"I have looked on many women with lust. I have committed adultery in my heart many times." - Jimmy Carter, Playboy Magazine (Sept. 1976)
A historical if not downright heroic statement concerning the "Male Gaze," courtesy of the 1976 Democratic presidential nominee.
This comment was published as part of writer Robert Scheer's interview with Jimmy Carter in the September 1976 issue of Playboy, which nearly derailed Carter's campaign and was leveraged (unsuccessfully) in an effort to smear Carter on the eve of his campaign by such outstanding citizens as Gerald Ford and the Rev. Billy Graham.
But to Jimmy Carter's credit, he was, let's face it, just being honest here—unlike serial groper-in-chief Donald "Women, I am your protector" Trump, greasy Matt Gaetz, phony populist J.D. Vance, and other oleaginous Republicans currently strutting and fretting their hour on the stage.
(It is to laugh, but highly appropriate, that the moralistic Vance's own Hillbilly Elegy memoir—hardly salacious reading—was recently censored and removed from public school libraries in Michigan.)
As someone who, at a tender age, took a stand in favor of Free Speech while attending Syracuse's very public Hurlbut W. Smith Junior High School by often sporting a bright orange button emblazoned with the legend F*CK CENSORSHIP—I also advocated in my AP English class against the suppression of editor/publisher Ralph Ginzburg's artsy stroke-book Eros Magazine. Though relatively tame by today's standards, the publication of Eros sent Ginzburg to prison for 8 months.
Speaking of today, l look askance at the current recuperation of the late Andrea Dworkin's stentorian anti-porn pronouncements from the late '60s—still cringe-worthy after all these years—in which several contemporary literary journals are lauding her views as proto-feminist. I've always found her writing to be strident and tone-deaf, especially her unintentionally hilarious anti-heterosex harangues.
Case in point is the recent republication of her 1981 book Pornography, a book-length critique of the subject in hand (!) in which in the service of her argument Dworkin summarizes the narratives of several cheapo porn paperbacks of the Beeline Books variety that are, in her re-telling of their major plot points, dare I say even "dirtier;" i.e., more erotically charged, than the texts of the original books in question.
(She had a real way with words, our Andrea.)
But do women also enjoy taking advantage of, and is there such a thing as the "Female Gaze?"
The late Pauline Reage (who wrote under that pseudonym and also under the name Dominique Aury, although her birth name was Anne Desclos) came close with 1954's Histoire d'O, which was written to entertain her male lover Jean Paulhan, from the point of view of a female submissive.
Some years later, in 1973, Erica Jong had a bestseller with her novel Fear of Flying and its central conceit of "the zipless fuck." Jong's novel was pre-dated by science fiction author Joanna Russ's steamy The Female Man, which took only five years to publish. And recently, Miranda July has raised the female-centric erotic stakes again with her novel All Fours.
For my money, though, the absolute greatest of all female smut purveyors was my old friend Iris Owens, who, as an ex-pat in Paris, wrote some of the wildest and filthiest erotic novels for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press under the pseudonym Harriet Daimler—classics including Darling, Innocence, and The Woman Thing—all well worth tracking down, all more than worthy of her friend Terry Southern's (himself a sometime dirty book author) Quality Lit seal of approval.
In underground comix, Italian graphic artist Giovanna Casotto wrote and illustrated fantastically explicit erotica like her Bitch in Heat collection in the '90s. These graphic novels push the transgressive envelope while celebrating the forbidden and illicit.
In cinema, Candida Royalle distinguished herself in the '60s and '70s as a sex-positive feminist and went on to produce and direct numerous erotic "couples" films.
Most recently, Dutch film director Halina Reijn certainly exercised her droit du seigneur with the recent directorial succès de scandale of her film Babygirl, which I've written about here: http://culturecatch.com/index.php/node/4404
But this expansive female sex-positive attitude has certainly not consistently enough been the case, as the infamous Frank Zappa versus the PMRC congressional hearings spearheaded by Tipper Gore attest to.
Pornography, as we all know, is definitely in the Eye of the Beholder, both male or female or intersex, pace Supreme Court Justice Potter Stevens's landmark ruling of 1964 regarding the banning of Louis Malle's 1958 film Les Amants in Ohio on the grounds that it was pornography:
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ['hardcore pornography'], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.
But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
Regarding the Male/Female Gaze:
I adored the late Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue cable TV series in the '70s and '80s.
The very IDEA of Al Goldstein (publisher and editor of Screw Magazine)—a loud-mouthed vulgarian, a tummler, a rager, a stand-up comedian, and swaggering teller of hard truths—the living embodiment, in fact, of the anti-semitic Jewish Pornographer stereotype, which hearkens back to Ulysses's first American publisher, First Amendment champion Samuel Roth (a lifelong Orthodox Jew), and Olympia Press major-domo Maurice Girodias (half-Jewish but wtf)—always warmed the cockles of my heart.
No one essayed the role of Jewish Pornographer with a capital P better than Al.
I especially loved his infamous televised "Fuck You!" Department, a staple of Midnight Blue.
Al was a goddamn one-man Consumer Reports, mouthing outrageous take-downs of sacrosanct institutions like the high-end Hammacher Schlemmer department store, who sold him some broken-down crap, or bitching about the staggering bill for inferior food or service at some tony restaurant in Manhattan.
This segment always ended with Al's middle-fingered kiss-off to the product or person at hand deserving of his righteous scorn:
“Hammacher Schlemmer--FUCK YOU!!”
Al took no prisoners—naming names and reporting phone numbers of the folks working at these joints who'd done him dirty that he encouraged his viewers to harass!
This outrageous tactic was to eventually prove his undoing when he went after his ex-wife and her divorce lawyer and gave out their phone numbers. (Bad move.)
Yes, not everyone loved Al.
My life partner, Caroline Sinclair, f'rinstance LOATHED Al Goldstein. She found his show gross, obnoxious, and odious in extremis (all points in the show's favor, IMHO)—and she always demanded I immediately switch channels whenever the show came on over Manhattan Cable's Public Access channel.
This was true also of the other Manhattan Cable Public Access sex-centric cable shows back in the day, helmed by colorful New Yorker characters such as Ugly George, a Polish American emigre who roamed the streets of the boroughs shirt-less in silver lame hot pants with a Sony video portapak strapped on his back who specialized in sweet-talking random hotties he encountered into back alleys and secluded nooks where he (somehow) coaxed them into taking off their tops and bras for his camera—the raw footage of which he gleefully aired every week.
Also, the man known simply as "Dan" (no last name given), a bearded, somewhat portly Jewish erotic connoisseur referred to as "Rabbi" by the mainly male callers-in who watched the show.
Dan was frequently seen cavorting in the churning waters of a hot tub with two nekkid and nubile young ladies, all the while fielding on-air calls over his phone from fans watching the action live—one of whom set him up unforgettably one summer night by asking if he could personally address one of Dan's female tub consorts.
Dan passed the phone to her (all calls were heard over the air):
"Tell me dear…when you're sitting in that hot tub next to Dan...and things start getting steamy and intimate with him...(Dan and his partner both smile and nod here)…and you turn to Dan to kiss him...and you two start getting it on.
Tell me, does Dan smell??"
A faint smile played over Dan's mainly serene and enlightened visage as he hung up the phone with a cool:
"Next caller."
Then there was the Robin "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box" Byrd show, which concentrated on interviews with hot lesbians and gay male models, new ones every week, new kids fresh in town working and dancing at Show World on West 42nd Street—something for everybody!
It is surprising to me that Caroline was so repulsed by such, in retrospect, innocent TV fun—as once upon a time in a world long ago and far away, she had been an illegal alien in our fair city until she wasn't (Reader, I married her). She had (shhhhh!) occasionally supported herself back in the days without a Green Card by working in the Forty Deuce porno film industry as a part-time editor and set decorator on a couple of films starring Al's good pal with a big schlong, the gross Ron Jeremy.
Let me backtrack a bit here:
My interest in the erotic was stoked via my random discovery at age 10 or 11 of a well-thumbed European pirated edition of Ulysses on my father's bookshelf, which it turned out he'd liberated in the '40s from the Zeta Beta Tau Jewish frat house while a student at Syracuse University.
That, and stumbling on (and eventually going steady with) my older sisters's paperback copies of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place…and my own close encounter in summer camp with a fellow camper's copy of Roslyn Drexler's I Am the Beautiful Stranger, which we passed around in our cabin in the woods like Russian dissidents sharing samizdat literature in the former Soviet Union.
The truth, though, is that in the current digital moment, things like specifically erotic novels, adult cinemas, x-rated stores, and their like have more or less gone the way of all flesh, vanishing vapor trails in the polluted ether, with the bit-torrent of hardcore porn but a click away on your iPhone (or so I've been told. I have never availed myself of the opportunity—have you? I prefer to patrol the precincts of my own dirty mind—À la recherche du temps pair deux—and need no visual stimulation to "fire my imagination," as Mick Jagger so succinctly put it in the sensational '60s).
