The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (45 page)

In an artistic and commercial universe parallel to Hollywood’s, a loosely affiliated network of filmmakers, hucksters, regional distributors, and local exhibitors were able to provide audiences with images banned by the studios in the form of low-budget exploitation films on a range of topics forbidden by Hollywood’s Production Code. Film historian Eric Schaefer has traced the relationship between education and titillation in what he calls the classical exploitation film from 1919 to 1959.
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Exploitation films were distributed by itinerant showmen to both low-end urban movie houses and small-town theaters, often on a “road show” or “four wall” arrangement with the distributor paying a flat fee to run the box office and control the promotion and exhibition of the threadbare, disunified, and licentiously “educational” film for the length of the engagement.

Where Hollywood policed its own content and unveiled the resulting product to the pubic as “entertainment,” exploitation filmmakers mobilized clinical and educational discourses to provide legal “cover” for the forbidden images and accounts on display. The “birth-of-a-baby” film
Street Corner
from 1948 tells the story of Lois Marsh, a seventeen-year-old high school junior who loses her virginity after the graduation party for her boyfriend Bob Mason. Lois becomes pregnant, and Bob dies in a car crash rushing back from college to marry her secretly. A waitress at the local diner puts Lois into contact with a female abortionist on “the other side of town,” and Lois almost dies from sepsis and internal bleeding after her surreptitious operation. The wizened and weary local physician, Dr. James Fenton, saves Lois’s life after the botched operation, observes the successful prosecution of the abortionist, and narrates the story in flashback from his office.

Street Corner
begins with the exploitation film “square-up,” a credit crawl assuring us that what is to follow is in the interest of education and social utility: “This is an everyday story about everyday people. It is fiction, and yet it is not fiction.” The square-up assures us of the “seriousness” of the subject and the “sincerity” of the filmmakers and ends by reminding us that the events of the story “could happen to someone you love. It could even happen to
you
.” We enter the narrative at the municipal
courthouse where a terrified Lois is asked to identify the accused abortionist, a silent harridan staring at her malevolently. Lois identifies the woman, and the judge eventually sentences her to ten years in the state prison. We then follow Dr. Fenton to his office, where he lights a pipe, and his nurse Jane helps him into his white doctor’s coat.

He sits at his desk and begins to address the camera, telling us the story of Lois Marsh. The mise-en-scène underscores his medical authority: on his desk are medical books and a microscope, he is dressed in a white coat, and his role as genial elder is underscored by his pipe. Further, Jane, the nurse, is in a proper state of subservience, unlike the black-clad, mute, and threatening abortionist, who has usurped the access to Lois’ body best left to professional medicine.

Doctor Fenton is an experienced, gentle, and progressive small-town doctor who is close friends with Lois Marsh’s parents. He voices his concern for her in literally patriarchal terms: “If I had a daughter, I’d want her to be just like Lois Marsh. Bright. Pretty. Just past seventeen.” As he recounts Lois’s story, he is compassionate and sympathetic to Lois and Bob’s struggles and vulnerabilities in a society that has left them bereft of education and guidance as they “deal . . . with impulses as old as the centuries.” Schaefer observes that
Street Corner
and other “postwar [hygiene] movies continued to place a heavy emphasis on the dangers of sex while placing increased faith in science, medicine, and other forms of expertise.”
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This world of expertise is contrasted with the “street corner” of the film’s title, the informal network of peers, slightly older young people, and misinformed adults from which teenagers receive information about sexuality and the body in the absence of proper education from legitimate authority. The end of the line is exemplified by the abortionist herself, who plies her trade from behind a residential façade upon which a side reads, “Palmist,” and when she speaks to Lois late in the film we hear a Teutonic or Scandinavian accent. These motifs link her with the superstitious, the blasphemous, and the foreign.

After her botched abortion, the bleeding and unconscious Lois is helped to Dr. Fenton’s office by a kind male bystander. Dr. Fenton performs lifesaving surgery and immediately dresses down Lois’ parents outside of her hospital room for not providing her with the information she needed, and for being unwilling to listen to her when she came to them for help. The indefatigable doctor then excuses himself to go to his weekly public lecture next door in the auditorium, and it is again time to draw aside the veil of false modesty, this time in the form of the films that accompany his lecture. We see illustrations of animated drawings of ovulation, fertilization, and implantation, and then, graphic medical
footage illustrating, in turn, the obstetrical delivery of a baby, the delivery of a baby by caesarean section (admittedly, the skill and speed of the obstetric surgeon in this footage is truly extraordinary), and the ravages of gonorrhea and syphilis on (mostly male) bodies and genitals. Here the audience finally gets what it paid to see, close-ups of human genitalia, albeit presented in as shocking and desexualized context as possible. After this series of meat shots, the film moves quickly through its denouement: Dr. Fenton finds Lois and her parents reconciled in her hospital room, and we return to his office, where he hopes one more time that we have learned a lesson from all of this, his nurse helps him out of his white coat, and the film ends.
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Doc Fenton’s medical progeny would guide moviegoers through forbidden images of the body for at least another two decades. After the published findings of Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and other researchers took hold of the popular imagination, sexploitation films of the 1960s often featured prologs and epilogs of a psychiatrist or “sexologist” at his desk expressing hope that moviegoers would not suffer the fates that befell many of the films’ characters. By 1970, many American theaters were successfully showcasing a new variation of this kind of movie,
Man and Wife,
distributed by a company called The American Institute for Adult Education. As David Lerner has shown,
Man and Wife
and its AIAE follow up,
He and She,
released later in 1970, were two of the first nationally distributed theatrical films to show unsimulated sexual intercourse while mobilizing many formal conventions of the documentary or educational film, including the onscreen presence of a male doctor instructing the audience on the importance of sexual satisfaction in maintaining a healthy and lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage. These “marriage manual” or “white coater” films (so named for the presence of the male figure of medical authority) successfully avoided prosecution by many state and local censor boards since the US Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in
Memoirs v. Massachusetts
had ruled that in order for a work to be obscene and not subject to First Amendment protection the work taken as a whole must be “utterly without redeeming artistic, social, or educational value.”
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Man and Wife
begins with yet another exploitation film square-up crawl, this time quoting Dutch gynecologist T. H. Van De Velde’s 1926 volume,
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique.
Then the filmmakers themselves weigh in with a square-up of their own, inveighing against the miseries caused (again) by “false modesty” and “puritanical attitudes” and assure us that they “have consulted several authorities on marriage problems” in the making of the film. Stock footage of a hospital
front provides a transition to our medical expert, a man in a dark suit seated at a green metal desk in what appears to be a wood-paneled basement rec room. His eyes shift beneath a massively Brylcreemed shock of gray hair, and the voice we hear is synced with the movement of his lips only some 70 percent of the time.

