Two things made me decide to write my blog this week on obscenity particularly attitudes towards sex. One, the whole kerfuffle about Bush uttering an "obscenity" into a hot microphone at the G8 summit and two, a comment a British friend who now lives in the US made to me when we met for a drink on a balmy summer evening in Notting Hill last week. As the Hollywood Reporter talked of fines and decency laws being broken because the utterance had been broadcast, British papers barely gave the "incident" a mention except to say that Blair as always (who is not enjoying great popularity here at the moment) seemed inept at handling the situation. Obscenity, at least in the American sense of the word, has to be pretty obscene to get some real attention here. This is, you must remember, the country of the Page 3 girl - a pinup of a topless "model" which graces the inside (it's not porn) of the popular papers here.
Which brings me to the comment my friend made to me. A recent husband and father of a less than year old child, this friend said that he felt that the UK had become more sexualized than he remembers. It should be noted that this friend only left London a few years ago. He went on to say that he felt like "everything was about sex' here. Whether it was selling cars or dish soap, somehow sex was involved. My response was surprise but also it made me think about the very glaring differences between the attitudes about sex in Europe and sex in America. Right now on television in the UK, I have counted at least three separate adverts for dish soap, yoghurt and deoderant in which a man gets naked. You don't see any frontal (we are not Italians!) but there is a definite view in 2 out of 3 of the ads of a naked ass. When I first saw the ads, I was shocked. Now I really love them as they remind me that sex and sexuality is a part of everyday life and so should be a part of our everyday culture. Sure girls are dressing a little sluttier a bit too early but I wonder if that is because they are more sexualized by the media or because I notice more as I am fast approaching the point where I could have a teenager myself.

This all brings me to the point of sex in cinema. Think Film will be releasing John Cameron Mitchell's SHORTBUS later this year in the US. The film depicts attractive singles and couples having unsimulated sex - that would be real sex to you and me. Though I haven's seen the film, people I know and trust who saw it at Cannes really loved the humanity of it. Not one of them mentioned the sex until I asked about it. I wonder how audiences in the US are going to react. When 9 Songs came out, no one went to see it. Audiences seemed to be so turned off by the idea that they were going to see real human connection in a physical way that they missed out on a heartwrenching tale of lost desire. Intimacy, a film by Patrice Chereau, met a similar fate. Interestingly, when Intimacy was released here in the UK, there were very erudite articles in The Guardian (the arts paper) about the actress and the unsimulated sex with someone that was not her husband. In the US, the film went straight to video.

With the President (who is from Texas for pity's sake) unable to swear on TV, I am not sure how far the US will really embrace sex in the cinema. Perhaps ShortBus will be the one to help break down some barriers in this regard.

One can always hope.

Keeping it indie,

Julie