I saw I'm So Excited! while I was in Denver at a lovely theater called the Mayan. This movie turned out to be barely eligible for SSL Review, so here we are. I say barely because I think there is some room for interpretation in the scenes I would say are depicting female sexual release, but I think it's worth a review either way.
It's a Pedro Almodovar movie. He's a Spanish director I was introduced to in one of my favorite college classes - unsurprisingly called Spanish Cinema. I think of him as having 2 distinct groups of movies that he does. There's the kinda dark, quirky, passionate ones. Those are the reason I love Almodovar and why I went to check out this one. Then there's the brightly colored, silly, boisterous, drama-filled ones. They're alright - a fun movie experience I'd say, and that's what I'm So Excited! was. If you want to see a Soap-Opera style drama with flamboyant characters and a shit-ton of sex that takes place on a plane, this is a movie you want to see, my friend. Also, all his movies have sex and often strangely rapey sex ribboned throughout, and this was no exception.
I won't get into the details (because honestly it gets a little complicated), but both the SSL eligible scenes involve a woman bouncing up and down on a dudes lap (the intercourse is inferred of course - we aren't seeing insertion) while he sits in an airplane seat. Both have the woman facing away - kind of like reverse cowgirl in seated position. Both women are enthusiastically vocalizing and moving in ecstasy much like any porn scene you'd see. There are clearly no hands - either from the male or the female - touching the lady's vulva/clitoral area, and she's facing away from the man, so there is clearly no body contact on the clitoral/vulva area. So any orgasm that might be happening must be assumed to come from the penis moving in and out of the vagina. (By the way, I know the insertion is happening in the vagina and not the anus because the question of which hole it was happening in was specifically asked in the movie - just so you know.)
Now, I couldn't point out a particular moment when the viewer was supposed to understand she actually comes, so one could take these scenes as simply depicting women making vocalizations of pleasure and not necessarily "orgasming" continually like a porn star for the entire act of intercourse. I'll accept that understanding, and if that's what was happening, then I can't really be too judgy. I mean, pleasure comes in lots of different forms, and the feeling of intercourse could certainly be one way to experience pleasure. One might even choose to express that pleasure by screaming and moaning like a porn star. The problem is pleasure is not "orgasm" and we too often depict women's experience of intercourse (the hands-free penis moving in vagina thing) as eliciting orgasm when it realistically does not. Images, like the ones seen in this movie, of a woman, hands free, bouncing up and down on a dude while screaming and moaning, is a ubiquitous image in porn and in mainstream media (the genre just depends on how explicitly the insertions is depicted really) and whether there is a particular moment of orgasm or not, it heavily insinuates that having sex in that way is orgasmic for women. Some people may be able to see through that kind of ridiculous imagery, but for many, this is just another link in the chain of miseducation about how women's bodies react to sex. It's all too common, and I think it needs to be called out more.
Also, did I mention that neither situations were really consensual. One involved a woman using a male stranger on sleeping pills with a nocturnal erection, and the other involved a man with his brand new wife. He kept feeding her sleeping pills and she had "sleep-walk" sex with him. Like I said, there's often a strangely rapey situation in Almodovar movies, and don't judge me, but sometimes it's a pretty good element, but not in this one.
Anyway, this gets a bad SSL Review - ZERO vulvas. That's right zero vulvas...but I'll type one in just so you can enjoy it. It's not for the movie though... (!)
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