Screening Sex (review)

Screening Sex explores the evolution of how sex acts are displayed in movies and how seeing these images make us feel. In the introduction of Screening Sex, author Linda Williams claims that "moving images are surely the most powerful sex education most of us will ever receive" (6). Williams spends much of the book making a case for this claim by discussing how movies have depicted various sex acts, from a simple kiss to graphic images of penetration and oral sex, and the impact viewing these screened sex acts has had on the audience. Screening Sex defines "screening" as what is seen on the screen and what is screened out, blocked from the screen. This dual definition is important as Williams investigates how filmmakers have wrestled with the decision of what to show and what not to show in sex scenes. In this 412-page book Williams does an impressive job examining how America changed from a culture that prohibited screened sex acts to a culture that permits, and sometimes even embraces, sex acts on screen.

Screening Sex studies both simulated and non-simulated screened sex acts. Early in the book, Williams differentiates between pornographic movies where the focus is on making the non-simulated sex acts as visible as possible and mainstream narrative films where the practice is to conceal sex acts. She examines how cinema arrived at this separation of concealing and revealing sex acts because pornography was seen as taboo and how it was not until the 1970s that a filmmaker was able to successfully blend them together.

Screening Sex is effectively organized by time period and theme. The book studies sex acts in movies from different time periods starting with the late 1890s and progressing until the mid-2000s. As anyone who has studied the relationship between media and society understands, as different eras brought significant changes in societal views on sex and nudity, movies pushed further in exposing sex acts, both simulated and non-simulated. Chapter 4, "Make Love, Not War: Jane Fonda Comes Home (1968–1978)," is an example of how the book is organized by theme. Though this chapter overlaps with the time periods of chapters 2, 3, and 5, this chapter focuses on how a woman achieves an orgasm and how this is realistically expressed. Supporting Williams's claim that movies are an important source of sex education, the information about a female orgasm displayed in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, in Klute, and in Coming Home, regarding both how a woman appears while having an orgasm and how the female orgasm is achieved, was the same information gathered by the sex studies of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson.

The chapter titles are original and intriguing and suggest that the reader will be rewarded with interesting reflections and insights into the sexual acts in moving images. Chapter 1, "Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies (1896–1963)," explores the screened kiss. The author very effectively discusses the use of ellipses, the three dots used to signify the omission of words, in relation to the screened kiss during the Hollywood Production Code era. She describes ellipses in movies as a way that filmmakers, prohibited by the code from showing explicit sex acts, would cut away from a kiss to a shot of the same actors in the same location but at a later time. The ellipses were a way to suggest that sexual acts prohibited by the code had occurred after the kiss and before the next scene without actually showing anything. Chapter 2, "Going All the Way: Carnal Knowledge on American Screens (1961–1971)," examines how watching screened simulated sex is much different from reading provocative novels. This chapter explores screened simulated sex scenes in mainstream movies, independent films, blaxploitation films, and avant-garde films that pushed much further than the movies of the previous decades that stopped with just a kiss. Chapter 3, "Going Further: Last Tango in Paris, Deep Throat, and Boys in the Sand (1971–1972)," investigates movies where sex and screened sex acts...