Film school will destroy my brain.

[charloween]

Hokay. So. Am researching for a paper that will make frequent mention of the film Not A Love Story, a laughably bad reactionary "expose" on the porn industry that was made in the 1980s by a bunch of frigid white protestant women who were shocked and embarrassed by their own sexuality. (I'm contrasting it with a fairly solid feminist anti-nuke doc called If You Love This Planet; both films were made by the NFB and paid for by Canadian taxpayers!) As such, I've been reading up on the film, and have stumbled across a delightful paper called "Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher". In this, the author (a "feminist man") talks about his habits surrounding viewing porn and peep shows.

I've been reading about penises for nearly a full hour.

The problem is that this paper is dealing with the films as Canadian-made texts which are treating American subjects (NY porn theatres on the one hand, American nuclear disarmament on the other), and how Canada (as a nation), the Canadian goverment (which financed the films) and Canadians (as individual viewers) are implicated in the shifting of the Canadian gaze from internal (as per the original National Film Board mandate) to view our neighbours. If they are at all. Which means the problem is that I really really want to work in references to "tools of the American Imperium" and the "driving shafts of American culture". Heh. Penis.

I know, all that set-up for a lousy punchline, but I'm sitting here in the library doing this research and I've got this ridonkulous smile on my face...

Comments

[naturelf.livejournal.com]

Are you reading Linda Williams for that? She's written some great (positive!) stuff on the construction of gender in S&M porn.