I wanted to quickly post a little something before the holidays. I'm currently working on an 'A Journal Article I Read' post summarizing THIS 1998 article that people are always calling the article that finally discovered the full anatomy of the clitoris. It did not do that. People like to say it though. It's alarming to think the clit anatomy wasn't known until 1998, and so it makes a good headline. What it really did, though, was assert that the vestibular bulbs should be named the clitoral bulbs and that they should be thought of as part of a 'clitoral complex.' Not a discovery at all, and frankly, I think it unintentionally did a lot of harm to orgasm equality because it strangely gave people a lot of baseless fire to insinuate that there's something inside ladies' vaginal canal region that penises can stimulate during intercourse to cause orgasm. ...And people do be insinuating that a lot in relation to the "newly discovered" inner parts of the clit, but like I said. BASELESS. Anyway, I'll be getting more into that next time.
However, that subject and a recent watch of the Science, Sex and the Ladies movie cast and crew bloopers got me and Charlie talking about something I thought would be an alright post.
First, that subject up there always gets me thinking of the movie simply because the trend of baselessly pinning the cause of the never-actually-physically-recorded-in-all-of-scientific-literature vaginally stimulated orgasm on the 'newly discovered' inner parts of the clit, was really just not in vogue when I finished writing and we started production of the movie in 2009. The G-spot was still the in-vogue way people baselessly explained how the vaginally stimulated orgasm (maybe) happens (if it exists at all...since there's actually not actual proof it does). So, I spent a lot of time showing how ridiculous the G-spot theory was and almost no time talking about how ridiculous the inner clit theory is, which is really the only thing that I would do different in the content. But ya know, it was a different time, and anyway, I'm planning a little supplemental video about that soon (*soon means I've decided it will be done, and it will eventually get done but at a snail's pace).
That brings me to the other things me and Charlie were talking about that I wanted to write on. It was a different time, man. I say that again, but now it's in relation to how movies were seen. It wasn't that long ago, but when we decided to make Science, Sex and the Ladies, online video content was not what it is today. People weren't considering dropping their whole movie on YouTube or Vimeo. Netflix was still mostly DVDs. We still did have shorts and weird little videos we sent to our mailing list back them, but we had to find a way to host those videos for people to get to and watch, and it was a hot mess.
If I had this idea today, I would 100% have created the content of Science, Sex and the Ladies in short vignettes for interweb consumption. These little vignettes would still be as bonkers strange, blunt, and full of citations as the movie was, but they would be much more easily findable, bite-sized pieces that could be viewed together to create the whole argument but also apart to at least get part of the argument out and maybe prompt viewing all of them.
The reason we made a full length movie was really just because it seemed to be the medium that would best portray the content in the way we wanted - as a complete argument, with citations, while being entertaining and super weird enough that regular ol' people might engage with it (i.e. funny and not a piece of writing or talking heads doc that mostly academics and progressives might find). At the time, there wasn't a place you could just set medium sized videos on the internet. If we'd made a bunch of shorts, where would we even show them? Why? Why not just make a movie? Honestly, we had only made shorts up to that time, so it's not like that wasn't on our mind. SSL was our first full length, and it took us a long ass time to finish it.
I mean, no actual regrets. Sure I would do things differently now. We learned and grew a lot making it, but I love that crazy ass movie warts and all. It was just pretty interesting to think about how different our mindsets were about how motion picture content could and would be consumed back then. It changes a lot of things and it was only barely 10 years ago.
Also, watching the bloopers for the first time in probably 6 years was super fun. That cast that stuck by us were gold. I love them all, and even now I get a little tingle in my heart when I see one of them who would never have known another talk to each other on social media.
Okay, here's the trailer for fun.
