Romance, Fantasy and Female Sexuality in Feeling Sexy

To what extent can it be argued that the vision of women filmmakers is a vision informed by their gender? This intriguing question is one that feminist analysis has repeatedly revisited. Writer Leslie Felperin notes that in the 1970s and 1980s, the differences between male and female artists were hotly contested.^[1]Leslie Felperin, ‘Chick Flicks’ (Editorial), Sight and Sound, vol.9, issue 10, October, 1999, p.3. Much of the debate centred upon whether it was essentialist to argue that women might have different strategies for expression. This issue has been, and continues to be, problematic and controversial. Judith Mayne has said that the reluctance to speak of a ‘female tradition’ has been influenced by this fear of essentialism, a fear that the discussion of ‘female texts’ presumes the uniqueness and autonomy of female representation, thus validating, rather than challenging, the patriarchal hierarchy.^[2]Judith Mayne, The Woman At The Keyhole: Feminist Woman’s Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p.93.

Despite this fear, some writers are taking up and exploring the question. Felperin, for example, argues that only a woman could have made ‘a film as explicit as Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1998), as mocking of male and female vanity as Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, 1999) or even, with [Lynne] Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, as defiant of film school rules of conduct’.^[3]Felperin, op. cit. Felperin suggests that women might want, and be able to, explore content that would not get an airing otherwise. Many women film-makers have dismissed gender issues, wanting to be seen as ‘film-makers first and women film-makers second or not at all’.^[4]ibid. Gillian Armstrong has said ‘we will never achieve true equality until people drop the label “woman” before “director”’.^[5]Gillian Armstrong, quoted in Felicity Collins, The Films Of Gillian Armstrong, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, 1999, p.9. But for all this, gender issues continue to be crucial, both in the politics of the industry and in the films themselves.

In the 1970s, representation received keen attention from feminist theorists. Claire Johnston noted in 1977 that within a male dominated cinema, ‘woman is presented as what she represents for man … [D]espite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent’.^[6]Claire Johnston, ‘Myths of Women in the Cinema’, in G. Perry (ed.), Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, Dutton, New York, 1977, p.410. This observation was made before there were many women making mainstream films.^[7]In Australia, women have always been involved in film production, but there weren’t any features directed by women between Paulette McDonagh’s 1932 film Two Minutes Silence and Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career in 1978. By mainstream films, I mean feature films that receive wide exhibition and are produced following funding from the marketplace. However, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, there have been a significant number of women film-makers in Australia, many of whom are telling stories from a female perspective. Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade (1995), Rachel Perkin’s Radiance (1998), Jackie McKimmie’s Waiting (1990), Samantha Lang’s The Well (1997) and Jane Campion’s films are texts that explore women as social and sexual beings. Feeling Sexy, the debut film of visual artist Davida Allen, shares similar preoccupations with these films. This article considers the particular vision of romance, fantasy and female sexuality embodied in Allen’s film.

Allen is one of an increasing number of visual artists now making films.^[8]While artists experimenting with different mediums is not a new phenomenon, there does seem to be an increasing convergence of art forms and a resistance to being pigeonholed as a ‘painter’ or a ‘photographer’. For example, Peter Greenaway and David Lynch paint, draw and make films (Lynch is also a cartoonist), and Australian contemporary artist Tracey Moffatt works across photography, film and video. Her work is concerned with the tension between reality and fantasy, between the domestic and the creative. In Feeling Sexy, Allen’s prose and etchings appear to have leapt from the page and the canvas on to the screen.^[9]See for example the etchings: ‘Feeling Sexy’ (1990) and ‘The Model Art Teacher’ (1991). Set in 1972, Feeling Sexy tells the story of Vicki (Susie Porter). Married and with two children, Vicki feels caged in ‘wretched domesticity’ and wants more: more love, life, and sex – in fact, more everything! ‘The demands of motherhood fight with her desire to be a thinking, feeling, creative artist’.^[10]Description from the Feeling Sexy web site: http://www.maverickfilms.com.au/feelingsexy.html

