Night At The Roxbury - The SSL Review

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Night at the Roxbury
I've watched SNL through the more and less funny years since before I can remember, so I'm for sure familiar with the Night at the Roxbury guys. I never caught the movie of this SNL skit, though, until last month when I was chillin' at a friends house, saw it was available to watch, and then started it up since none of us had seen it ever. We knew it wouldn't be like great, but ya know, maybe it would have a couple funny lines. It didn't.

It somehow was opposite of funny. It sucked funny out of the room. I mean, SNL movies aren't known for being good, but some of them are. I think Superstar with the Mary Katherine Gallagher character, holds up pretty well.

There was, however, 1 gross noise in this movie that kind of made it worth watching. I believe the foley artists must have slipped it in there just for fun, but I'll get to that in a minute. The reason I'm here on this blog, though, is because there was an SSL Reviewable moment. Spoiler alert, the Vulva Rating will be about as high as what I would give the movie as an overall rating.

An SSL Review

An SSL Review, for those that need a little refresher, is a review specifically of any discussion or depiction of female orgasm, female masturbation, cunnilingus, 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 parts of 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 Sex Scene - I-I-I-I-Ikea!
Emily (Molly Shannon) is laying next to Steve (Will Ferrell). They are talking about their family businesses. Emily, who has a head for business and sees their relationship as a way to combine and grow (this all sounds more filled out and interesting than it actually is), decides to emphasize how she sees this happening to the thick-skulled Steve by climbing on top of him and sexing him cowgirl style. She's telling how they are going to do this business plan the whole time she's riding him.

She starts out slow. We only see alternating shots of her from the shoulders up and him from the mid chest up as he's laying in the bed. She is perpendicular to his body, so there is no leaning forward or any way that her clit area might make contact with his body.

We don't ever see her hands. From the look of her shoulders, her arms are down and unmoving. If I had to guess what is actually happening with her hands, I'd say she's pressing them into his stomach to steady her as she's bouncing on him. It's possible that this character could have her hand(s) on her clit area, but if she does, we can't see that she's rubbing anything by the looks of her shoulders. It doesn't seem to me like clit rubbing was intended in this depiction at all.  She's also very clearly bouncing up and down, more so at the end than the beginning.

In fact, it's Molly Shannon, so she gets pretty spastic. She gets to the point of convolutions, throwing her head around and shaking up to the point were she seemingly comes while she's telling him they'll be as big as I-I-I-I-Ikea! Steve is clearly getting stimulation too. When we see shots of him intermittently. He's kinda doing an mouth open thing, in a pleasurable awe sort of way, but he doesn't seem to come. As soon as she comes, though, she rolls off of him, and then he says they're moving too fast (that won't spoil the movie for you - the movie spoils itself). And it's a quickie, ya'll. From the time she gets on him to her Ikea-gasm is a mere 30 seconds.

Same Dumb Lady-gasm Shit
It's an unrealstic lady-gasm, k? And not unrealistic in that she's getting off on the growth of their furniture stores or that it took a mere 30 second (some ladies pop off quick just like some guys do). It's that there didn't seem to be any stimulation of the area a female needs stimulated in order to orgasm - her clitoral glans/vulva area.

Seriously, it's like a scene where a guy comes in 30 seconds from something that is not stimulating his actual penis (no dry humping/clothes burning, not intercourse or even a touch - nothing). That kind of scene might be played in a comedy (probably to show how sexually inexperienced and turned on a guy is), but it would seem like a freak thing, something odd and over the top created for laughs. That his penis was not touched would be a main part of the comedy because we all know penises need touched for a guy to come.

Although it is just as physically ridiculous to assume that Emily would come at all from the stimulation inside the vagina she would get from bouncing on his dick with no additional clitoral/vulva stimulation (much less for 30 seconds), the foundation humor in this scene is not about the ridiculousness of how she is physically orgasming. The humor is in how hot the business talk is making her, how weird and convulsive her orgasm movements and vocalizations are, and maybe even that she finishes before him and doesn't care (How crazy, why I do say! Can you imagine! A woman like that! Putting her orgasm first and giving no shits about her man's orgasm!).

Yes, we can't say for sure she isn't diddling her clit. We don't actually see her hands or lower arms, but if Molly Shannon, the writer, and the director meant the character to be doing that, they didn't leave much clues. They sure as hell made sure we saw that she was bouncing hard up and down on the dick, so my guess is they were focusing on the intercourse as the source of her orgasm and the audience would most likely assume the same as well. I get it, though. It is depicted this way and understood by the audience this way because that's how we still understand lady-gasm in our culture. It's ridiculous and unrealistic to assume intercourse alone would ever bring a woman to orgasm, but sadly, that's the state of our understanding.

And, seriously, there's no reason to believe stimulating the inside of the vagina causes orgasm, but the whole world, even quite progressive sex-positive, sex-informed people, believe this can happen at least some of the time, so really this depictions is not really overly egregious. It's just continuing to normalize a shit understanding of lady-gasm that really needs to go away. Unfortunately, scenes like this help to make sure it stays around. And, I know this movie is over 20 years old, but it's not like that sex scene is out of date. The understanding around female orgasm has not changed in a significant enough way at all to make this scene seem outdated...and well, that's sad.

The Sound
Oh yeah, the sound was a really wet plopping sound at the time when it seemed like she sat on the dick. It was a little outrageous. We took it back a few times. It's definitely there, and like I said, maybe the only thing worth watching this movie for.

