Go Of The Hate [Pandagon]

Sure you got the sassy girl Friday or the misguided girlfriend, but the most memorable noir dames are the Bad Girls. Post-war, noir dames bridged the gap between independent working women and the feminine ideal of the 50's. The noir dame is every inch a woman, but she's totally in control of the situation. Here's Fred MacMurray's Double Indemnity dupe:
"She liked me. I could feel that. The way you feel when the cards are falling right for you, with a nice little pile of blue and yellow chips in the middle of the table. Only what I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t playing her. She was playing me, with a deck of marked cards and the stakes weren’t any blue and yellow chips. They were dynamite."

Or Sterling Hayden to Marie Windsor in The Killing:
"I know you like a book, ya little tramp. You’d sell your own mother for a piece of fudge. But you’re smart with it. Smart enough to know when to sell and when to sit tight. You’ve got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart."

They play men, they break hearts, sometimes they kill, and they look glam doing it. Some constants:
She's Smart: From Barbara Stanwyck's manipulative husband-killer in Double Indemnity to Lana Turner's, um, manipulative husband-killer in The Postman Always Rings Twice, noir women are in control, organized, playing men off each other in a man's world.

She's Savvy:
Barbara Stanwyck: Last time I looked, you had a wife.
Robert Ryan: Maybe next time you look, I won’t.
Barbara Stanwyck: That’s what they all say.
-Clash by Night

She's Sexy: Her sex appeal comes from her smarts. Yeah, the noir dame is well turned-out (see any of Rhonda Fleming's rad suits in Cry Danger) and she handles a cigarette with knowing assurance. But the sex appeal comes from the confidence.

She Has a Way with Words:

Barbara Stanwyck to Keith Andes: What do you want, Joe, my life history? Here it is in four words: big ideas, small results.
-Clash by Night

In other words, she's the product of difficult times and sharp intelligence. The fact that, like, Faulkner was writing screenplays at the time doesn't hurt. No wonder Hollywood can't replicate that today. The noir woman was operating in a man's world, and twisting it to her own advantage. You could argue that there's something disquieting in the portrayal of so many evil dames; but the actresses played them with such nuance and intelligence that at the end of the day it spelled equality in way that, ironically, we never see now. Thank God for Netflix.

Naughty Ladies Of Noirdom Strut Their Stuff [LA Times]

• “Actresses Earn Music Cred, Acclaim,” the lead article in the report, notes that some Hollywood actresses are crossing over to become moderately successful indie rock musicians. The only women mentioned are Rebecca Pidgeon, Scarlett Johansson, and Zooey Deschanel. They received more critical praise than fellow actor/musicians Russell Crowe and Keanu Reeves, so clearly this was the most important thing to happen to women in entertainment in 2008.

• All the women were asked the same set of questions, including, “If not Hillary, then who?" It’s possible they meant, “If Hillary isn’t going to be the first female president, who will be?” but almost everyone said, “You know, the nominee? Obama?” interpreting the question to mean, “Since you ladies were all automatically supporting the girl, who’s going to get that pretty little vote of yours now?” Charlotte Huggins, a 3-D film producer, wins for best response: "I'm not answering that. ... That is a sexist question."

• The article on Diablo Cody and Ellen Page (both "legends and honorees") points out that “the peculiar gravity of new media holds that all praise is merely prelude to an equal and opposite backlash, and both progressed from sweethearts to punching bags in record time . . .” Cody says “criticism is as useful as praise. I eat it like fuel. I'm the little engine that runs on hate. My productivity spikes when I've got something to prove, and it seems like I always do."

• The article on The View says that, with the recent appearances of Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, the show has gained some influence as a political forum. Barbara says, "... a lot of women do get their news from it, just as people get their news from Jon Stewart."

• Amy Baer, the new HBO Entertainment president says, "Should we talk about the mock surprise that every male executive had at the surprise success of Sex and the City? ... I believe if you make a good movie, whether it speaks to one quadrant or four quadrants, they go. Iron Man wouldn't have the success it had if women didn't go."

• Alexandra Patsavas oversees the music on Gossip Girl, Mad Men, and Grey’s Anatomy and her song choices are known for drawing attention to bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Phantom Planet, and the Killers. "I feel like I'm getting away with something all the time," Patsavas says: "Our producers are into really good music these days, and we are putting forward some very obscure and nontraditional choices. And I'm so happy about that."

• Alyssa Finley, is the producer of the award winning video game BioShoc. The author notes that the game, about a plane-crash victim who is attacked by mutants “sounds like the kind of survivalist dystopia normally visited by adolescent boys targeted by the male-dominated gaming industry ...” You may wonder what it’s like to be a female working in the gaming industry, but somehow this doesn’t come up in the article.

• Nancy Dubuc is executive vice president and general manager of the History Channel and has helped make it the second most popular cable network for men (after ESPN) with new shows like Ax Men, Battle 360, and Ice Road Truckers. It would have been interesting to hear her thoughts on why more women don’t watch the History Channel, but that's not addressed.