The titles of Allen’s artworks illustrate her thematic preoccupations: ‘All of My Life is Leaking Away’, ‘The Housewife’s Lament, Alone in Time’s Prison’, ‘What is Reality Here? What is Fantasy?’, ‘Woman Ironing’, ‘Dishwasher Machine’ and ‘About Sex’.^[11]Lithographs: ‘All of My Life is Leaking Away’ (1991), and ‘The Housewife’s Lament, Alone in Time’s Prison’ (1991). Etchings: ‘What is Reality Here? What is Fantasy? (1991). Paintings: ‘Woman Ironing’ (1993), ‘Dishwasher Machine’ (1993) and ‘About Sex’ (1993). In 1986, Allen’s forays into fantasy captured significant attention with her paintings describing her passion for Sam Neill. The description on the cover of her novel, The Autobiography of Vicki Myers, Close to the Bone, outlines the story that Allen repeats over and over in all of her work, that of a ‘life as it has been, yet also as it never was, a life imagined and fantasised as well as lived and felt’. Feeling and imagining are of seminal importance to Allen. Her work connects with tensions between the pragmatic concerns of the world in which we live and our inner yearnings: ‘This isn’t how I imagine it … I cannot separate the woman and the artist. While one chokes on domestic dust, the other luxuriates in devilish lust’.^[12]This is the description on the back cover of Allen’s novel, The Autobiography of Vicki Myers, Close to the Bone, Simon and Schuster in association with Endeavour Press, 1991.

In the 1990s, stories about balance seem to have struck a nerve. Sea Change (ABC 1998), for example, depicts a world where work, family and relationships cause tensions that lead to collapse and, ultimately, regeneration. Achieving balance, or juggling to keep the balance, is a central theme in many contemporary film and television productions. Ally McBeal explores the world of a woman whose career, it is implied, comes at the expense of her emotional happiness. (That will teach her to step outside the comfort of the patriarchal nest! As journalist Amanda Dunn says, Ally is ‘Post-feminist like a hole in the head’.)^[13]Amanda Dunn, ‘Post-femininist Like A Hole in the Head’, Age, Today, 9th August, 1999, p.3. The so-called ‘Baby Boomer’ feminists are battling the ‘Generation X’ feminists, in what may well be a largely media orchestrated battle. Feminism is reported to have let ‘Generation X’ down. Somehow, today’s young women came to believe that feminism had promised them everything – a career, a relationship, children, a PhD, a sex life, a dog … A common position in a variety of media debates is that feminism did not deliver, and young women are disenchanted.^[14]See for example Karen Kissane, ‘Sitting Down on Common Ground: Moira Rayner and Fiona Stewart’, Sunday Age, Opinion, pp.22-23. The post-feminist fairytale rejects the reality of experience in favour of succumbing to the hope of having it all. Feeling Sexy reflects this in the ways in which it expresses a desire not to let anything go, to have and maintain everything. It is also post-feminist in its exploration of the complexities inscribed in the construction of the sexual subject.

Romance and ‘Happy-Ever-After’ Endings

Feeling Sexy is about what happens after, after the couple are united. Allen tries to give definition to the space described in fairytales such as Cinderella as ‘happy ever after’. She refuses to accept that marriage is the end of romance and sensual bliss, or in fact the end of the story. Marcia Lieberman has said that ‘happy ever after’ endings have ‘been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls’.^[15]Marcia Lieberman, ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’, College English, December, 1972, p.385. Quoted in Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek (eds), Folk and Fairy Tales, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, 1991, p.369. Allen is not interested in telling the audience they should forsake the fantasy as oppressive; she acknowledges and embraces it, as she tells a story that might appear to reinforce patriarchal ideology. Writers such as Patricia Mellencamp have expressed alarm that marriage has been portrayed as ‘an enchantment that will shield her [the woman] against harsh realities outside the domestic realm and guarantee everlasting happiness’.^[16]Patricia Mellencamp, A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Feminism, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995, p.76. This is a fantasy that Allen confronts.