I bring this up in regard to a recent viewing of a new restoration of Japanese cult anime director Hideaki Anno's experimental 1998 live-action film Love and Pop, which is now playing at the IFC Center here in the West Village. It's a film that is simultaneously a critique of a porn-centric world and the virtual Thing In Itself—a real Peep Show Bible for obsessive oldsters and "nasty narrow-minded jades" (to quote Vivian Stanshall).
Boasting some of the weirdest camera angles and more outre discontinuous edits ever seen before "on the big screen" outside of certain avant-garde classics, the film is based on the book Topaz II by Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami (often confused with Japanese writer Haruki Murakami—definitely not the same animal), author of the indelibly lewd Almost Transparent Blue (for years available in English translation only in NYC at a Japanese import store on West 57th Street) and other explorations of the soft white underbelly of Japanese decadence. It is a glittering dark jewel with many facets that shimmer in its depiction of wayward Japanese youth coming of age.
It concerns a quartet of cute teenage girls living in the Shibuya district of Tokyo who are devoted advocates of "sugar dating"—lining up dates with creepy older men through a phone service specializing in connecting such erotic hook-ups, the goal of the girls being to obtain the maximum amount of gifts from their furtive male patsies without actually putting out.
(And btw, I've never seen such repulsive male marks as portrayed in this film, two of whom the main female protagonist Hiroshi has to endure in one endless long day's journey to the end of the night in the hope of scoring enough yen to purchase an expensive ring.)
The film, while exposing the machinations of both sexes in this twisted Japanese mating ritual, lingers lovingly Tarantino-like on plenty of close-ups of bare, barely pubescent female feet, ankles, legs, etc.—all the better to make the viewer complicit in the whole seedy story—a voyeur, if you will, of the film itself; a regular Peeping Tom.
We're kinda in Ghost World film territory here, but way more in-your-face and outrageous.
As an objet du cinema, I've never seen anything like this film, frankly—other than—thematically, anyway—the 2009 Polish film Mall Girls, directed by Katarzyna Roslaniec—which tells a similar tale of young Polish girls from poor families who semi-prostitute themselves hanging around in large bustling malls hoping to pick up older sugar daddies to basically "buy them stuff."
Well, it is a "mean old world," to quote Little Walter, if not a dog's life, for 98% percent of the human population hereabouts, vis-à-vis hierarchic capitalist exploitation based on the old in-and-out, top man/bottom man dialectic.
Three cheers then for Sean Baker's audacious and hilarious film Anora, which, as I write this, just swept the Oscars —and his acceptance speeches (two of them) wherein he praised the lives of sex workers.
(Although, hey, Love and Pop's bourgeois teenage Japanese girls are hardly "sex workers." These grrrls just wanna have fun, i.e., go shopping).
Love and Pop is definitely worthy of the attention of cinephiles of any persuasion, especially as the film has never had a proper release in North America (and it's been a 27-year wait).
It looks like it should be playing on and off at the IFC on 6th Avenue in the West Village for a while in any case, and it's set to open in other U.S. cities later this year.
And while I'm grazing in the "Asian Babes" section:
All broad-minded literati are recommended to check out the recent publication of new English translations of Japanese novelist/model/actress Izumi Suzuki's superb books Terminal Boredom, Hit Parade of Tears, and Set My Heart On Fire—all of which might well be filed under the Love and Pop category, dealing as they are with complicated and claustrophobic male/female relationships and romantic agony in Tokyo in an age of disposable chintzy popular music and glitz.
All were recently published by (go figure) Verso Books, devoted mainly to leftist political and philosophical writings, such as our friend Cineaste editor Richard Porton's important study Film and the Anarchist Imagination.
And Izumi Suzuki's books are decidedly not that in any way, shape, or form. Suzuki was both a brilliant writer and a stunning-looking woman (I'm exercising my Male Gaze prerogative again here—sorry!).
She achieved much notoriety in Japan as both a radical science-fiction author and film actress—as well as an erotic model for famed Japanese photographer/one-time lover Nobuyoshi Araki—but her flame burned too brightly, she suffered mental health issues, and eventually, Izumi Suzuki took her own life at the tender age of 36. Perhaps in the mistaken belief that at that point she was over the hill in a Houelllbecque-ian "Female as Commodity" sense.
Her books are fascinating, and her writing is a profound glimpse into the female psyche, like the work of Elena Ferrante.
Both Izumi Suzuki's books and Hideaki Anno's Love and Pop should be a lot better known in the world.
Hopefully, this essay is a beacon pointing you, the voyeur, in their direction.