After he guides us on yet another tour of illustrations of the reproductive system, he describes a series of forty-nine sexual positions that are demonstrated by two young couples in what appears to be an adjacent space in the same rec room.

Some of what we hear is relevant to the acts we see onscreen. At other times, we hear pages turning and gain insight into how a man can tell that his wife is sexually aroused: If she has never borne children, the inner lips of her vagina turn from pink to bright red, but if she has been through childbirth, the same tissues turn “a deep wine color.” A young Joe Dante, reviewing the film upon its release for
Film Bulletin,
mocked the “seedy, desperate character who is supposed to approximate a doctor” and
Man and Wife
’s “[t]hin . . . disguise . . . as an educational, how-to-do-it manual for failing marriages (‘beats the legal rap wherever tested,’ proclaim the trade ads).”
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Here is the framing medical discourse on the morning of its extinction, although it is interesting to note that Aquarius Releasing’s
Deep Throat
three years later featured both a pre-credits square-up and the (now parodic) inclusion of a medical doctor/gynecologist as a major character, played in broad comic style by Harry Reems.

Nina the Naughty Nurse Shows You How: Feminist Sex-Ed in the Age of Home Video

Neither the rumpled, dazed, and ill-synced “doctor” in
Man and Wife,
much less the mustachioed Harry Reems of
Deep Throat,
are likely to be reassuring figures to women moviegoers, then or now. In fact, one of the second wave of feminism’s most sustained, passionate, and detailed critiques of the role of women focused on the institution of medicine, particularly gynecology and psychiatry, and its role in the silencing and marginalization of women and their experiences.
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Even the kindly, pipe-smoking Dr. Fenton was eventually revealed as complicit in the circumscription of female agency and autonomy. His entreaties for a frank discussion of sex and the body were unmasked as a softer form of control after women began to “look critically, and with strength, at the existing institutions serving us,” in the words of the preface to the first edition of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
.
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The Boston Women’s Health Collective began
as a series of small discussion groups in 1969 in which women met to share their experiences and research a series of topics on women and their bodies that had never been adequately addressed by “doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgmental, and non-informative.” Their research findings were discussed, critiqued, and debated within a group of their peers, and eventually presented in a course that bore the title
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
which was published in book form by the New England Free Press in 1973.
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The volume contained a highly detailed section of the long history of women as healers, wise women, and midwives that offered a fierce rebuttal of their centuries-long suppression through social institutions
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and stereotypical images of a piece with the frightening abortionist in
Street Corner.
The book’s section on women as healers and peer educators ends with a quote from Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English that imagines a world in which “wisdom about daily life is not hoarded by ‘experts’ or doled out as a commodity but is drawn from the experience of all people and freely shared by them.”
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Our Bodies, Ourselves
presented a range of information and resources on relationships, sex, contraception, childbirth, abortion, and lesbian visibility, and its call for empowerment and its valorization of women’s shared wisdom drawn from personal experience was taken up by a wide and varied small press movement, whose books were sold to women’s specialty bookstores either directly or through regional and national small press distributors.

An entirely different approach to sexual education and contraception began as the Boston Collective was engaged in its first summer research project. The Adam and Eve company (incorporated as “Population Planning Associates”) was started in 1970 by Phil Harvey, a recent masters graduate in family planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with years of experience working with CARE in India, and Dr. Tim Black, a physician recently returned from a period in New Guinea and Nigeria supervising family planning services and health clinics. Harvey and Black began a business selling condoms by mail in the US, marketing and advertising their product in softcore magazines such as
Playboy, Penthouse,
(and later)
Oui
, and
Hustler,
and pouring much of the profits from this endeavor into family planning efforts overseas, including the establishment of the nonprofit foundation D. K. International. At this point, the Comstock Laws were still in effect, although the 1965 Supreme Court decision
Griswold v. Connecticut
had struck down a Connecticut law barring the sale of contraceptives to married couples. Harvey and Black could not assure themselves that all of their customers were married, but they pressed on, knowing that they were the only company in
America prepared to sell condoms through the mail on a large scale.
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With the advent of home video, Adam and Eve began to sell sexually explicit videotapes, and the company hired a panel of psychologists and sex therapists to screen their potential releases for content inimical to what the company termed a “positive” portrayal of sexual experience.