• Alison Silverman is the head writer and executive producer of The Colbert Report. She won an Emmy for her work as writer-producer of The Daily Show. Her responses to the inane questions Variety asked each woman are: Role model: "Michael Palin." Three things I can't do without: "Lungs, pancreas, skin." If not Hillary, then who? "To paraphrase a great man, 'Some see Hillary as she is and say then who? I dream of Hillarys that never were and say who not?' "

• Stephanie Savage is the writer and executive producer of Gossip Girl. She says, "We're making a magazine show every week and setting the trend." "Teens have a sensational narcissism and genuinely believe that their experiences are unique and can't be explained to adults," explains Savage. "But we forgive them for their mistakes and naivete. I love writing about young people."

• Sharon Sheinwold is an agent whose clients include Jack Black, Jason Segel, Jason Schwartzman, Amy Poehler and Jonah Hill. She signed many of them before they were very famous, and she encourages her clients to write their own material (which paid off for Jason Segal when he wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Her answer to “If not Hillary, then who?” is “Amy Poehler.”

• Karen Baker Landers is an Academy Award winning sound editor who says being a woman interested in "gunshots and big explosions and car chases" has been an issue in her career. "They think, 'Well, yeah, you can do a romantic comedy,'" she says. "Well, I love a nice romantic comedy, and I love something like Ray, a movie I did that was all about sound that made you feel emotional. But I also can sit in a big effects film, a big fight scene, and go nuts and love it ... You don't have to prove it as a man; if you have a good resume, they're not going to question it. But you do have to prove it as a woman."

Women's Impact Report '08 [Variety]

"When Don't Look Now was released, the big screen was the only place that people might expect to see sex scenes in which they were not personally involved," Lawson argues. "Now, any act involving any actors - animal, child, living, dead - is available online. Philip Larkin, a poet subsequently revealed to be keen on porn, immortalised the view that 'sexual intercourse began in 1963'. But, for cinema at least, sexual intercourse ended in about 2005, when the most explicit images possible became as readily available as television." Sex in cinema still has erotic power in my mind because of the medium more than the message.

Sure, you can download any sort of DIY banging you want from the confines of your own home. But there is something powerful, and transgressive, about sitting in a room with a bunch of other people witnessing an explicit act of sex. Because the end game (unless you're Paul Reubens) isn't the consummation of your own sex act, you can appreciate the artistry of the director, the bond between the actors, and the reactions of the people around you.

I saw the notoriously horrendous Brown Bunny in a theater with a platonic dude friend. The explicit blow job scene between Chloe Sevigny and Vincent Gallo was, in person, shocking and sort of funny. It comes out of nowhere in the context of the movie, which is largely ponderous and dialogue-free. Sitting in a room full of people, shifting in our seats and giggling nervously, made the viewing of that cinematic BJ an experience. Had I seen some XTube clip of that same scene, divorced from the rest of the film and viewed from my couch, I'm pretty sure I would have just thought, "Huh. The Sev's giving a BJ to some greasy looking dude. Gross."

I agree with Lawson that there has been a "sexual desensitisation" since the days of Don't Look Now, and perhaps there is something "passe" about the sex in Roeg's new release, Puffball. But as someone who never had a chance to see Don't Look Now on the big screen, there's still something transgressive about watching sex on the big screen.

The End Of Cinematic Sex [Guardian]

Before we made the video, I had accepted that it would be less than flattering, but I thought that it would be more empowering than soul crushing. I thought it would be saying a big fuck you to the celebrity-sartorial complex which requires everyone to be a size 0. I thought I could quell my vanity to make a point that I felt strongly about. It turns out, not so much! In the weeks that have elapsed since the we put up the video, I've been more self-conscious about my size than ever. Lemme tell you: Having thousands of internet trolls write about how gross you are — even when you've already likened yourself to a "fat hooker" — does a number on the old self-esteem. And I'm not the only one — Tracie felt similarly. She was only less upset than I was because she had prepared herself to be "devastated" before the video went up, whereas I thought that I could handle it.

I read the comments you readers write. Every time an issue comes up relating to weight on the site, everyone rushes to post her measurements. Even anonymous internet commenters feel the need to somehow prove they're not fat. I thought about doing that after the video, but I realized that would be destroying all the things I hoped to stand for by making it in the first place And yes, I realize how shallow and ultimately useless it is to obsess about your weight, and every time I think about how much time I've wasted hating myself for my unwaiflike proportions I hate myself even more.

The way we scrutinize our own bodies — and others' bodies as well — is almost impossible for some of us to get beyond, no matter how hard we try to will ourselves beyond it. I don't have any solutions. Maybe someday I'll be able to pull a stunt like that and be invigorated instead of cowed into size-submission. But for now I'm settling for never, ever seeing myself in a gold lamé tube dress ever again.

Real Naked Ladies [The New Yorker]
Fifty Nude Women [Fifty Nude Women Official Website]

Earlier: American Apparel Will Make You Look Like A Fat Hooker