EARLY in Dee Rees’s film “Pariah” it journeys into a Brooklyn strip club where scantily clad young black women gyrate to a sexy, foul-mouthed rap song. Lascivious customers leer, toss money and revel in their own unbridled lust. It is a scene that could have been in any of “the hood movies” that once proliferated or even a Tyler Perry melodrama in which Christian values would be affirmed after this bit of titillation.But I thought that lesbians' (supposed) lack of interest in such things was part of the evidence for lesbians' (supposed) moral superiority to us mere mortals, especially gay men. What gives?
But in “Pariah” the gaze of desire doesn’t emanate from predatory males but A.G.’s, that is aggressive lesbians, who, in a safe space where they enjoy the fellowship of peers, can be true to themselves.
Friday, December 30, 2011
But you told us that this sort of thing never happened.
In an article in The New York Times on African-American films, we read:
I live by a very simple code when it comes to these things:
ReplyDelete"Nudity is it's own reward."
It can be simplified to:
"Yay, Nudity!"
But the first one is more sophisticated.