Strictly Sexual
In Los Angeles, the wealthy aspirant writer Donna and her best friend (also aspirant designer) Christi Ann are bored of relationships and decide to chase two escorts in a bar for a one night stand. Meanwhile, construction workers and best friends, Stanny and Joe, come from New York but can't find jobs in Los Angeles. Without money, the guys decide to go to a fancy bar to drink and leave the place without paying the bill. Donna and Christi Ann meet Stanny and Joe and invite them home believing they are gigolos. After a night of sex, the women discover the misunderstanding and that the men are, indeed, unemployed construction workers. The women offer to have the men stay in their swimming pool cabana, furnishing them with beer and food while the boys search for jobs. In return, they would be their on-call "boy-toys" in a strictly sexual relationship. During the ensuing months, the couples become closer and change their feelings and behaviors with the development and growing of their relationships as the couples begin to develop romantic feelings.
Strictly Sexual
For those beginning a sexual relationship with someone, either tell them explicitly or give off extremely strong signals indicating that sex is as far as you want to take it. I have never experienced a blow-up of feelings with a no-strings-attached sexual partner, from either party, although it has happened to my friends.
Parents need to know that this mature drama focuses on the age-old question of whether people can have sex without becoming romantically attached. The twist here is that it's the women who are pursuing the casual encounter, but it's less surprising that the main characters all start to develop feelings for each other. The film shows adults in adult situations, with plenty of drinking and smoking and a few people smoking marijuana. There is plenty of profanity and many explicit discussions about sexual activities. The numerous, graphic sex scenes feature lots of thrusting and sound effects, but no actual nudity.
With its graphic sex scenes and constant swearing, STRICTLY SEXUAL is strictly grown-up fare. But it's grown-up fare done badly. Though the female leads show promise, their male counterparts offer sub-par performances, either overacting or underacting moments. Still, the acting's not the biggest problem with it. The writing is. Riddled with expository dialogue, it's the epitome of telling, not showing. Scene after scene has characters sitting down ruminating, but the conversations offer little wisdom. For a movie about sex and relationships, it's a snoozer.
Families can talk about romance and sex. Do you think it's possible for two people to have a strictly-sexual relationship, without developing romantic feelings for each other? Do you think such a relationship is healthy?
Sexual reproduction has long been proposed as a major factor explaining the existence of species and species diversity. Yet, the importance of sex for diversification remains obscure because of a lack of critical theory, difficulties of applying universal concepts of species and speciation, and above all the scarcity of empirical tests. Here, we use genealogical theory to compare the relative tendency of strictly sexual and asexual organisms to diversify into discrete genotypic and morphological clusters. We conclude that asexuals are expected to display discrete clusters similar to those found in sexual organisms. Whether sexuals or asexuals display stronger clustering depends on a number of factors, but in at least some scenarios asexuals should display a stronger pattern. Confounding factors aside, the only explanation we identify for stronger patterns of diversification in sexuals than asexuals is if the faster rates of adaptive change conferred by sexual reproduction promote greater clustering. Quantitative comparisons of diversification in related sexual and asexual taxa are needed to resolve this issue. The answer should shed light not only on the importance of the different stages leading to diversification, but also on the adaptive consequences of sex, still largely unexplored from a macroevolutionary perspective.
Based on the hit independent film of the same name, this smart, introspective look at sex and love explores dating in the modern world, the balance of career and romance, and the challenges of friendship and keeping things strictly sexual.
Synopsis: If you could have sex with no strings attached, would you? Donna (Amber Benson) and Christi Ann (Kristen Kerr) try their best, with funny and heartbreaking results. Tired of dating and relationships, the daring women keep two young men in their pool house for strictly sexual purposes. Joe (Johann Urb) and Stanny (Stevie Long) are unemployed New York construction workers who have found themselves living with two beautiful and successful single women. But the hardest part about all that sex? Sometimes you find yourself falling in love. In the vein of Sex And The City, this film is directed by Independent Spirit Award Winner (John Cassavettes Award) Joel Viertel, and written by Stevie long, who also stars in this heartfelt, ensemble comedy about how sex and love can make us laugh and cry at the same time.
