David Davis 45, part 1

a new series on the sex scene

Do you remember your first sex scene? Was it in a book, a film, or another kind of media? To my surprise, the first that came to mind for me didn’t include sexual intercourse at all.

I was 7 or 8 years old. While flipping channels with my sisters, I accidentally landed on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In the “sex scene” in question, an ultra-racist standout from Spielberg’s 1984 blockbuster, our hero, Indy (Harrison Ford), witnesses a ritual human sacrifice that culminates with the removal of a still-beating heart from a captive’s body. I remember fire and drums, the bloody penetration of one man by another, and the gruesome certainty that I had stumbled across an unspeakable evil of Biblical proportions.

But not even my horror was a match for my remorse: I knew my dad and his wife would punish me for watching even just a few minutes of this grownup movie without permission. I wanted desperately to confess, to be reassured with fact (Don’t worry, it’s all pretend!¹) and forgiveness, but to do so would first mean getting in trouble. My agonizing only lasted a few minutes, I’m sure, but after what seemed like hours, I finally came clean.

It turned out that my parents didn’t care about what I had done, certainly not enough to punish me for it. They were amused by my histrionics—and I can understand why, now that I’m an adult myself. I don’t remember what happened after that.

My immediate association of an occult, Orientalist cannibalism with sex comes as no surprise for an Evangelical child raised by racist anti-intellectuals whose primary values, shame and work ethic, were cherrypicked from religious pig-ignorance and right-wing propaganda. I was a particularly guilt-ridden kid, obsessed with the potential for transgression, all of which felt sexual to me, because as I understood it the sexual was the greatest taboo of all. Violence was one thing; I remember, at around the same time as the above anecdote, my dad explaining to me over dinner that capital punishment didn’t violate the sixth Commandment, that in fact Jesus Himself would have been, in a way, too primitive to understand why Americans needed to put some people in the electric chair². Sex, on the other hand, was unforgivable.

When I ask, Do you remember your first sex scene?, I want you to be as free-associative about it as I was because, 90 years after the Motion Picture Production Code and 150 after the first Comstock law, the distinctions between art, commerce, and moral and legal obscenity—all of which dictate both sex and scene—remain unclear. How is a sex scene more or less sexual because of the gender(s), races, and sexual identities of its performers (both as actors and characters)? Because of the medium and genre in which it’s found? Because of where and when and by whom it was made? When does a sex scene cross over into pornography (and by framing this question in this way, do I limit us with a false spectrum, a careless conflation of genre or form, or something else)?

The sex scene is neither discrete nor contained. Like all sex(uality) it is constructed, disciplined, and often punished. This makes it a perfect site from which to explore the leaky, smushy, capaciousness of fantasy, desire, and profanity; to share and discuss our favorite sex scenes; to analyze texts across media; to investigate our horniness and disgust; to elevate our discussions of art to something more interesting than, Does consuming this make me a good person? Does creating that make me a bad person?

More to come soon. I’m excited for this one!

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1. These are people who regarded The Exorcist (1973) as a docudrama, so the odds were not in my favor.

2. I was taught that “Thou shalt not kill” was the sixth Commandment, but I’m discovering that it’s ranked differently in other Christian traditions. In any case, my dad is a bad person.