repercussions.

i haven't thought about it in a while, but one of the things i got really into when i was in university was what i came to call "cultural reverse engineering." what it is, essentially, is taking the productions of a culture (their arts, their laws, their language and so forth) and figuring out from those remains what was or was not important to that culture.

this caught my attention today. especially some of these quotes:

Serious, adult sexuality a turn-off for movie audiences... According to studio marketers, it tends to make them (especially men) uncomfortable. "If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell," producer Peter Guber says. "If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. ... Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave." ... "Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ... "We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."

what does this say about our society? more specifically, what does that say about our relations with ourselves, with our sex partners, and our conceptualizations of gender?

it's getting even more dangerous.

"I want people to start thinking critically about how these images affect black women today," said Jennings, a Spelman College alumnae and now a law student in New York. "We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

later on in the article, they quote a gentleman from Black Entertainment Television telling women not to watch if they don't like it. but let's cut the relativistic marketing naïveté and think about this critically: if you're calling youself black entertainment, this implies if you're not entertained, you're not really black. and you're also implying that blacks are entertained by and construct a culture that values women by their sexual availability. if you'll sleep with a man, you're a ho. if you don't, you're a bitch. there is no room in this structure to respect a woman, and certainly no room to think about a woman's intellectual capabilities.

to back out further, when sex comedies and violent sex are the only way to entertain people, regardless of race, you're walking a very interesting line. especially when we take into consideration that men tend to make most of the visual entertainment and men are made most uncomfortable by depictions of mature sexual relations. if people never see adult, mature sexuality, where are they going to get their information from? especially among ever-increasing calls for "abstinence-only" sex education, which doesn't even discuss anatomy or biology, parents' increasing reluctance to talk to their kids about sex, and in fact, parents' apparent reluctance to engage in mature sexuality themselves. we're slowly heading back to ignorance, because ignorance is more comfortable. if we don't have to accept the emotion, the intimacy, the vulnerability inherent in sex, we don't have to worry about it.

sometimes it's important to see things that make us uncomfortable, if for no other reason than to sit down and think "why does this make me uncomfortable?" yes, sex is uncomfortable. but it is also a part of life. and it can be beautiful and fun and subtle and joyful, all without the inclusion of violence, tension, or fart jokes. to ignore the possibilities or dilute them is to do a disservice to ourselves, to those people that we could love, and most importantly, to our children and to our children's children, who will have to combat the myths and prejudices all over again.