Rejuvenation of the Orgasm Equality Spirit, My People

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Hello out there. As you are aware, and as I point out in pretty much all of my recent posts, my activity on this blog has slowed the last year or so. This is not a lack of interest. It's more a prioritization to accommodate my life in its current form. 

So, I am not here with some sweet (they are sweet to me at least) scientific journal article summaries, even though I would love to be working on one at the moment. There are plenty to read HERE, though, if you are jonesing for one. 

This is also not not an SSL Review  - otherwise known as in depth review of a depiction or discussion of the female orgasm, the clit, lady-bation, or cunnilingus. Although, to be sure, there's a shit ton of past reviews for both TV and Movies if you need some of that in your life right now. Spoiler alert: Slums of Beverly Hills and Diary of a Teenage Girl are in the top tier of 5 vulva rated movies (!)(!)(!)(!)(!), but The 40 Year Old Virgin and The Overnight are some that have a big fat zero vulva rating. :( ...And if you want to know what's currently sandwiching the list, 20th Century Women got the only coveted 5 1/2 vulva rating, while strangely enough, Hysteria, a movie about the invention of the vibrator is trailing the pack with the "-1 vulva rating" - something I made up special due to my utter disappointment in what it could have been vs. what it was. 

This post is not those things. What it is, is me waking up just feeling particularly excited about this work and wanting to post about it. I'm always kind of excited about his. It's truly something I want to leave in this world when I'm gone, but you know, within that there are frustrating times and disappointing times as well as exciting times and vibrant times. I just happened to have a little touch of excitement last night at a sweet sculptural art opening. I talked with a fab artist and cool lady (who has introduced me into a group of fab women and I am incredibly grateful to her for that) along with some other super cool people there, and I was able to engage about this work. 

I'll be honest, talking about my work has been a journey and a struggle full of learning and eye-opening responses. I think I've honed how I speak of it better over the years, but it's still a thing that makes me a little anxious for a variety of reasons - especially to new people. I'm truly a natural bull-shitter. I feel pretty comfortable talking with most people about life and feelings and dumb shit. However, speaking about things I have a real stake in, things that I really want to verbalize correctly is a whole different matter and something I do not naturally do well. All that to say, I really felt good talking to these people, and I really loved their engagement and their thoughts, and it was just an overall good experience that, I guess, upped my overall blogging motivation. 

You know, I think moving to a different city 4 years ago changed my culture around this work and although I hadn't thought of it this way before, maybe was really demotivating. I still had the bad-ass women on line that are in this fight too. They have continued to be great, and I even met a super amazing new one while I've been here too. However, I suddenly didn't have a lot of interactions with people other than workmates, and new co-workers are not the people you want to just start talking about lady-gasms to. Overall it was a struggle to find new friends, and then the pandemic happened, and I just recently started feeling like I'm finding a culture and a social life here, and so last night was nice and rejuvenating, and I'm grateful to those people I was with.

That's what I wanted to say. Be well all my friends out there!

For your extra enjoyment, here are some stills from the OG movie to this blog, Science, Sex and the Ladies.

Watch SSL, Contact Me, Know Me

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I get asked every now and then where you can watch the movie or where you can contact me. I realized that this blog doesn't actually have an easy link to that stuff when you're looking at it on a mobile device, so I thought I'd re-up. I'll add this page into the dropdown for mobile and top links for desktop.

Watch Science, Sex and the Ladies!

On Vimeo (we love Vimeo - there's great stuff there. Also you can watch it with English, Russian, or Brazilian Portuguese subtitles): https://vimeo.com/ondemand/26160

Science, Sex and The Ladies from AnC Movies on Vimeo.


On Amazon: (We're new here, so and if you've seen it already and want to give us a customer review there, we'd love it.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M5FZ1A2?tag=moviefone-20

For your classroom: You can buy the movie plus the Educational License and can stream or download at any time. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sciencesexandtheladiesed

At An Event: Hey, we first and foremost want people to see this movie, so if you have someplace you'd like to show it, just contact me, Trisha (see below). 

Contact Me!
First off, I LOVE to hear from people. I LOVE it. Contact me. Say whatever you want. Secondly, here's ways to do it.

Email: trisha att ancmovies dott com

Twitter: @ScienceSexMovie (Follow me, baby)

Facebook: Here's our movie group's page AnC Movies. We made Science, Sex and the Ladies. We're working on our next full length...which will be a bit different than SSL.

Links 
Science, Sex and the Ladies Website

AnC Movies Website

About Me
I love lady-gasm activism. I love this blog. I love SSL Reviewing movies and journal articles and advice columns. I love finding and highlighting other people out there working (knowingly or unknowingly) for the Orgasm Equality Movement. I hope all the shit I fill this blog with can be a strange and wonderful resource for all kinds of people. I wish I had more time in the day to spend working on this blog.

Me and Tina having fun working on this blog

I have a day job though. I'm a biologist, and I actually quite like that job as well. I'd even call it a career.

I also LOVE making movies with 2 men, Charlie and Barnaby, I've known since high school. We're AnC Movies. Science, Sex and the Ladies (SSL) was our first full length movie, but we'd made lots of shorts and commercial work before that. It happened that our first full length was a doc about lady-gams, but we're not really doc makers necessarily. We just really liked the idea of that movie. Our next one is a narrative and probably the one after that will be as well.

L to R: Charlie, Me, Barnaby having an AnC meeting circa 2005ish - probably talking about the SSL script

I'm excited to make more movies, but SSL will always have a special place in my heart. It was my baby, and I fell in love with the subject. I've been doing this blog for years now, expanding on the subjects we touch in SSL, and I'm so grateful I get to continue exploring this subject. I think it's important. But I watched SSL again recently, and I still think it's a crucial companion to this blog. I find it hasn't lost much for me over time and further exploration. I just really love it because it puts the whole story I'm trying to tell together. That's hard to do in these blogs. It's too complicated and broad, and the movie says almost everything without getting too bogged down or being too light. Plus, I think it's funny as hell and weird as shit; something that is not quite a doc but definitely non-fiction. It's got its own special little style that we call a visual essay. I heart this movie hard.

On set for Science, Sex and the Ladies. It was almost all done in front of green screen in a run-down old building. All the wierd stuff hanging is lots of make-shift sound treatment, and this is the sexed up caveman scene - one of my faves. 

Charlie, me and Barnaby on set for SSL.  2009ish. We are doing important things (Charlie's little brother in the background).

AnC at the Gateway Theater Doc Week showing of SSL (April 2016)

I also have 3 cats. Charlie (of AnC Movies as well) is my husband. We have tons of nieces and nephews, and watch lots of TV and movies. We have worked and lived most of our adult lives in Indiana. It's where both our extended families mostly are. It gets a lot of shit as a location, but hey, this is where Kinsey did his sex research. Hoosiers have a solid history of pushing sexual culture forward through science. It's also pretty cheap to make movies here. We've recently moved to an even more midwesterny city, Des Moines, Iowa, and ya know what? It's much cooler than you might think. 

This is me and Ramona, the only of our cats we found as a kitten. She started it all. I'm sleeping. Anyone who has known me for any length of time will have seen me in this sleeping position at some point...in a meeting, in a class, at my desk, talking to you. I can sleep anywhere and anytime. 

I don't want to leave Eds out. She was the last cat we found, and she's sitting next to me on a copy of Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Response there. Her full name is Edgar. We named her through a window well before we decided to take her in. Update: our sweet, food psycho Eds passed, but her picture still gets to stay on the blog, because well, I like looking at her.

Pictures 
Here's some pics related to me, AnC, and Science, Sex and the Ladies, for you to enjoy.

This is me with the trophies I won from baton twirling as a young girl. I got a 1st out of 1 and a 4th out of 4...but they were big impressive trophies none the less. This is just before I threw them out.

Amazing mash-up photo of Charlie, me and Barnaby at a 2008 Baltimore exhibition of our short Mustache II: The Second Mustache in collaboration with the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (Dude on screen is our other HS friend and early AnC member, Phil. I'm licking his tiny mustache) 

Still from our first post-HS short movie (2002) Him Her Roland. That's me and B, and the back of Charlie's head. Shot with our first digital camera the XL1 in the restaurant I worked in at the time.

Here at AnC Movies, we try our best to send out a yearly holiday (could be any holiday) card to let our mailing list know about our endeavors. This is our 2014 New Year one.

Me and Charlie on set for SSL as characters we both had to step in and play because the actor couldn't make it last minute. I am Marie Robinson, an opinionated female sexuality writer of the 50's. Charlie is a romance novel character. The romance novel shoot was epic. 

I've saved the best for last. This is me as 80's mom in SSL, a late (2012) re-shoot. We transformed Barnaby's living room for this and that is his cat Yancey. It is the most perfect picture of me in existence. 

An Educational Video Meets A Midnight Movie - Finally, We've Given You a Box for Science, Sex and the Ladies!

