Scifi with aggressive sexuality
- Thread starter JirinPanthosa
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I was disappointed in Defiance's treatment of her character, because at first it looked like they were doing something interesting where the female was the one who was really in power over her husband, despite surface appearances, but then they went and fell back on more conventional gender dynamics by having her be afraid of her husband's violence. And that was just one example of how it mishandled its female characters. The woman in charge of the local brothel was originally portrayed in an empowering, non-shaming, sex-positive way, but then they tacked a rape backstory onto her out of nowhere and fell back on the cliche of prostitutes being victims. I think they tacked a rape backstory on her sister as well. I believe there was a showrunner change midseason, and the portrayal of the female characters just took a nosedive into cliche and exploitativeness as a result, and that was a large part of the reason I lost interest in the show.
And again, although this doesn't apply so much to Defiance, I disagree in general with the assumption that any portrayal of female sexuality must be targeted at a male audience. As I said, women like sex too. They like portrayals of women engaging in sex for their own pleasure, just like men enjoy watching stories of men engaging in sex for their own pleasure. And of course there are a lot of lesbian fans as well, as revealed by the strong response to shows like Xena and Lost Girl, or to the same-sex relationships on shows like The 100 and Person of Interest. Lesbian women like ogling sexy women as much as heterosexual men do. Even heterosexual women like seeing sexy women in fiction, because it can make them feel sexy by identification. Here's an intriguing New York Times Magazine article on the subject. Plenty of women love seeing stories about sexually desirable and sexually active women. That's why romance novels are such a huge industry. They just want stories where the women are in control of their sexual choices rather than being objectified or victimized to satisfy male desires, and they want stories where the women are characters who drive the story rather than plot devices serving male characters' arcs. As with that webcomic explainer I linked to yesterday, the difference is one of who has the power and consent in a sexual situation.
That's another Michelle Lovretta show, so it has the same kind of sex-positivity as Lost Girl -- although it does touch more on issues of sexual exploitation, with Dutch's history in a royal harem and the creepy, borderline-abusive way Khlyen keeps trying to control her life.
It's also LGBT-inclusive like Lost Girl -- the bartender character Pree is as flamboyantly gay as Felix on Orphan Black, and there's the same-sex flirtation between Delle Seyah Kendry and Dutch. And it portrays sex workers ("sexers" in the Quad's parlance) in a matter-of-fact and non-stigmatized way. Although it hasn't taken things quite as far as LG did, which only makes sense, because LG was a show about a lead character for whom sexuality was central to her existence, while Killjoys is a show about space bounty hunters.
But the reality is that women who become strippers, porn actresses, or prostitutes are not happy girls. They have some sexual abuse in the childhood—as does their clients—which gives rise to trust issues, damages the ability to form healthy relationship, and draws them to reenact the trauma. Being raped is almost too strong a character motivation as I can't see a woman enduring that becoming a whore on her own accord, unless she was deeply mentally ill.
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Actually, that's not the reality, it's a myth that's been debunked in recent years by actual studies.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/porn-stars-and-the-naked-truth-8348388.html
http://www.livescience.com/27428-truth-about-porn-stars.html
Or, in the case of prostitution, it's something that's less true today than it was in the past:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002670.html
Everyone has a bias, and we should try to keep in mind that our own biases are not automatically the ones that the universe must conform to. Which is why scientists do multiple studies in order to minimize the influence of bias (note that I cited two different studies showing the same thing about porn performers), and why we should always be open to having our own biases disproven, rather than reflexively rejecting everything that challenges them.
Besides, we're talking about fiction here, and fiction is allowed to be biased. Like I said, it's not about making an all-or-nothing choice. The problem is that the media landscape has historically been heavily biased in ways that marginalize, objectify, or slut-shame women, and adding works that offer a more inclusive and sex-positive point of view helps provide greater balance to the overall media landscape. You don't have to like those individual works if they don't suit your bias, but other people with different attitudes and tastes have just as much right as you do to have fiction that's welcoming to their viewpoint.
Besides, we're talking about fiction here, and fiction is allowed to be biased. Like I said, it's not about making an all-or-nothing choice. The problem is that the media landscape has historically been heavily biased in ways that marginalize, objectify, or slut-shame women, and adding works that offer a more inclusive and sex-positive point of view helps provide greater balance to the overall media landscape. You don't have to like those individual works if they don't suit your bias, but other people with different attitudes and tastes have just as much right as you do to have fiction that's welcoming to their viewpoint.
It's not an all-or-nothing choice but know that one of your choices is wrong! You can choose an inclusive, sex-positive POV or you can marginalize, objectify, and slut-shame women, the choice is yours!
But people will always have differences of opinion on what constitutes titillation vs. valid artistic merit. On each pole things seem fairly obvious to the average person but it gets fuzzy in the middle. And since entertainment exists within a marketplace, and everyone knows sex sells, it's hard to prove that a particular decision wasn't made merely to appeal to the prurient. Even if that's not the case, a piece of work originally intended not to be cheap titillation might still wind up becoming popular due to those who are attracted to it simply because it has sexual content in it.
Sure, but there are far better examples for discussing sexuality in science fiction than a tacked-on underwear shot in a scene that has nothing otherwise to do with sex. It's not even a sexual situation in any way -- it's a pragmatic situation where a character needs to hastily change uniforms. But the choice was made to present it in a way that added a cursory bit of titillation. You could've cut it out of the movie altogether and had zero impact on the story.
If we want to talk about presentations of sex in science fiction, then we can talk about stories where sex -- as in the actual act of sex or the exploration of relationships or gender dynamics -- is relevant to the story, rather than just a random bit of skin tossed into an otherwise non-sexual story. Like, say, the movie Her, where the lead character falls in love with an incorporeal artificial intelligence and there's an exploration of how they manage to include sex in their relationship. Or Ex Machina, where the inventor of a series of female androids creates them to serve his sexual needs but tries to justify their sexual nature in pragmatic and philosophical terms. There's a worthwhile discussion to be had over whether Alicia Vikander's nude scene there was gratuitous or legitimate, because it fits into the movie's larger themes of power, sexuality, and exploitation. Even something like Under the Skin, where an alien uses casual sex to lure in victims. There's no shortage of SF movies out there that actually have something to do with sex as a significant part of the story, the characterizations, and the themes.
This is part of the distinction I'm talking about between the 14-year-old-boy approach to sex -- as in hoping to cop a quick, distant glimpse of a naked woman and considering it an accomplishment -- and an adult approach to sex -- as in engaging with the actual act and emotion of sex as a shared activity with another person (or people, or whatever).
Too often, we overthink and overanalyse sex and try to find more negatives than positives. Or at least it seems that way.
That said, I stumbled upon an article at TrekMovie.com that's promoting a book called Star Trek Sex. It was published in 2015 and talks about a wide variety of issues in TOS and its movies, from prostitution in "Mudd's Women" to Velaris' mind-rape in Star Trek VI and everything else in between. Read the article here.
That said, I stumbled upon an article at TrekMovie.com that's promoting a book called Star Trek Sex. It was published in 2015 and talks about a wide variety of issues in TOS and its movies, from prostitution in "Mudd's Women" to Velaris' mind-rape in Star Trek VI and everything else in between. Read the article here.
Hopefully both.
I don't have any problem with sexual themes, just I consider it fantasy breaking when it feels like the premise was manipulated to force the story to revolve around it.
I didn't know the writers were lesbian. So I suppose the reason Bo's touch works on straight women and not gay men is *female* wish fulfillment, not male wish fulfillment.
I didn't know the writers were lesbian. So I suppose the reason Bo's touch works on straight women and not gay men is *female* wish fulfillment, not male wish fulfillment.
I still have to catch up on the series. I'm only on season 2.
There's a distinction I'm trying to make here that's about apparent intent.
Say there is a character who has a character trait, and that trait leads them to have lots of sex. If the trait is the cause of the sex, it's fine. If the sex is the cause of the trait, that's when I see a problem.
If the intent is the create a great character, and that great character you created would naturally choose to have lots of sex, it doesn't feel like manipulation. If the intent is to showcase lots of sex, and thus you create a character who would choose to have lots of sex, that's when it feels like my base desires are being exploited, and that takes me out of the fantasy more than anything else.
Lost Girl feels like they designed the entire premise with the goal of making the characters have constant sex and sexual titillation.
Whereas a show like Game of Thrones it hasn't really felt that way. Ramsay isn't a sadistic asshole because they wanted him to rape Sansa, he raped Sansa because he was a sadistic asshole.
Say there is a character who has a character trait, and that trait leads them to have lots of sex. If the trait is the cause of the sex, it's fine. If the sex is the cause of the trait, that's when I see a problem.
If the intent is the create a great character, and that great character you created would naturally choose to have lots of sex, it doesn't feel like manipulation. If the intent is to showcase lots of sex, and thus you create a character who would choose to have lots of sex, that's when it feels like my base desires are being exploited, and that takes me out of the fantasy more than anything else.
Lost Girl feels like they designed the entire premise with the goal of making the characters have constant sex and sexual titillation.
Whereas a show like Game of Thrones it hasn't really felt that way. Ramsay isn't a sadistic asshole because they wanted him to rape Sansa, he raped Sansa because he was a sadistic asshole.
I'm buying whatever service it's streaming on if I don't already own it. Like, for years...
I don't really see that as being the case with Lost Girl. There was a lot more to Bo than her just having sex all the time.
But there's the thing -- by calling them "base desires," you're preemptively defining them as invalid, and that's the root of the problem. There's nothing inherently bad about sexuality. It's the reason life continues to exist and evolve at all. It's a fundamental driving force of our lives, and it's as valid a thing to tell stories about as any other human impulse. If anything, it's sick and twisted that our society thinks it's perfectly okay to tell stories about murder and torture and violence, and yet somehow corrupt and immoral to tell stories about people sharing pleasure and joy. How is it more wrong to tell a story about a succubus than a vampire? How is it more wrong to tell a story about a sex worker than a hired assassin?
Well, duh, it's a show about a succubus. Of course it's about sex. Why not? There has always been abundant erotic literature and fiction in human culture. There's even erotica in the Bible, the Song of Solomon. And there's certainly plenty of erotic fantasy/supernatural fiction in prose -- I think I already mentioned Laurell K. Hamilton and Jacqueline Carey, and I believe Anne Rice wrote a fair amount of erotica under a pseudonym -- so why not on TV as well?
I've heard a lot of criticisms from viewers who disagree, who feel the sexuality in GoT was often taken to a gratuitous excess. Some of the rape scenes were added by the show's writers and weren't in the books at all, which argues against them being necessary to the story.
And of course there is a profound and fundamental difference between consensual sex and rape. Rape is not an expression of sexuality, it is an act of violence targeted against the victim's sexuality.
Which scenes are you referring to?
No, I think he's just describing "base" in the sense of, it's a desire that everyone in the world has. Meaning, it's at the "base" of all human existence. Although if I've misinterpreted what he's said, he should feel free to correct me.
Not even yours?
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