Female Orgasms and Crazy Swedes: Bright Lights Film Journal #72 is Live

 

Bright Lights Film Journal #72 is live! And it's better than ever. New voices, new weird thoughts about film, and best of all, it's here to save the world! For as editor Gary Morris puts it:

Whether it's an international terrorist or the local Aryan nation thug, Bright Lights will be there to resolve the problem. Wherever there's injustice, we'll be there, with our arsenal of words. Even the most hardened miscreant, we believe, will surely wilt when pelted with "scopophilic" and "limited omniscience"! (more here)

I'd have to agree! There's an abundance of scopophile manna in this issue including a sizzling expose of the female vaginal orgasm myth in allegedly sophisticated mature audience dramas like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and THE END OF THE AFFIAR ,  Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex by Marilyn Adler Papayinis:

Not only do most movies exclude realistic representations of the way most real women come, many bypass even the idea of foreplay, a modest concession to female pleasure predicated on the (tenuous) notion that if she has been adequately "prepped," she will achieve her orgasm in the "normal" way — through penetration. Indeed, the sex we watch in the movies is so narrowly defined as to marginalize female experience almost entirely. 

And hey! It may be about the slighting of the female orgasm, but the pictures are not for children. Speaking of which my book review of Daniel Ekeroth's instantly essential Swedish Sensationsfilms is also in this issue:

"Thanks to the lurid popularity of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sweden has perhaps become in the popular American imagination a place where socialized medicine, beautiful people, and a stable economy offsets bleak winters  and brutal sexual assaults condoned by a shadowy government knee-deep in Satanic cult conspiracies." (more here)

Check it all out here!