I am wondering because my girlfriend and I are in the beginnings of a non-monog relationship, and we are just kind of wondering about what the "norm" is for this kind of thing. Obviously the norm is not really the most important thing, because we set the rules based on our comfort level, but we are still figuring that stuff out, and I would love to get just some input on where you fall on the spectrum of friendliness with your sexual partners.
Would anyone reading this mind sharing where you fall with your sexual partners? Does it vary by partner? If it's anything besides number 1, I am especially interested in your perspective, because I would love to hear about if there was any work needed to ease any kind of spousal fears of falling for anyone because there is some kind of emotional connection (even if casual, you will still learn things about each other). We do not plan to commit to anything until we're both comfortable, but I think having the perspective from people that have experience can help us figure that stuff out.
This disavowal of specific subgenres and their female fans isn't limited to books or film, either: in horror comics fandom, the stereotype of a female fan is that of the gothy Sandman fan. No slight to Neil, but the linking of goth fashion and being female is another way in which I see female fans being portrayed as romantic and/or ridiculous, which comes close to reflecting the way the overly-sexualize and ridiculously romanticized has come to be associated with camp, another disavowed form of horror. There are films that are labeled camp which I am not even clear on why they are labeled camp: Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, which a number of horror producers such as Clive Barker, have listed as their favorite horror classic: why is that classified as camp? If,
as one definition of camp claims, camp is equated with being "effeminately homosexual," then I think we are seeing media being disparaged and disavowed not for its content, but for its audience, and that disparaged audience is identified as female and queer.
I'd like to tackle a few of these points. First I think that you are correct in that camp is most often associated with queer culture. However, it is mainly thought of in terms of exaggerated behaviour verging on the ludicrous. To quote John Waters, camp is "the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic." It has been used on pop culture artifacts in this manner since Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. For Sontag camp was liberating. It is noteworthy for being both naÃve (completely unaware of one's camp-ness is a requirement) but also it's extravagance. Bride of Frankenstein is thought of as camp because it is so over the top. One look at Elsa Lanchester's hairdo as the bride and you know there is something not quite right. As Sontag notes "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." I think that what we need to establish here is that for Clive Barker (for example), a gay man, having this as his favourite film is motivated by forces other than those that seek to feminize or demean. I would also say that Bride of Frankenstein is pretty commonly thought of as an example of camp even by those only marginally aware of what camp really is. But I think this is a good starting point to discuss the viewer. For the queer viewer of horror films where does camp fit in or does it even need to? There is a lot of classic (the twenties right through the sixties) Hollywood horror films that could be seen as campy by queer audiences. There is something decidedly fey in Max Schreck's performance in Murnau's Nosferatu. And do we even need to mention the homosocial Lost Boys or the lesbians in The Hunger? The vampire character itself has come to be known for outside normal sexual boundaries. And I agree with you that the vampire character is recognized as a romantic figure and it is consistently associated with the feminine. Is it this "feyness" or implied deviance that pushes it outside of the patriarchy and into deviance? I think that romanticism in horror and science fiction offers up an interesting opportunity to think about alternative identities within these narratives and how they relate to what audiences feel and desire outside of heteronormative paradigms. These films open our eyes to the possibilities that exist outside the hegemony of "the normal."
I think your final sentence is very telling, and there seems to be a lot of evidence to support it around this time of year, when we seem to see a lot of these alternate identities, from the romanticized to the queer and campy, being literally tried on during the Halloween season. It's interesting that the mainstream seems to focus so much on the campy aspects of Halloween, from Elvira costumes to Dracula to drag: if camp is a combination of the overly-sexualized 041b061a72