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We have another Review - at Rogue Cinema. Check it out HERE. Thanks to Misty Layne for taking the time to watch and write about it. It's a good review, but I'll be honest. It says something we hear about this movie more than I'd like - "I'm not sure who the audience for this documentary is." I've heard it before, and it always feels like an unnecessary questions to me. I always want to say something like - Did you like it? Then you are the audience. However, I have learned since making this movie, that it does matter to people. Categorizing a movie, and thus categorizing the audience who might watch the movie, makes a big difference, and we probably should have done a better job filling in the details for what box people should fit SSL into with our marketing. We should be telling them, so they don't have to spend any precious time worrying about it. So, I'll address that a little - in my own way, here.

 I always knew the movie was hard to categorize. It's a non-fiction movie, but documentary doesn't quite describe it. It's really off-beat with lots of cheese, but not quite the kind of cheese people are used to seeing in their documentaries - the wink and nod to the innocence of the 50's with some cheesy b-roll of a black and white educational film reel featuring shiny happy housewives doing something that seems quaint and silly or with men in suits talking directly to the camera.

those silly ol' 50's housewives! What were those 50's people thinking?! 

Crazy ol' educational video narrators! So ridiculous, huh?!

You know what i mean, right? - the kind of b-roll featured in all kinds of docs, but especially Micheal Moore docs and all the other docs styled like Micheal Moore docs. Anyway, it's not that SSL doesn't have some 50's Housewives and dudes in suits talking directly to the camera. We definitely do. It's just that ours is not random B-roll, thrown in here and there. It's our actual movie. We are not just laughing at such silly stylings. We use those styles...but kinda different. And we're definitely not laughing at the idea of how things used to be...in fact, we're pointing out that thinking things have changed much is the real thing we should be laughing about.

That silly ol' dichotomy between "wife-types" and "whore-types" - too bad that dichotomy didn't actually stay in the 50's! 

That crazy ol' SSL narrator talking about the 60's/70's sexual revolution not actually being much of a sexual revolution for the female orgasm!

So, I think the cheese in SSL is an unexpected type of cheese. It's not familiar in the documentary genre. It's also just less like the familiar cheese of say, the Simpsons, and tends more towards something much stranger like Tim and Eric Awesome Show  - Great Job!

Who doesn't enjoy the cheese of Troy McClure?

Tim and Eric, on the other hand, can get a little weird for some tastes

This is during a musical number called "Petite Feet" which involves..well just google it.

It's not exactly Tim and Eric styling either though. Yes, we have some rainbow unicorns and other weird, cheesy shit, but we certainly don't take anything as far as they do, and the the big difference is the movie itself is not played as a joke in the way cheesy, weird stuff like Tim and Eric or midnight movies are. Science, Sex and the Ladies is a serious movie. The actual information that is being presented is an accurate, cited, well thought-out, and often densely packed argument. It's just there's this very not-serious element in the visual presentation. So, there's a particular mix of the serious and the silly that clearly doesn't fit a mold.

Science, Sex and the Ladies making a point about sprirtual/emotional/non-orgasmic physical pleasure being great and maybe even climactic, but yet still different than an orgasm

The Funbunch! in SSL talking about "Why Ladies Don't Masturbate as Much?"

The other thing that I think worries people with the categorization is that it's kinda sex-ed like, so people immediately start thinking it's for young people. I get that sex ed is something we think of as a teen sort of thing, and I get that adults always tend to think they are already educated, so it wouldn't occur to them that something sex edish is meant for them too. However, the main point in SSL is that we all need to be re-educated. Our whole sexual culture is misinformed about the basics of female sexual release. That means, with all likelihood and to some degree, you are miseducated, I am miseducated, and the expert we read about sexual matters from is too. We all are. So the movie is aimed at sexual researchers, sexual education experts, and grown-ass married people who've had lots of sex and relationships as much, if not more than, it's aimed at teens. So, it includes some sex ed, but it really isn't aimed at kids...this is also very, very confusing to people.

So, let me now lay out how this movie should be categorized. Science, Sex, and the Ladies is an educational video mixed with a midnight movie. I fully realize that these two genres maybe aren't supposed to be mixed, and the description might not create a satisfactory enough box, but it is at least satisfactory to me...for the moment at least.

Because one cannot decide on an audience for a movie until the movie is appropriately categorized, we can now get back to that question. "Who is the audience for this movie?"  At first glance this genre mix doesn't help us answer that question in an easily understandable way. Who watches educational videos? Kids. Who watches midnight movies? Cynical adults who tend toward blue comedy. They simply don't mix! 

I see it differently though. An education video is for anyone who wants to learn something....so that's hopefully most people. Plus, as I described above, SSL is meant to re-educate everyone who has been immersed in our current sexual culture - which is, again, most people. I take a lighter view of the midnight movie crowd too. Yes, there is lots of sex and violence and really weird shit and ironic watching, but I think all those things come together because they make a fun experience. The way I see it, midnight movies are for anyone who likes going to the movies and simply having a fun, somewhat raucous, communal experience. To me that's exactly the mix that is SSL - it's a movie that is fun as shit to watch - the more people you watch with, the more fun it is. It creates a communal feeling in the audience - like everyone just went on a weird-ass journey together, but it's more than just fun midnight movie fluff. It is informative and thoughtful, and leaves the viewer with more knowledge and understanding of the world than when they came in. 

So there you go. If I must give you a particular "type" of audience for Science, Sex and the Ladies, it is people who would go to a screening of The Room, or Rocky Horror, or Grindhouse, but would also rent informative docs like The Corporation or Bigger, Faster, Stronger  (Although, honestly, my real answer is a completely and utterly unacceptable one - I think this movie is for everyone).

NUVO

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When you live in the Indianapolis area and you are in the arts. The go to paper to get coverage of your work is NUVO, the alternative paper for Indianapolis. AnC has been in it a few times over the years for our movie making, and we just graced their pages again for SSL. It's a super sweet spread over two pages in Their "Sex" edition. Pretty appropriate if you ask me and timely since we are having our cast and crew and friends screening tomorrow. This is just the start of getting this wild movie off the ground and we like to think a big move on the road to realign the cultural (mis)understandings around female orgasm.  If you want to see the article it's here. Page 18 and 19.

Thanks to Rebecca Berfanger, first, for wanting to write about our little movie, and, second, for writing it up so well.We were also pretty excited that we had more than one picture and in color even, that's a first for our NUVO appearances.

Our 2nd Test Screening!

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This past Saturday we invited a small group of 20 and 30 somethings to watch our still slightly unfinished movie Science, Sex and the Ladies. Just like at our last screening, our participants filled out a questionnaire directly after the movie and then took part in a 1/2 hour discussion. It was a great discussion. We got great feedback on the written responses, and we even had some people email later with more feedback. In case any of you are reading this - I want to thank you again for taking the time to help us out.

So after both screenings, what is my overall take? To be honest, I just can't quite figure out how to talk about them. Overall I'm quite happy with the results and definitely got important and useful feedback. I want to just stick with the simple positives of it. I want to say that I heard from people both anonymously and face to face that they were really moved by the movie, that it spoke to the frustration and confusion they are currently experiencing in their sexual lives, that they learned some basic things about their sexual functioning, that the movie made them look at the history of their sexual relationships with a whole different perspective, and I wouldn't be lying. I did receive that sort of feedback. In fact almost everyone said the movie reflected their own experiences, but it's not really the whole story.

There was the couple of people who felt I didn't need to be so harsh about negating the vaginal orgasm. I expected that - actually I expected that there would be a lot more of that than there was. There were those who said they already knew most of it. I expected I'd get that from a certain demographic. There were also those worried about the hetero-centric nature of the movie. I knew that was coming also. All those things were calculated risks for us - things we thought about. There was also just basic criticism about areas that seemed too long or repetitive or too fast - a scene that was confusing - stuff like that, and those were expected too and quite useful to hear.

 But there was a weirder thing that I didn't see coming. I probably should have, but I didn't. I don't know if I can fully explain it, but I'll say it was feedback that seemed confused - confused I guess mostly because it focused very little on the movie itself and more on things that the individual people thought were important about the general subjects of sexuality, sociology, feminism, education - that sort of thing. It was a critique of ideas assumed to be in the movie that actually weren't at all; or it was a clear misunderstanding of points other people found repetitive; or it was a running annoyance about one particular thing that colored all the answers on a questionnaire. I know the movie is a lot of info, and I know that it is not a perfect information giving machine, but I feel like there was criticism and then there was this weird criticism that seemed to me to stem more from personal interests than about the actual movie. This weird criticism wasn't necessarily more harsh or anything. It was just kinda bizarre, and it took me aback. I mean we immediately thought, "what did we do wrong to get these reactions we had no intention of getting." Yes, there is a shit ton of information and a good amount of our personal taste in SSL, and we know some of it's bound to be ignored or misconstrued. I think there is another thing at play here, though, and I should have been more prepared for it given some of the situations I've encountered during the making of this movie and during the writing of this blog over the years.

