Day: February 25, 2018

To me, this image relates to sex panic because often times the people perform sex acts that fall outside of the “Charmed Circle” are often villainized for being ‘deviants’. To those inside that circle, these people represent something they cannot understand; and fear is a common response to things people do not understand.

Asexuality complicates the message a bit because there is a lack of sex acts being performed, but even that falls outside of this “Charmed Circle”. If it is ‘unsavory’ sex acts that are deemed as ‘unnatural’ or ‘deviant’, then a lack of sex acts should not illicit a similar reaction. However, that is not the reaction to asexuality that we see.

In this scene from the film But I’m A Cheerleader,  the homosexual residents of a conversion therapy program are instructed to roleplay sexual acts with each other in boy-girl partnerships.  The parents of the gay and lesbian characters in But I’m A Cheerleader are swept up in the sex panic of their children being abnormal or diseased and elect to send them away to be treated. I chose to discuss this image because it seems to privilege one type of sexual panic over another. When present for the purpose of de-gaying characters, re-enactments of heterosexual sex are justifiable, but because a relationship (devoid of explicit content) between a lesbian couple unfolds  throughout the film, the movie was originally given an NC-17 rating and was directed to tone down its sexual content in order to receive an R rating like many other films with queer content (Rated R for Ridiculous).

If the Motion Picture Association of America, like many other institutions, censors on the basis obscenity, asexuality would likely fall into an indeterminable space. On one hand, asexuality is not widely understood or accepted. Asexuality can be interpreted as a deviant sexual behavior in the way that someone who is asexual departs from the sexual standard. But on the other hand, asexuality usually produces no sexually explicit content to be regulated.

References:

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge,1992), 143-172.

Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIaeMTYtHgM