Sex and Sexuality 2: Concussion (2013).

Warning: Spoilers

Concussion is a film about a bored lesbian housewife who becomes a sex worker. For me the last part almost made it something I didn’t want to watch, I’m not really here for films that go all Pretty Woman and pretend that being a ‘sex worker’ is totally awesome and has no problems that getting rid of stigma can’t fix. But luckily Concussion isn’t that. Now it doesn’t explicitly talk about the violence inherent in prostitution but it is hinted at here and there throughout. Concussion shows a very specific type of sex worker and oddly enough it’s the one that people are so quick to defend: a white, well off woman who purely does sex work because she chooses to. Whilst the film doesn’t exactly preach that this is the epitome of sex work it doesn’t really mention all the women whose experience of prostitution is nothing like hers. For information on the myths surrounding prostitution, decriminalisation and the Nordic Model go here, here and here.

It was refreshing to watch a film about lesbian women, found in the LGBT section of Netflix, that, whilst yes was about sex, was about them as people. No one died, no one seduced their student or went jealous and killed someone. It could have easily been about a straight woman doing the same thing except it wasn’t. It showed that no one really likes housework, no one is really fulfilled cleaning up the house and taking care of the kids – despite how much they love & care about those kids. At its core it’s about women needing a hobby, needing an outlet for the boredom that is the necessary and boring day to day stuff. Nothing would get done if we were all walking around in un-ironed un-washed clothes, hungry and in a house covered in filth after all but that doesn’t mean its inspiring and fascinating – for anyone who wants to read more about this you should buy this book.

So Abby decides to go back to work as an interior decorator, who renovates homes and apartments to sell them. As she works with her contractor they talk and one thing apparently leads to another and she’s paying for sex in the apartment they are renovating. Afterwards she’s complimented on her skills and so she decides to become one herself. As she never really explains it to her wife it’s not really clear what she does with the money she gets but it’s clear the money isn’t needed; her wife works as a lawyer and despite their house and two kids they seemed to be fine financially when she was unemployed, her going to work was to get out of the house more than anything. She works out of this white, clean apartment, she completely chooses her own clients and the closest she gets to having a pimp is her contractor getting her clients who is later replaced by his girlfriend – named The Girl – who is a fresh faced young woman getting her degree who needs the money for student loans.

The only real showing of a woman in this industry who perhaps is struggling and does need the money is when Abby visits a prostitute who appears to be addicted to drugs. The second she walks in a less fancy motel room she sees the woman taking drugs, she offers them to Abby who declines. Then the woman bends her over the bed and the scene changes. It’s not really talked about but it is the catalyst for her choosing a more expensive sex worker next, and for her to give herself more options in future. It’s made clear that Abby doesn’t want to be like this woman, nor does she want to sleep with this woman or women like her and because of her money and status she happily does neither.

The choice and freedom that Abby has is a luxury and it is plentiful. She doesn’t choose her clients but she does choose that they only be women – not an option for most lesbian sex workers, especially considering the money is with men who are the vast (so vast) majority of people who buy sex. She chooses where to conduct her business, again not something seen in sex work – especially considering the dangers of inviting a stranger back to a place where you know you’re alone; contrast this to brothels in decriminalised places like Germany where women have options like mega brothels, or colour coded places that look like stables. Then there’s one client who is particularly violent, she throws her around and strangles her but she just never invites them back; she says no and that’s that, she says she ‘has to protect herself’ but again due to not needing the money it is a luxury she can literally afford.

Abby also does something unusual that is specific to her own brand of sex work, something that prostitutes who need money quickly and efficiently can’t do, she meets her clients for coffee first. She sits in a nice looking coffee shop and she asks them questions about herself, she wants to know them as people before she sleeps with them; some clients don’t seem happy about that, they just want to have sex and be done with it. But others, such as one woman who is in her twenties who has never had sex or kissed anyone, come to enjoy it and it helps them break the ice. This is a key thing Concussion does as well, it really wants to reinforce that this film is about women as people not women as sex objects, something that it so easily could have fallen into; I would attribute that to the female writer and director, Stacie Passon, as it shows how easily the female gaze can change film.

Ultimately Concussion is about desire, about the exploration of female sexuality, how family can change you as a person and how a desire to be a person, to be a woman doesn’t have to conflict and rip it apart. It shows it has feminist roots in a character who recommends The Second Sex – ‘it was crazy’ – to a woman who feels uncomfortable in her own body, and with Louise Bourgeois’ art hanging on the walls in the room where she sees clients. It shows women being shy, women being erotic, and women being human; it made me want to keep watching and existing in that world where women get to be all the things other films deny them. It’s not, I don’t think, asking for much to acknowledge that in a patriarchy the female gaze can mean a lot – it can mean a break in the drudgery of films that don’t like or respect women. When it comes to sex and sexuality, to films about lesbians having a lot of sex, I’d say the female gaze is pretty damn vital.

P.S.

After the film I briefly watched an interview with the actress who plays Abby, and the woman who plays a friend Abby knows, cough, called Sam. It starts with the male interviewer saying to the women 'it's not about the sex, it's about the story'; he repeats this because he maybe thinks that it's important to them that this man thinks that he didn't think about them having sex whilst watching a film where at least half of it is women having sex. I just wanted to mention it as it was a weird thing to clarify but also that maybe it was because he didn't feel like it was about sex because the sex wasn't for him, it wasn't aimed at him and it didn't include him. It was all about women. But I have to say as a bisexual woman watching the film it would be pretty hard to pretend that it wasn't at least a little (okay a lot) about the sex.

Sex & Sexuality 1: Felt.

In this history of cinema there are films about men in all their glory, all their flaws and everything in between. But when it comes to films about women that’s not quite true. Women are expected to look stunning, to be inhuman and to be what men want them to be. So I’m doing a project where I try and find films about women’s sex and sexuality that treat women as human beings who can be complex and erotic and all the rest. First in the list is Felt which looks at sex.

Warning: Spoilers (for all of the film).

Felt is a slightly autobiographical film about a woman called Amy who was sexually assaulted, it starts after the fact and shows her dealing with day to day life. We see her as she goes on dates, hangs out with her friends and it’s painful to watch people not understand her or how to deal with her. It would be reductive to call Amy weird, to say she’s just odd or messed up; she’s stuck in a process of trying to find her own way to heal, to figure out who should be in life, and how to interact with people again after something has shattered everything she thought she knew about people and herself.

Amy is an artist and she explores the female and male body using her art. She creates costumes that mimic the male body and it’s fascinating. Watching Amy walk around the woods wearing a skin tight suit with a fake penis on it is something to behold. It’s worth putting it in perspective too, remembering the many films that show men dressing in ‘women’s’ clothes, the documentaries on men wearing masks that are sick caricatures of female faces and remembering how little we see this reverse. But also worth remembering the societal context that makes what Amy is doing so different.

Amy isn’t, and this is my opinion here as she only explains it once, wearing a fake male body because she wants to be a man but because she wants to see what it’s like to have the thing that hurt her, a penis. She wants to see what power it supposedly has, how something so simple could shake her world so much, and what it’s like to explore nature in something she sees as destructive, and for her to be the opposite as she saves a dragonfly that is stuck in a spider’s web. She has many costumes in the film but it’s her exploration of the male body that’s so striking in the context of the rest of the film. Felt didn’t start with a rape, or a sexual assault – it didn’t feel the need to be like Irreversible, thinking that the only way you could understand rape is to brutally show it. Amy wants to show you what happens after, what a woman feels like when her own body is used against her.

When her own female anatomy is invaded she can hardly escape it, she can’t just not go back to the scene of the crime and so she gives herself a new body instead. Her friend doesn’t get what she’s doing, she gets annoyed and angry as Amy sits across from her wearing a lyrca mask to mimic a man’s face. She gets frustrated and sees Amy’s ‘acting out’ as something that is selfish, she wants her to be ‘normal’ so she doesn’t have to try & understand Amy or think about what she’s going through. People often hate the word victim because it reminds us that we live in a world full of perpetrators. It’s easier to want people to call themselves survivors, to pretend that they were spontaneously hurt and that they’re braver for it. No one wants to admit that men are hurting women.

So Amy explores instead, she reaches out with felt and lyrca and padding and tries to understand how these differences in sex can be so vicious. At one point Amy goes to a photo shoot, a naked photo shoot and we see a woman standing half naked on the bed; she is topless and wearing underwear and black lace tights – the man taking photos of her is fully clothed, with a big beard and hat. Then out comes Amy wearing another suit, a bra with fake nipples and underwear that has a plastic vulva on. It’s a sight to behold and the whole scene is really actually touching. The guy taking the photos tells her to stop, to leave, to end the joke as he doesn’t find it funny. However the woman who was already there loves it, she lets her walls down and she starts having fun.