We are messing with incredibly personal subjects. Everyone has experience with their own and sometimes others' sexuality and pleasure and gender. Some of us take great pride in our sexual persona or gender identity. Some of us hold such shame and confusion about it, and for most of us, our very identity is heavily intertwined with our sexuality and gender. We are going to get a really wide array of reactions, and among all the more positive ones, they might be weird, irrational, surprising, or insanely maddening, and I'm gonna be okay with that because sex and gender in this world have a whole lotta weird baggage. Plus, I think it'll be mostly ok. The truth is, even the people who had weird reactions and the people who were bothered by things like too much anti-vaginal orgasm talk were actually overall positive about the movie and almost everyone felt other peoples should see it. So, yeah - the test screenings gave us some great detailed insight that we're definitely moving forward with, but maybe the most exciting thing I took away is that this movie really does strike something - whatever it may be - with people, and they seem to want to talk about it. Truth is, that's all I ever wanted - to get a real conversation started in this culture about the female orgasm and its impact on our understanding of female sexuality. Simple, right? So, yeah, this whole putting a movie out and hearing what people have to say about it is going to be a scary mixed bag, but I have faith it's gonna be worth it.

Our First Festival Submission!!!!

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Oh yeah - we did it...at the very last minute...but we did it. When I say last minute, I mean last minute. I mean 2:59am, the day after it was due - which happens to be 11:59pm the day it was due in the festival office time zone. That's a little too close for comfort, so I didn't really rest easy till we were informed of our submission status, which we now have. We've got the thumbs up from the festival that we've satisfied all submission requirements (the blue check for those of you who have submitted on Withoutabox). We are in the running now.

We knew we'd be cutting it close. We decided to submit in early August. We thought we were close enough and could get it to submission ready if we busted our asses, so we created a timeline to get it done, and really did pretty well (with the help of Nathaniel Blume on Temp Track duty) at getting there. We originally planned to be finished 6 days prior to the deadline so we could mail it and have it be in their offices when it was supposed to be, but then we learned we could upload our screener instead of sending a DVD. Now we decided we only had to be done 3 days ahead of time.

I mean we've dealt with the trials and tribulations of getting a movie finished (finished enough in this instance) and out to a watchable format. It is always problematic - in ways you could never imagine. This situation is where evil lives, and we were aware. We assumed it would take some finagling, and there would be some mistakes. It was much worse than we thought.

Here's how things needed to work. We had to first export the movie from our editing system in a particular format, then upload that onto IMDB/Withoutabox as a the secure online screener. It then needed to finalize. Then it would appear on our Withoutabox account and we could submit it. All our other submission stuff was done. We just needed to give them the stupid movie. Now, a full length movie is a big file, and we were looking at around 4 hours every time we exported or uploaded. That's cool once or even twice, but we had to try uploading this more than once or twice. It would go all the way to the end and then fail. In fact, Charlie watched our last failed upload hit "100%" and then fail.

At about 8pm the day of the deadline, it was in the process of uploading, Charlie had tried yet another format. At this point, he had been watching uploads all day, and I had been obsessing about it all day at work. By this time, he had become calmly accepting that we would not make it, and so we went out for Subway and cat food (we'd been needing to get that, since our new cat Tina eats like it's the end of days) while it slowly uploaded. We got home when it was at about 70%.

For my part, I tried to think the right things so that it would work. I struggled to decide how not to jinx us. I always have a feeling that if I'm too confident, then it surely won't work. But then sometimes, I think maybe being depressed about it will make it surely not work. It isn't easy to control your thoughts to obtain favorable outcomes people. I decided to come to peace with the failure, but continue to look at all possible options towards success. That was my superstitious time passing belief for this instance of life stress.

When it got to 98%, we stared at it, discussing how positive we were that it would fail just after 100% like last time, then.....it gave us the "successful upload" page. This was about 12:10am. We'd already decided that we'd go by the time in LA not here, so we still had almost 3 hours. There was high-fiving, and such, but then we realized that the finalization process might take a while, and by while I mean that it was at 96% when we checked it at 2:56am, and still at 96% at 2:57am. Charlie had got the webpage set up on the upstairs computer so that we could just push the button when the time came. However, it kinda seemed like we were gonna miss it just barely.  It hadn't moved by 2:58, so just for a last ditch, I headed upstairs to check if it had shown up on our page yet. It hadn't, so I pressed refresh again and it still hadn't, then I pressed refresh again, and there it was. It still boggles my mind how it that it actually worked out. I clearly had thought the correct combination of positive, negative and indifferent thoughts.

It would have been fine if we didn't submit. Who knows whether we'll get in or not, but I really would have felt bad if we missed this opportunity, especially since we busted our asses so hard to get it ready. Anyway, that's the story. I have a feeling our next submission will be much less tense.