Cinema and sexuality: representation and cultural impact

Sex & Sexuality - Cinema Comparison

SEX and SEXUALITY: CINEMATIC COMPARISON on the surface, the two features, Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000) and the Notorious Bettie Page (2005) have little in common other than the very superficial similarities of principal characters who earn a living from their physical attributes in the fringes of the sex industry. Bettie Page is discovered walking on the beach in Coney Island in Brooklyn after which she becomes famous for her provocative photographs and the mid-20th century version of what would be considered "soft-core" pornography today.

Julia Query is a lesbian comedienne whose life is portrayed with particular focus on her employment as an exotic dancer and her difficult relationship with a mother who refuses to condone her daughter's involvement in the tamer segment of the sex industry despite her own lifelong dedication to protecting street prostitutes.

Both protagonists are profoundly affected by the hypocrisies in Western culture, especially in the United States during the mid-20th century, albeit in different ways.

Childhood flashbacks into Betty Page's early life reveal that she was raised in a devout Christian family in the Bible Belt (Tennessee), where she was sexually abused by her father and later gang raped after the end of a short unhappy wartime marriage.

Even after eventually embarking on a career in the soft-core sex industry, her character comes across with a preserved innocence that belies cultural beliefs and attitudes about "fallen" women, exemplified by a Senate subcommittee investigation into the industry resulting substantially from some of her work. Her innocence is represented both in her character and in her genuine perception of having done nothing wrong, but most of all by her apparent obliviousness to the primary prurient purpose and uses of her images.

Julia Query is less naive, but equally subject to the harsh realities of the gender- based sexual double standard, the powerlessness of women at every level of the sex industry, and most of all, the moral outrage of society, represented by her mother's rejection because of her work as a stripper. The exploitation of women depicted by her experiences in the exotic dancing industry, especially in the upscale venues, illustrates the degree to which women are subject to societal rejection and to duplicitous moral values.

Her rejection and castigation by her mother provides even more of an insight into the hypocrisies that pertain to social values when it comes to women and sexuality, precisely because her mother is a famous advocate of and sympathizer with the plight of street prostitutes at the farthest end of the spectrum of sexual deviance according to contemporary social values. Nevertheless, when it comes to her daughter instead of strangers, she is utterly incapable of transcending her own prejudices, preconceptions, and her selfish and egocentric preoccupation with her own reputation in the same society whose unfair treatment of street prostitutes is her life's calling. The profound irony of this hypocrisy is underscored both by the fact that Julia's mother is a feminist who supposedly espouses the philosophy of "freedom, justice and equality for all" as well as by the early scene of Julia's reading Free to Be You and Me together with her mother.