Flower - The SSL Review

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Flower
I remember seeing trailers for Flower and wondering if I would like it. It felt like it could go either way for me. Was it a touch too much of the recently classic snarky-teen-girl-too-smart-for-her-own-good movie go-to character? Would I like Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! in it? There were a lot of questions, people. I kinda forgot about it for a minute until I saw it on Netflix, though. So, I watched it in order to answer all my questions. The main character, although certainly in the snarky-teen-girl-too-smart-for-her-own-good genre, was a really well done version of that, and although it took a scene or two to get past seeing Tim as the Tim in Tim and Eric, I did get past it, and I actually thought he was a pretty good fit for that role. The movie as a whole, I think, was a really solid one, and it also had a nuanced progressive approach to female sexuality that I thought was truly a breath of fresh air.

And...it had a little tiny line in it that made it eligible for an SSL review, so I get to write about it here in this blog. An SSL Review, for those that need a little refresher is a review specifically of any discussion or depiction of female orgasm, female masturbation, or the clit. I critique the realism of the depiction/discussion and also write about what the depiction/discussion says about and/or adds to our cultural understanding of female sexuality and orgasm. I try my best to just stick specifically to those SSL Reviewable moments, so it usually stays pretty focused on those moments in the movie only, but sometimes I like to digress.

So here we go. I have tons of these reviews btw. You can find all the other movie SSL Reviews HERE and the TV SSL Reviews HERE.

The joys of a gay brother
I'm going to just describe the SSL Reviewable moment real quick. So, Erica is a 17 year old, and she's getting a new stepbrother, Luke, who is around her age. She's telling her friends about him, specifically that he didn't want a blow-job from her, and they are kinda discussing that he might be gay. One of them points out a solid positive,

"Dude, if you have a gay brother, you can both jerk off to the same porn."

Indeed you can...granted, of course, that as a straight gal you're into a little gay porn, which I think you really should be, but that's just my opinion.

So, that was a lot. I think I need to go back and explain a bit.

Why try and give your stepbrother a BJ? Great question. For money. Luke was in a rehabilitation center for a while, and he's coming home to live with Erica, her mom, and the very new stepdad. They pick him up and all 4 go out to eat. Erica's mom has asked her to be nice to him, and when he freaks out at the dinner table and runs out of the restaurant, her mom asks her to go talk to him, and eventually bribes her with $20 if she can get him to come back in.

Let's go back a bit further. Erica is accumulating and saving money for a very specific thing, and she's making some pretty sweet bank by basically blowing for money and then blackmailing older men (she's 17 - remember) that totally know how old she is. She blows them, and then her 2 friends tape it and appear once he's come and paid so that they can get even more money out of it, which they all 3 split. She's good at blowjobs and has a pride in her jobs well done.

So, that's why she asks her brother if he wants sucked off. She's good at it. She assumes it would make him feel better, and there's money at stake to get him feeling better. Simple as that.

The SSL Review
As for my take on the SSL Reviewable line up there, I think it's excellent. What's not to love about teen girls openly and apologetically speaking amongst each other about their masturbation habits? The more masturbation among girls is normalized, the more girls will feel like it's okay to do it, and the more women and girls we will have that enter into their first partnered sexual encounters understanding what exactly makes their bodies orgasm. That is a win for orgasm equality, because we have too many a gal that doesn't know how to orgasm when they start having sex and end up real fucking confused and orgasmless when their bodies find intercourse doesn't actually cause orgasm like the world would have us believe.

And I also want to talk about how the movie treats her sexuality
So, that line gets a good SSL Review from me, but I also want to just talk about the tone of this movie in regard to female sexuality because I think it's important. The movie did not give Erica's sex-for-money endeavors a heavy weight the way I have seen in so many movies. The character herself spoke about it casually and really quite fondly. She doesn't mind doing it - like it doesn't disgust her or anything at all. She's good at them, and she feels good about that. She also clearly likes that it is a skill she can turn into money. Her friends are also casual about it and supportive of her. She did get one rando mean girl at school that called her a slut, but it didn't bother her until the girl poked at her about something else. Overall, her BJ-centric activities don't feel like a burden to her - quite the opposite.