Female friendship is something that has got feminism further than men want it to; this solidarity in the face of assault and oppression is something that men want to break and stop because it’s so powerful. This scene is a great expression of that, two women who have never met before in a situation that is not about them as people but purely about them as pretty objects with boobs. But there’s Amy showing the female anatomy in all its glory and the man taking the photos doesn’t want it. He wasn’t there to take photos of women, of the female body in its realness but in its fake-ness; he wanted the objectified version that lets men pretend that women aren’t human. Amy and her new friend, Roxanne, start messing around and farting and just generally being so great and real.

Afterwards they go out to a bar, they play pool and have fun. Then a guy comes along, so they be themselves and he gets uncomfortable. One of my favourite things about this film is that it features a fair few scenes of men looking uncomfortable and in a world where TV and film actively makes women feel uncomfortable it’s really great to watch. Then as the film progresses Amy meets the man from the bar again and they start dating. He tries to be the Nice Guy, the one man in the world who won’t hurt Amy, who sees her as she is and loves her for it. He takes her to see art of women – which is so great – and he throws her a vulva/vagina birthday which is amazing. She shows him her art, which is full of dildos and felt penises, she sits stabbing one with a felt needle and he asks her to stop as it’s painful for him to watch – she doesn’t.

Then Amy explains why so much of her work is about penises, as he asks, and she explains it’s because she lives in a rape culture. She tells him that the world wants her to be an object, it wants her body for its pieces and she hates it. It would be hard to find a woman who wouldn’t agree, even those who want to pretend it doesn’t exist must still have that feeling – that men see their greatest worth in their body. That there is always a suffocating wall around them of women’s breasts, of their arses and skin. That no matter where you turn you see men being human, being flawed, and then women being sexy and pretty no matter what situation they are in. So Amy turns to felt, she turns to plastic and she creates the things that patriarchy holds dear, and then she stabs it with needles.

As the film goes on we see her friend, Roxanne, driving and as she’s driving she sees Amy’s loving boyfriend Kenny. But he’s holding hands with another woman, so she takes a picture and she finds Amy and she shows her it. Amy asks her why she wants to hurt her, why she wants to break them up and Roxanne explains that she just wants her to be happy and that he won’t be that for her. But Kenny was meant to be different, and it’s hard at first for Amy to let go of that. Like any woman, on the internet or in real life, she’ll have been told, by some well-meaning man who lives in a world where women need correcting no matter how smart they are, that not all men are like that, not all men are abusive, and not all men objectify people. But they do, all men live in a patriarchy and all men in one way or another punch down. Whether it’s through seeing women as sexy objects, through watching porn, saying sexist jokes, calling women bitches, and the hundred and one options for screwing over women that they have at their disposal they will have done at least one.

So Amy takes him into the woods, she shows him her special place where she goes alone in her costumes to heal. She puts on her male costume and she gives him her female costume, he looks pained and uncomfortable as she makes him strip and get changed in a hollowed out tree in the woods. Just before this he tried to sit her down and explain how he hasn’t been quite truthful with her, she didn’t let him finish as she already knows what he’s going to say. So, walking through the woods in their costumes, she asks him to lie down on a tree and he looks so scared. She climbs on top of him, kissing him and then out of her bag she pulls out a pair of scissors – “they could cut through anything!” – and she stabs him repeatedly. Again, something that has been done to women in film since men realised they could film it and call it art. Then, as we all knew would happen watching the film, she takes those scissors and she cuts off his penis; she holds it against her body, an actual one to replace the plastic one, and she walks through the woods. The End.

It’s a film designed to make men feel uncomfortable, to make them feel embarrassed for the things they say, the way they act, and the abuses they commit. I hope men turn away when they watch it, that they wince as she brandishes the scissors and that they feel like I do regularly when I watch TV & film – that it’s not for them, it’s not there to be their friend, that it’s there to show them that their body is for consumption. Felt is a film that doesn’t shy away from saying the truth about the patriarchy we live in, and I love it. It’s a film that people call feminist that for once actually is feminist. It’s not about choice, it’s not about reclaiming sexy, it’s not even about showing how women are broken by men but that women are people who are human in a world that doesn’t want them to be.