Vulva Rating
This depiction of how a lady might physically achieve orgasm is unrealistic, and it works to continue the normalization of the very wrong assumption that a female would orgasm just from bouncing on a cock. Again, it's not taking us backward. It can't because that assumption is where our sexual culture currently stands.  It's just not taking us forward, thus it adds to all the other things out there that are continuing to damage our sexual culture and particularly damaging women's understanding of their own orgasm and women's opportunities for getting off in partnered situations. If this were a better movie, I might be more lenient, but it wasn't so it gets a 1 out of 5 vulva rating.

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Superstar - The SSL Review

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Okay - I'm just going to admit that my posting-every-3-to-4-days schedule that I had kept the last couple years is not something I'm gonna keep up with at the moment. I'll get back there, but I'm just going to be completely honest and say I'm going for a once a week situation for a while until things with my move and new job and all the stuff that goes with that get more settled.

Superstar
So that's that. Now, I'm here to write a post, and that post is an SSL Review of none other than Superstar starring Molly Shannon as Mary Katherine Gallagher. I was staying at my sister's house last night while we were on a quick visit back to Indy. After much too long of searching through streaming media services (because that shit always takes way too goddamn long), we settled on watching this classic, and I might even say actually quite funny, 90's SNL flick. My teen niblings (this is a real word for nieces and nephews - look it up)  hadn't seen it before or hadn't even ever seen Mary Katherine Gallagher smell the sweat under her own armpits. They liked it too.

Seriously, I remember thinking this movie was pretty hilarious back in the day, and although it had largely horrible reviews, I say fuck those reviews - I was pleasantly surprised at how dumb and funny I still found it. It's a solid watch, and -bonus- there was one tiny little line in it that made it SSL Reviewable, so all the better for me.

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 our cultural understanding of female sexuality and orgasm as well as what the depiction/discussion adds to our cultural knowledge on those subjects. I try my best to just stick specifically to those SSL Reviewable moments and often don't talk much about the quality of the rest of the movie...unless I want to talk about it. See all the other movie SSL Reviews HERE and the TV SSL Reviews HERE.

The line was small, but I thought a telling one and worth a review. Enjoy.


Buttons, Holes, and Poles: the line in question
It's not easy to explain exactly what was going on in the plot, but here's a quick summary to get you into the feel of the movie. The Catholic high school that Mary Katherine Gallagher attends is hosting a "Let's Fight Venereal Disease Talent Contest" sponsored by a Catholic magazine, and the top prize is a chance to be an extra in a Hollywood movie with positive moral values. Mary Katherine Gallagher wants to be a SUPERSTAR, so she enters the contest and hilarity ensues.

That's the background that you actually don't really need. So anyway, at one point the Priest/principal of the school says to a student in relation to the venereal disease theme of the talent contest:

"Girls have a button, boys have a pole, and wicked touching takes its toll."


Here's the deal. Pole does not rhyme with button. It rhymes with hole. The writers could have used hole to equate with boys' poles, but they didn't. They, quite correctly, used button. Button insinuates clit and hole, well, insinuates vaginal opening.

Let me be clear. Penises are the male pleasure organ in the same way the clitoral glans (the lady-button) is the female pleasure organ. Lady-holes are not the female pleasure organ.

The father was wise and correct in his comparison even though it is way more common, I believe, to hear people equating the penis in boys to the vagina (as in the hole) in females. That's a bullshit comparison because the vagina, contrary to popular belief, is not a thing like the penis that can be stimulated into orgasm. You might think it would be because we so often see women depicted as orgasming from penises ramming into their vaginal holes, but that's just some myth. In fact in all of scientific literature, stimulating the vaginal canal has never been physically shown to cause orgasm in a woman. It just hasn't.

But stimulating the button or the pole sure the fuck has - numerous times.

So, my point here is that I feel like there was a conscious decision by someone in the writer room to say button instead of hole as a way to sort of give props to the button, and I think that's important because the button does not get near enough props. It's sadly and stupidly always being seen as second pleasure fiddle to the hole even though it is so clearly not just the first fiddle but really the only fiddle game in town (if we're talking about orgasms). I know that's a lot of metaphor, but I think you get my drift.

THE BUTTON, NOT THE HOLE, IS EQUIVALENT TO THE POLE, and the more we hear that out loud, the more likely it will sink into our cultural brain that lady-gasms come from clit stimulation and not poundings.

Satan Ain't No Chump
I have an honorary SSL Reviewable scene too. One of the weirdo gals in Mary Katherine Gallagher's class likes to act like she is kind of possessed by Satan, himself. She brings Satan up a lot, but she's cool though. Anyway, at the end of the movie we see random couples getting together and kissing in that end of the movie sort of way. When it cuts to her, though, she starts pushing her dude's head down out of frame like she's telling him to eat her out.
I just like it because I like anything that insinuates women like to do sex stuff other than getting banged...but especially getting eaten out - because a tongue on one's clit is, well, it's a lovely thing and we should be reminding everyone of that more.

The Vulva Rating
So, I might be wrong that the choice of button instead of hole was a conscious love-the-clit choice, but even if it wasn't, it still said button and not hole. That in and of itself is a little victory for the lady-gasm given that the clitoral glans - the literal thing that causes female orgasm - is so often ignored in our sexual discussions yet the hole where penises go in, babies come out, and orgasms don't seem to be stimulated from - is constantly being brought up.

Obviously, I also LOVE seeing a girl depicted as desiring oral sex given that clit licking is a viable way to actually orgasm.

These were small choices. They weren't over-the-top orgasm equality progressive, but they were small wins towards orgasm equality.

I give Superstar a 4 out of 5 vulva rating.

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