A history of exploitation cinema from low budget pictures of the 1930s and 40s through an era of 'nudie cuties' and into the days of free love and beyond. Portraits of the artists and auteurs behind the films are provided including: Russ Meyer, Dwain Esper, Radley Metzger and The Mitchell Brothers.
As surprising as it may be to parents, young people today are immersed in porn culture everywhere they look. Through Internet porn, gaming, social media, marketing, and advertising, kids today have a much broader view of social and sexual possibilities, which makes it difficult for them to establish appropriate expectations or to feel adequate in their own sexuality. Even more important, no one is talking to kids directly about the problem. Parents tend to convince themselves that their children are immune to cultural influences, wait until it comes up, or hope schools and pediatricians will address the issues. Educators and doctors may be able to start the conversation but it is fundamentally a parent's job to provide information about sex and relationships early and often to help young people find their way through their social and sexual lives. Delaying the necessary but awkward conversations with their kids leaves them vulnerable. The media, marketers, and porn and gaming industries are eager to step in anywhere parents choose to hold back. Sexploitation exposes the truth to parents, kids, educators, and the medical profession about the seen and unseen influences affecting children, inspiring parents to take the role as the primary sexuality educator. With more information, parents will gain conviction to discuss and develop values, expectations, boundaries, and rules with their kids. Kids who enter their teens with accurate information and truths stand a better chance of developing an "inner compass" when it comes to sex and relationships, which sets them up for a healthy adulthood. In her comic and straightforward style, Pierce brings together the latest research with anecdotal stories shared with her by high school and college students in the thick of it. Above all else, her goal is to get people to develop more comfort around those difficult conversations so that kids gain more confidence and courage about drawing boundaries based on their own values not those put upon them.
Michèle Alexandre’s innovative study examines how sexual profiling represses, oppresses, and hinders various aspects of life for both genders, and explores the ways in which the law and the community can help eradicate the practice of sexual profiling. Alexandre defines "sexploitation" as the perpetuation of myths and stereotypical notions regarding men and women in order to further an agenda of oppression and subordination in certain spheres of society. The most popular means through which this sexploitation is achieved is through a method Alexandre coins as "sexual profiling." She argues that sexual profiling ultimately stifles the growth of our society by creating inefficient as well as oppressive systems, and that its eradication can help increase the productivity as well as the morale of society. Alexandre opens the book by exploring in detail the various ways in which normative views of gender are constructed and perpetuated through media and societal norms. She then focuses on the ways in which recent legal opinions and developments contribute to perpetuate these restrictive and oppressive norms. Finally, Alexandre outlines a plan to help eliminate the presence of these destructive norms and attitudes from different sectors of society.
An indispensable sampling of the vast assortment of publications which exist as an adjunct to the mainstream press, or which promote themes and ideas that may be defined as pop culture, alternative, underground or subversive. Updated and revised from the pages of the critically acclaimed Headpress journal, this is an enlightened and entertaining guide to the counter culture - including everything from cult film, music, comics and cutting-edge fiction, by way of its books and zines, with contact information accompanying each review.
From a prominent young historian, the untold story of the rich variety of gay life in America in the 1970s Despite the tremendous gains of the LGBT movement in recent years, the history of gay life in this country remains poorly understood. According to conventional wisdom, gay liberation started with the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. The 1970s represented a moment of triumph -- both political and sexual -- before the AIDS crisis in the subsequent decade, which, in the view of many, exposed the problems inherent in the so-called "gay lifestyle". In Stand by Me, the acclaimed historian Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together -- as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues -- to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life. As Downs shows, gay people found one another in the Metropolitan Community Church, a nationwide gay religious group; in the pages of the Body Politic, a newspaper that encouraged its readers to think of their sexuality as a political identity; at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, the hub of gay literary life in New York City; and at theaters putting on "Gay American History," a play that brought to the surface the enduring problem of gay oppression. These and many other achievements would be largely forgotten after the arrival in the early 1980s of HIV/AIDS, which allowed critics to claim that sex was the defining feature of gay liberation. This reductive narrative set back the cause of gay rights and has shaped the identities of gay people for decades. An essential act of historical recovery, Stand by Me shines a bright light on a triumphant moment, and will transform how we think about gay life in America from the 1970s into the present day.
hen Julia Ferguson enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Cold War, little did she know that the price of her enlistment would include sexual exploitation from the Army recruiter himself—followed by several high-ranking non-commissioned officers who would take sexual advantage of her and other young newly enlisted women over a two-year period. Julia then discovers the ultimate survivor in herself, testifying against her abusers and surviving reverse discrimination, sexual exploitation, and rape. Despite the post-traumatic stress she experienced after her honorable discharge from the Army, Julia finds that the effects of her abuse have led her to personal and professional growth and development over the years, and her story is, ultimately, one of triumph.
Introduction: "Coy leericism"--Producing permissiveness: censorship, obscenity law, and the trials of spectatorship -- Peek snatchers: corporeal spectacle and the wages of looking, 1960/1965 -- Girls with hungry eyes: consuming sensation, figuring female lust, 1965/1970 -- Watching an "audience of voyeurs:" adult film reception -- Conclusion: Skin flicks without a future?
Too often dismissed as nothing more than 'trash cinema', exploitation films have become both earnestly appreciated cult objects and home video items that are more accessible than ever. In this wide-ranging new study, David Church explores how the history of drive-in theatres and urban grind houses has descended to the home video formats that keep these lurid movies fondly alive today. Arguing for the importance of cultural memory in contemporary fan practices, Church focuses on both the re-release of archival exploitation films on DVD and the recent cycle of retrosploitation films like Grindhouse, Machete, Viva, The Devils Rejects, and Black Dynamite. At a time when older ideas of subcultural belonging have become increasingly subject to nostalgia, Grindhouse Nostalgia presents an indispensable study of exploitation cinemas continuing allure, and is a bold contribution to our understanding of fandom, taste politics, film distribution, and home video.
Examines, with historically informed nuance, the myriad routes of cultural influence that converged in the American ‘grindhouse’ phenomenon and its aftermath.
From early twentieth-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the boom in 1970s “porno chic,” adult cinema's vintage forms are now being reappraised by a new generation of historians, fans, preservationists, and home video entrepreneurs-all of whom depend on and help shape the archive of film history. But what is the present-day allure of these artifacts that have since become eroticized more for their “pastness” than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering these rare but still-visceral films from a less “enlightened,” pre-feminist past? Drawing on media industry analysis, archival theory, and interviews with adult video personnel, David Church argues that vintage pornography retains its retrospective fascination precisely because these culturally denigrated texts have been so poorly preserved on political and aesthetic grounds. Through these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a “striptease,” permitting tangible contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the overall physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Disposable Passions explores the historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, and how a long-neglected genre is primed for serious rediscovery as more than mere autoerotic fodder.