Popular romances have continued to deploy traditional fairytale models. Romantic fantasy exerts a powerful imaginative allure and has considerable erotic potential. Mills and Boon romance novels have endlessly portrayed stories climaxing in a couple’s wedding. Mellencamp describes Juliet Mitchell’s position: ‘romance seeks an idealized object, and when that object is attained, love ceases to be romantic’.^[17]Juliet Mitchell quoted in ibid. p.75. Thus ‘romance must occur outside marriage and marriage must be the end of the movie’.^[18]David Shumway quoted in ibid. p.75. In Feeling Sexy, Vicki’s husband Greg (Tamblyn Lord) will not have sex outside marriage and so, effectively, he uses her desire to trap her into marriage. However, Vicki’s story starts, rather than ends, with marriage. She lifts her wedding dress to reveal SEX, SEX, SEX, written in red all over her leg. Vicki is not a patient, demure, fairytale heroine; she takes responsibility for what she wants, and tries to reconcile what she has with what she desires.

Fantasy

Another preoccupation at the centre of Feeling Sexy is fantasy. The film offers a view of erotica from a female perspective.^[19]I do not mean that all audiences would find the film erotic, but that it is a view of what Vicki believes to be erotic, something tending to arouse sexual desire in her character. It links the erotic to the romantic, but also portrays them as separate. This can be seen in films by other women film-makers. Jane Campion has said of The Piano (1993) that it is ‘unusual to have a woman exploring her libido without any kind of romantic attachment or sentimental quality, albeit briefly, as it is in this film’.^[20]Jane Campion quoted in Miro Bilbrough, ‘The Piano’, Cinema Papers, no.93, May, 1993, p.8. In Feeling Sexy, Vicki explores her libidinal side. The film insists that women can have a fantasy life which is a product of (and essential to) their sexual being; it is separate from, but can work with, other facets, such as a desire for romance. Vicki wants romance and is motivated to reinvigorate her marriage. She is a sexual person who discovers that her fantasy life can feed her real life (and her husband’s) and nurture her sexual soul as well.

The idea of fantasy and its relationship to reality is at the heart of the short film Audacious (1994), written and directed by Samantha Lang. Audacious expresses a similar vision to Feeling Sexy. Its main character, Stella (Dee Smart), has fantasies about people she meets in chance encounters, such as the man sitting opposite her on the bus. She is aroused by her daydreams, and finds a service on the Internet which provides video reproductions of her fantasies. When Tom, her husband (John Polson), finds the videos and enacts a scene, Stella is appalled. She says angrily, ‘that isn’t what I want’. Tom replies that he isn’t the man in her fantasies, without understanding that she does not want him to be, that the distinction is in the very nature of fantasy. Like Feeling Sexy, Audacious underlines the idea that women have sexual imaginations. In Audacious, Stella finds a video that her husband made, a sensual homage to her. This sensuality is also expressed in Feeling Sexy and, in my view, is rare in Australian films. Praise (John Curran, 1998), for instance, a film noted for its explorations of sexuality, represents the act of sex as being about sex, about orgasm, not about sexual imagination or sensuousness. Sex is portrayed as selfish, greedy and self-centred (although again liberated from the romantic). It reflects a culture of spiritual poverty. In contrast, Feeling Sexy connects sex with growth, imagination and partnership.

In writing about female fantasy, Mariana Valverde argues that ‘it is not that we have not been allowed to have desires, but rather that we have not been allowed to express desires independently of male desire’. She gives the example of the nymphomaniac, a figure of male fantasy whose ‘seemingly active desires are released only after having been firmly tied to the larger context of patriarchal desire … [A] woman who can’t get fucked enough … is fulfilled when she finds a man who is strong enough to subdue her’.^[21]Mariana Valverde, Sex, Power and Pleasure, The Women’s Press, Toronto, Ontario, 1985, p.158. Feeling Sexy delves into desire from a female perspective, and implicitly argues that fantasy is intrinsic to human beings as a mode to explore and express sexuality.

Ideology and Motherhood

Valverde notes that in the Victorian period, ‘many women claimed to feel no active sexual desire at all’. She asks if this is a consequence of women having ‘internalized their society’s values’.^[22]ibid. p.152. In contemporary Western society, sex is largely regarded and accepted as a natural function. But Valverde claims that women are now offered two forms of desire as possible models: ‘one is the wish to become the object of male desire, giving up our autonomy to a stronger (male) will. The other is identification with the “higher”, selfless ideals of nurturing and mothering’.^[23]ibid. p.157. These archetypes are embedded deep in the ideology of our culture, and for those who step outside them, the potential conflict can result in guilt and feelings of inadequacy.

In Feeling Sexy, Vicki is strangely free of guilt. Perhaps it is the egocentric persona of the artist that the director (an artist herself) offers us. Vicki tries to submerge herself in motherhood in a wonderful scene (spiked with a touch of madness) where she has a tea party with the children. This is not the story of the children, it is their parent’s story, something conveyed by the fact that the children are either not in shot or their heads are lopped off by the frame.^[24]In order to visually reinforce that this is not the children’s story, Allen excludes them. There is only one scene where the little boy, one of a pair of twins used for the film, would not face the wall, and the lighting is set up to obscure his face. Personal communication between Davida Allen and the writer. But motherhood cannot totally absorb Vicki, and, driven by her work, she leaves the children unattended at the pool. Her daughter breaks her leg, and Vicki is philosophical about it, saying that ‘it would have happened anyway, whether I was there or not’. She appears entirely liberated from guilt.

The film depicts a period of domestic monotony until Vicki gets a job and some relief from being at home with her children. On her first day at work, the children are sick and Greg tells her, in a matter-of-fact way, that ‘when children are sick, Mum stays home’. Vicki is not deterred and takes the children to childcare anyway. In an example of the economy of visual story telling that is a feature of this film, Allen intercuts between a sign saying that sick children must stay at home and a shot of the children’s rash covered legs, swathed in bandages. Mothers in the audience may well feel a mixture of pleasure and pain at this, joy at her escape, and dismay that other children will be infected. This moment tells us a great deal about a ‘woman’s lot’, a ‘lot’ which hasn’t changed as much as we might have hoped. Women still do most of the domestic work, are paid less, hold fewer management positions, are less gainfully employed, and do more daily childcare and home duties.^[25]The Australian Bureau of Statistics, Social Trends Report, 1999.

In Feeling Sexy, Vicki and Greg’s sex life is constantly interrupted by their children: ‘Mummy, my tummy hurts’. This rings true for anyone with young children. One starts to feel that the children have a sex radar; they wake up and call should any hint of passion permeate the air. People with young children are often too tired to have sex, but the longing to ‘feel sexy’ is a basic human need. Vicki won’t settle for waiting until the children are older for her sex life to resume. It is primarily a question of self-image. Vicki wants to see herself as a sexual being (as she used to see herself) and not just as a mother. Motherhood has negated her sexual self-image and she wants it back. She yearns for the first flush of a sexual relationship, ‘I just want to feel that butterfly feeling in my stomach again’. Allen observes:

As an artist I’ve always worked from my own observations, and I am fascinated with relationships. How they last and why they deteriorate, and why the gloss of new relationships fades, and what it is that can keep people together for years. It is hard to keep everything new and shiny. Everything grows old and dull.^[26]Davida Allen quoted in 48th Melbourne International Film Festival Programme, p.50.

The Fairytale As Catharsis

Allen says, ‘I wanted to disguise the recipe of how a marriage can stay together as a fairytale’.^[27]ibid. Bruno Bettelheim proposes that fairytales function to ‘suggest images to the child by which [s]he can structure his [her] daydreams and with them give better direction to his [her] life’.^[28]Bruno Bettelheim ‘The Struggle For Meaning’ in Hallett and Karasek, op. cit. p.330. If Feeling Sexy is a fairytale, then it could it be seen as a catharsis for the film-maker, the story that has been told over and over in her work, a culmination of the working through of desire in order to gain a better direction for her life. One of the key questions audiences have asked Allen about Feeling Sexy concerns its autobiographical nature.^[29]Personal communication from Davida Allen. This is despite the fact that the film is about the nature of fantasy. Perhaps this implies many spectators have either missed the point (and who knows where these things come from anyway), or they are attempting to ascertain whether, as voyeurs, they have been privy to Allen’s actual fantasies. Ultimately, the work is not about communicating the fantasies themselves, but rather about fantasy’s potentially purgative effect and its essential role in our lives. In an essay for a 1987 survey exhibition of Allen’s work, art collector Atherton Nye revealed that Allen claims she confesses through her paintings. Nye says that her work is ‘deeply subjective and cathartic. … [T]he real environment within which the events take place is the painter’s soul’.^[30]Atherton Nye, ‘Davida Allen Survey Exhibition, 24th October – 5th December, 1987’, p.8.

If Feeling Sexy is a fairytale, it is something of a hybrid. Karen Rowe says that ‘fairy tales fuse morality with romantic fantasy’, but this one doesn’t.^[31]Karen E. Rowe, ‘Feminism and Fairytales’ in Hallett and Karasek, op. cit. p.347. It accepts a position that favours diversity and individuality of sexual response. Rowe also says that fairytales are not just entertaining fantasies, but ‘powerful transmitters of romantic myths which encourage women to internalise only aspirations deemed appropriate to our “real” sexual functions within patriarchy’.^[32]ibid. p.348. This (post-feminist) fairytale could be read as working against the internalising of stereotypes found within dominant representations, those such as the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Feeling Sexy points to a position where women are sexual, creative and imaginative.

Feeling and Sexiness

Vicki keeps telling Greg that her life is not what she wants, that she wants to ‘feel’ alive. He is frustrated with her focus on herself, but he does feel for her. He wants her to be happy, he just doesn’t know how to help. His empathy is shown in a scene where he gives Vicki a circled job advertisement. In a marvellous cinematic moment, Greg waits in the background to see if it engages her, while Vicki is centre screen.

Feeling Sexy celebrates fantasy as the hottest of erogenous zones. Vicki’s sexual self-image has a role in validating the self (and the partner), and consequently has a strong link to self-esteem. The film tracks a pathway that is about negotiating intimacy and eroticism. The space fantasy inhabits in Feeling Sexy does not shut the partner out but includes him. Idealistically, the film concludes that fantasy kept to oneself could shut out what can be had with one’s partner. Exposing one’s fantasies could be a threatening and alienating experience for the partner (in that it affects his/her sense of identity and security), but this is not taken up here (as it is, for example, in Audacious). Fantasy is presented in this film as a resource for love-making, a resource to strengthen Vicki’s emotional connection to Greg, and as fun. Sexuality is presented as a vehicle for personal development.

Conclusion: Struggles

At its core, Feeling Sexy reflects the differences in men and women, and the struggle to be together. Max Luthi points out that men are predominantly the focal point in fairytales, but it is refreshingly not so in this case.^[33]Max Luthi, ‘The Fairytale Hero: The Image of Man in the Fairytale’ in Hallett and Karasek, op. cit. p.315.33 Both male and female characters mature and develop over the course of the film. The view of Greg, Vicki’s very straight husband, is an affectionate one; the film-maker has portrayed him as a winner. He gains insights into his wife’s sexual imagination and their relationship is portrayed as the richer for it. Some audiences might not buy this, however, and may feel that her ‘room painting’ protests too much. In some ways, the story is told with such economy that it risks appearing superficial, failing to delve deeply into the characters’ motivations and reactions. It does not dwell on Greg’s pain at Vicki’s infidelity, the suspicion her actions spark in him, or the issues of trust (or lack of it) which may well dog a relationship in such circumstances.

Another reading of Feeling Sexy is possible, given the issues problematised across the film and Allen’s body of work. A Freudian analysis would see the unconscious desires as bubbling up into consciousness and constituting potential real impulses. From this perspective, Vicki is involved in an ongoing battle. Her fantasy could be read as denial and her involvement of her husband as simply enlisting him in her denial. She is outwardly presenting the message that she is happy with her husband and her fantasies (the conclusion offered at the end of the film), but does part of her want to live these fantasies out? As a fairytale, the happy-ever-after is maintained, but as a fictional portrayal of the real world, it is more complex. On a pragmatic level, Vicki can be seen as having accepted her priorities in her commitment to her husband and her life with him. In the room painting, the words ‘I feel sexy for my husband’ are on the wall, but is there another wall Vicki does not show him? A wall that has ‘I want to have affairs’ written all over it?

The author would like to thank Davida Allen and Kate Raynor and Australian Galleries for their generous assistance.

This article was refereed.