The movie doesn't treat it heavily either. Sometimes movies will take something like this where the girl seems unworried and confident, but the movie shows us the truth. We eventually always learn the dark side to her being so young and so casually involved with sex. This movie never takes us there, and why should it? She's mastered a practice that takes finesse, and patience, intuition, and practice. We all like mastering something. She isn't giving her hard earned skills away freely. She gets paid handsomely. She is fucking over dudes that she sees as shit bags. She's going into these sexual encounters with her eyes wide open and with a clear, realistic idea of what she expects from them. She's living the dream really. The only thing that would be better, I imagine, is if she were somehow getting paid to get eaten out.

So, to me this movie is very different than most in that it allows sex things to just be sex things for a young women. It doesn't unnecessarily burden its female character with guilt, shame, or damage from sexual encounters that were completely consensual and thought through. It felt refreshing to see that because although there is certainly a lot of damage done to women and girls through sexual means, there is also plenty of sexual encounters women and girls engage in, sexual encounters that lack some or all of the elements of love and monogamy so often deemed necessary for healthy sexual female engagement, that are fulfilling, fun, and/or useful for a multitude of reasons and really not damaging at all. We don't often get to see that side of sexuality for women, and I think that ability to intentionally engage sexually in alternative but healthy ways is something that we should see modeled more often. A wider breadth of female sexual experiences than just romantic/loving sex and damaging/painful sex deserves to be told. I think this movie expanded the conversation.

The Vulva Rating
So, I give this movie a 5 vulva rating. The SSL Reviewable comment was small but mighty. I'm a sucker for anything that normalizes teen girls masturbating. That in itself would just get this movie a solid 4 rating, but I'm also a sucker for progressive, fresh takes on female sexuality. So, I'm going to give this a full 5 out of 5 vulva rating.

(!)(!)(!)(!)(!)

Alison Stevenson Giving Up BJ's for Orgasm Equality - A Retro SSL Post

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This is a re-post of a July 30, 2016 post. Please enjoy.

Writer Alison Stevenson is a bad bitch who should walk around with her hands pumping victoriously in the air most of the time. She did some truth-telling in a July 2016 article about how little she (and many women) orgasm during sexual encounters - particularly compared to men, and she said no more, my friends. No. More.

"If men expect to get an orgasm out of a hookup—without having to give anything in return—then I would adopt that approach, too."

Suck It, BJ's!
In an absolutely fabulous article from March 2015, she announced that she had stopped giving blowjobs, and in this new and equally fabulous 2016 article, she gives us a follow-up about why she's still not sucking dick. She, very rightly, decided that she had given too many goddamn blowjobs to boys that did not return the favor, and she's over it. She also rightly pointed out how the wrong-but-all-too-common assumption that women should just orgasm when a penis moves inside their vaginas (vaginae for you scholarly types) is the root of this problem. The reality is most women don't orgasm that way. The majority of women straight up do not orgasm from vaginal penetration (and I would argue it's even less than we are currently willing to admit).

"Penetration is great, but no matter how long, curved, or fat your dick is, it's not going to happen for me. That's true for plenty of other women, too—it's clit or bust. In other words, if a guy and I have sex, but I don't suck his dick, he can still come. If we have sex and he doesn't eat me out, I can't."

Tell Me Again How Orgasmic Sex Is...
I respect the hell out of what this women has done (and Tracey Moore at Jezebel does too) because the truth is women are set up to fail in sexual encounters in a way that men are not. None of us, boys or girls, were taught that the clit must be stimulated to orgasm. To drive that home, we were also taught that the most important and supposedly awesome part of a sexual encounter is intercourse - something which naturally involves the vagina and penis but not the clit. Fully involving the clit to the point of orgasm during a 'basic sex act' is not the norm. To involve the clit usually means that there are 'extras' given; extra effort, extra communication, extra sexual acts, extra willingness to do things a little differently. So the male orgasm is par for the course. The female orgasm is extra. It's some bullshit. Whether people realize it or not, the status quo sex act is male-gasm friendly but not female-gasm friendly.

Now, as Ms. Stevenson says in her original 2015 article, her lack of cunnilingus (and thus orgasm) in the past is part her fault too because she didn't used to ask,

"Look, I know that my years of being denied oral sex is my fault too. I was a different person then. I never asked for what I wanted, because I worried it would make me seem less attractive. It's something a lot of women feel, that it's more important to fulfill a man's desires over our own. You know, in order to "keep him." Even the most headstrong, self-reliant, progressive women fall victim to this line of thinking. I have finally been able to fully shed myself of my meekness when it comes to sex and I know now that I can not only demand what I want but also deny what I don't want: blowjobs."

I love that she takes some responsibility in this. She's clearly a sensible, thoughtful person, and I think it's true that a woman must become more proactive about asking in order to get her orgasm.

Men Just Get Orgasms, Women Need To Ask...For Extra
That said, can I also say WTF? Yes, she never asked, but can we take a minute and wonder why she has to ask in the first place? Why women must put so much work into getting their orgasm when men simply do not? Why men don't just automatically work the clit like women just automatically work the penis? Why we as a society fully understand and accept that men need their penises stimulated to orgasm, but are so clueless about what makes a woman orgasm that the default thing to do in sex with a woman is ram stuff up her vagina (seriously, contrary to popular belief, getting a woman off is actually not that difficult but trying to do it by stimulating the vagina instead of the clit sure makes it seem difficult, doesn't it?).

The frustration that led Ms. Stevenson to her no BJ decision is much bigger than boys aren't trying hard enough. Yes, that might often be the case, but the truth is we're dumb about lady-gasms. We shouldn't be because they're actually not that complicated at all, but yet we are, and since we're dumb about them and they seem so wierd and mystical and fickle, the female orgasm just gets ignored.
So...

• Men and often women don't know how to make them happen
• The way sex is depicted and joked about and taught either doesn't include or misrepresents the physical needs for lady-gasm
• The normal ways we go about sex don't leave room for it 
• We don't prioritize them
• Women often don't feel we deserve them (I mean they're so hard to get and your partner has to put extras in to get you there!)

All that adds up to males orgasming and ladies having to 'ask'.

Rock The Hell On Alison Stevenson!
This woman looked at her sex life and made a decision to put priority on her own orgasm over her male partners'. It's such a revolutionary thing to do because it throws a wrench in the age old sexual status quo and makes a bold statement that flies in the face of people (and I really think this is most people) who don't want to acknowledge how skewed towards male pleasure our sexual culture is. What she did is not easy. It takes self knowledge and courage, and it's inspiring.

So, for all that I am adding Alison Stevenson to the Orgasm Equality Heroes List. Her article and her sentiments fit into something I see as an exciting movement where women are acknowledging that status quo, run of the mill, normal sex is actually pretty bad sex for the ladies. What I mean is that the normal flow of sex, the normal expectations of sex, and the normal skills used in sex are just A LOT better for the male orgasm than for the female. Let me say it another way. When it comes to men, sex is like pizza - even bad sex is kinda okay because they come. For women, though, most sex is unorgasmic, some of it is downright gross, rapey, mean, utterly boring, or painful, and then only really extraordinary sex is even good or orgasmic at all.

This is important because as a culture there is still this entrenched feeling that the simple act of intercourse is a mutually orgasmic experience for both the male and female. It is hard to convince people that we should be going about sex differently because what could be wrong with the way it is? So, we need women speaking out and telling us about their actual experiences. How we go about sex and the expectations we have about sex and orgasm could be so much better. We need to hear more and more women getting real about this and pointing out the unequal playing field.

Bravo, Alison Stevenson! Every time one woman speaks out it makes it that much easier for another, and if we get enough we might have a full-on Orgasm Equality Revolution on our hands!

(and you really should read both her BJ articles - 2015 and 2016. She's also quite funny. Check out her Tumblr)