German lesbian experimental filmmaker Monica Treut collects four short documentary works dealing with a common sexual theme under the rubric FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR. Shot separately on both film and video, some dating from the early 1980s, the pieces offer first-person profiles of four women
whose self-views reflect a spectrum of Lesbian-American experiences.
The first segment, DR. PAGLIA, examines the ubiquitous and rapacious Camille Paglia, the Norman Mailer of the '90s, who speaks her mind (at several hundred words per minute) about what it's like to be an all-powerful emissary of the Ur-goddess and intellectual messiah, and an absolute bust at
"the sex connection." A self-professed lesbian bisexual, "butch bottom," and celibate monastic who thrives on confrontation, Paglia expresses an oddly charming mystification at why she has such trouble seducing members of her own sex, suggesting a more tightly wound Woody Allen without the
self-deprecation.
Paglia, despite the density of her books, is the most entertaining sort of intellectual, in that her ideology is purely autobiographical--it follows instinctively from her own experience, and seems genuinely fashioned to help her reveal secrets about herself which she can't get at any other way.
Paglia cites Madonna early and often, admiring her for her carnivorous quality, possibly because, like Madonna, she seems to believe she invented sex. Editorial inserts from Rick Prelinger and Petrified Films' vast store of educational and industrial footage--children learning grooming rituals, a
couple celebrating the perfect cup of coffee in glorious Technicolor--serve to underscore the pretentiousness of many of her statements. But the most telling moment comes during a Super-8 interlude in Times Square, where we follow her into a grind house peep-show booth. Although she tries for the
proper academic distance, she most resembles a giant bird studying something it doesn't understand.
The second part, ANNIE, charts the progression of fortysomething ex-porn star Annie Sprinkle--currently lecturing on the performance art circuit--from the former Ellen Steinberg into voluptuous professional supervixen, a transformation she suggests any woman is capable of. Borrowing heavily from
her one-woman show, she recreates portions of the performance either in-studio or through slides over a live audience soundtrack, such as a comical breast ballet; an erotic reading from her "favorite hot book," the Holy Bible; or the "money shot" of the stage show, in which she inserts a
gynecological speculum into her cervix and invites audience members up for a closer inspection. Although her credo seems to be that porn images are created out of whole cloth, and as such available to anyone who chooses them, the professional glaze into which she lapses when turned inside out for
her audience's amusement, mixed with an unsettling tendency to mug like Harpo Marx throughout, suggests instead that show people--even sex performers--are born, not made. Missing from the film, but very much present in the live show, is her current evolution into Anya, earth-mother and goddess,
whose preferences are exclusively post-heterosexual.
The third film, BONDAGE, features a manifesto from a leather-clad, lesbian bondage/discipline enthusiast on the eve of a Gay Pride Parade down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Various cutaways depict her donning nipple suction cups on the subway, attaching the mike's alligator clip to a nipple for "a
little bit of white pain," an assortment of body piercing at the parade itself, and apparently abstract, slow motion footage of what proves to be a trussed torso suspended above a bathtub in a spider web of harnesses. But the shopping list of taboos seems rather pedestrian, and their static
recitation recalls the private joys of any hobbyist, say insect collectors or model train buffs.
The fourth and by far most interesting segment is MAX, an interview with Max Molerio, born Anita Molerio in Hamburg, Germany in 1957. A practicing lesbian since the age of 18, Max at age 32 realized himself a transsexual, and currently lives as a man awaiting sex-change surgery. Both articulate
and engaging, Max offers the unique perspective of someone steeped his entire adult life in a subculture in which men were rated somewhere between irrelevant and undesirable, who is now evolving into an object of ridicule to virtually everyone he knows. Among the phenomena he discusses are the
dramatic increase in his sexual appetite, single-handedly explaining away the phenomena of pornography and prostitution; the enormous amount of energy provided by male hormones; and the pluses and minuses of genitoplasty vs. reconstructive surgery.
Taken together, the four films represent an evolution in female sexuality, presumably unintentional in their design, from the hyper-aggressive but largely cerebral theorist, to the discerning journeywoman and pan-sexualist, to the pioneer on the sexual ramparts, to the visionary who has passed
through the fire, and will soon dispense with female sexuality altogether. Also, there seems to be a bit of the outsider's glee at encountering American decadence in the flesh, as when frequent polka accordion interludes in the Annie Sprinkle segment at first suggest an ironic reading of the text,
and later merely play up the Oktoberfest camaraderie of staring into the business end of a seasoned professional's capacious anatomy.
Altogether, FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR is an intriguing glimpse into little seen aspects of the lives of what only the most adventurous souls might still call the fairer sex. (Extensive nudity, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment