I use to peak in on the Toronto Inernational Film Festival annually because it proved to be a solid source for discovering films with erotic content. That seems to hold true this year if the NYT is any indication. I’m keen on the seeing the Kinsey movie (although I don’t think Liam Neeson is going to be anywhere as sexy as a sexologist as he was a Jedi knight) and I’m also glad to see John Waters and Catherine Breillat making waves as well. Unfortunately, it might prove difficult for me to see these films because our local art house theater just closed down. I hope area alternative and college theater spaces will pick up the films.
Until then, I’ll content myself with T.C Boyle’s new book, a fictional account of Kinsey’s life. Funny, but I keep reading how unflattering James H. Jones’s “Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life” was to the man. Frankly, I thought it did a good job outlining how Kinsey drew his research methodology from zoological school of thought, a technique that had its shortcomings but was never clearly or definitively dismissed by later schools of thought. (And, hey, just open the butterfly drawers of any natural history museum and you’ll see that research approach perserved every bit as much as the samples within.) Obsessive? Perhaps and likely it combined with his analytical nature, resulting in his drive for knowledge. And, to put it another way: I doubt what obsessiveness he did have didn’t rise to the level of needing an SSR. I doubt his detractors would decry the man if, instead of sex, he had poured his behaviors into economics or conservative policy. But because he poured it into sexology and made a substantial impact on our culture, he’s almost the pariah that Planned Parenthood is.
I didn’t find Kinsey’s little masochisms detracting either. If anything, it ran parallel to his notion that no sexual practice is truly deviant. And his own sexual experimentation versus the pristine, detached image he tended to project? Hey, you’re looking at “the closet” in action. We tend not to see it that way because it held married straight swingers, but it was the closet of its time. Which makes me think that the closet for queers and other sexual minorities must have been in the moth-ridden rafters of a crawl space.
One significant reason I never found Jones’ book unflattering is because I know plenty of people who engage in the same practices that Kinsey did and, well, I see it as “normalized” already. Seeing any one of my friends and loved ones on the street and you wouldn’t know who sticks something up his pee hole or which couple does full swaps on a Saturday night. It was, frankly, impossible for me to see Jones’ description as purile.
Of course, if you’ve rarely deviated from the missionary position and go to church three times a week, I’m sure you’d feel differently. (Too bad nobody’s collecting the sexual histories of the conservative religious segment of our population.
Psst. I have a secret: My new favorite bisexual cartoon hero is Brock Samson of Venture Brothers’ fame. At first I thought he was strictly a womanizer, what with the famous tented erection in his boxers, but when he engineered a bondage and fisting scene with the pirates of the Sargasso Sea?* Well, that just changed everything. And that’s some bone-breaking sphincter he’s got!
Yum. * See episode guide.
FYI: I’m sick with a yucky headcold and although I’ve made it passed the sore throat phase, I’m now in the cough-and-chills phase. Blogging will be light to nonexistent for the rest of this week — just like the first half of this week. Sorry ’bout that.
