Science, Sex and the Ladies got its first real review - not an interview with us movie makers or anything like that, but a real review. I've been waiting for one of these, and I'm super excited with the outcome. I'm particularly excited because of the site we were reviewed on - Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which mostly deals with Romance Novels (all of the romance, none of the bullshit).
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| Smart Bitches, Trashy Books |
I don't read romance novels, or really anything much except non-fiction books about sex, but a friend and SSL guest blogger Kat Van Sass, an avid romance reader, got me on the SBTB train when she SSL Reviewed a book SBTB recommended that totally had some realistic ladygasming. She also led me to a funny orgasms-in-romance-novels thread on SBTB that I blogged about. Anyway, these SBTB ladies pull no punches, and that, my friends, makes a good review.
When I saw they sometimes review movies, I looked through their bloggers and found the one who's reviewing interests most matched the movie and sent her the info (she also writes the blog Geek Girl In Love). She, surprisingly, wrote back and said she'd do it. (Seriously the amount on non-responsiveness I get is astronomical, and I will ever appreciate this woman for taking time out of her life to randomly review this weirdly styled, controversial, somewhat explicit movie by nobody, with nobody famous in it). I told her going in that I understood a review didn't mean a good review... I mean I read their FAQ on the subject. They pointed out that most of the grades are in the C range and gave some C, D and F reviews to read.
Read those reviews. Now imagine we were saying those things about your book. Imagine Candy nitpicking on stupid details ("Morphine wasn't isolated until the 1800s!" "Why are people in 18th-century England saying 'Okay?'") and Sarah tearing your character a new one for being incredibly stupid. Imagine us calling the hero a fucking asshat, and the heroine Tonya Harding on crack — MORE crack than she normally smokes, even. Does the thought make you want to puke? Enrage you? Make your stomach twist? You might want to think twice about sending your book to us. If you've read those reviews, and you're SURE you can tolerate the level of bitchiness and snark we're going to level on it if we decide it's bad, or even if it's just mediocre, then go right ahead.So, I went ahead. Feel free to read it HERE. We got a B+ which is better than Maleficent (B) but worse than HER (A) - (which was also SSL reviewed BTW). What I really appreciate about this review was that she got that "The main premise of SS&L is that no one has ever scientifically documented a vaginal orgasm – that is, an orgasm that does not involve stimulation of the clitoris." She got that the movie was about how this obsession our culture has with vag-gasms has an affect on us all.
Granted she let us know that she got it because we rather annoyingly said the whole vag-gasms-haven't-been-recorded-scientifically thing a million times, but strangely we get feedback way too often that sort of completely ignores this major point from the movie. More often than I'd like, the focus for people seems to shine on the idea that kids should be taught more comprehensively about sex or that we should all be more sex positive - but the whole vaginal-orgasms-don't-really-exist thing seems to get swept under the rug.
Like, I've said before, there is a whole lot of stuff in SSL, and it's always surprising to me what different people tend to focus on, but I'd really like to have more focus on discussing if I am on the right track or way off base with this statement about vaginal orgasms. It's the controversial part. It's the part that is different from the status quo most-women-need-clitoral-stimulation-of-course-but-certainly-some-women-must-have-gSpot/vaginal/cervical-orgasms way of talking that dominates the discussion now. It's the part I want people to start thinking about, and I LOVE that this reviewer brought that up. I don't know if she fully agreed or not, but she got it and she talked about it. That's all I ask.
I don't mind if research comes along at some point that shows I'm off my rocker, but I think it is a HUGE idea to consider. What if...just for a second consider what if it really were true that the only way women orgasm is from stimulation of the clitoral glans-however that gets done (in the same way that men only orgasm from stimulation of the penis). Just...what if? What would that mean about our current sexual culture? How incredibly off-base would our understanding of female sexuality and females in general be? With our scientific understanding as it is now, it's something worth considering, and I just want that conversation to start happening.
Thanks again to Geek Girl In Love and Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Now, where's the next review...???
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