No sex please--we're American!

Groups protest film about sex prof

'Kinsey' opens Friday in limited release

Limited release means that it won't be showing here. The theater chain that controls most of the screens in this area operates theaters in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Ohio. Note that three of these are "blue states", and there are credible claims that Ohio is too, if you ignore places like Cincinnati. Nevertheless, someone has decided, apparently, that people around here are not interested in seeing this movie. It is fairly common to see limited release movies pass us by, but what is different in this case is that, several months ago, there were a lot of trailers shown for it. Every time I went to a theater in July, there was a trailer for Kinsey. But now, when it turns out that the movie may not be showing here at all, it really smells like someone is backing off. And perhaps they are backing off in response to this sort of shit:

"Alfred Kinsey is responsible in part for my generation being forced to deal face-to-face with the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, pornography and abortion," said Brandi Swindell, head of a college-oriented group called Generation Life that plans to picket theaters showing the film.

[Critics] argue that [the movie] omits unflattering details about Kinsey's interest in pedophilia and exaggerates the accuracy of the findings in his groundbreaking sex-behavior studies of 1948 and 1953.

Ah-ha! I see that the word "pedophilia" is being used--now is when we all recoil on cue, right?

"Instead of being lionized, Kinsey's proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Culture & Family Institute.

Focus on the Family, an influential Christian ministry based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said in a review of the film that "Kinsey" mocks Christianity and condones immorality.

"To say that it is rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda would be beyond stating the obvious," wrote reviewer Tom Neven.

Focus on the Family and its allies blame Kinsey for a host of ills -- including clearing a path for candid, comprehensive sex education programs espoused by organizations like the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

Bill Condon, the movie's writer-director, has some understanding of what these various reactionaries are up to:

"Their real aim, by maligning him and destroying his reputation, is to pretend that the last 50 years didn't happen," Condon said. "Kinsey affected everybody's life, and I hope the film gets a little breathing room for people to see it and think about it for themselves."

Incidentally, a while back I posted about Nicole Kidman's controversial movie Birth--so far, that hasn't opened here either.

Poland, Brazil and the "World Sex Championships" (as well as ruminations on parentheticals)

Okay, this was interesting:

Warsaw's mayor battles sex industry over "World sex championships"

I'm torn--since this article appears on Yahoo news, I know full well that it's going to be removed eventually (after a week? two weeks?), and so I'm inclined to reprint the whole thing here. But that would be a violation of fucking copyright laws I suppose. Or at the very least, a violation of the Blogger TOS.

So I will restrain myself. I do want to quote (and quibble with) one paragraph, though:

Poland, where more than 90 percent of the population is Catholic, is a conservative society but pornography and sexual services are openly on sale.

Brazil is also Catholic, and I doubt that anyone could make the same implication about it: namely, that being Catholic implies being conservative. Anyone with the means (i.e., an internet connection) can obtain videos and photographs of Brazilian women (and men, presumably) performing acts that would surely result in obscenity prosecution in the U.S. (and Poland, too, I imagine). I guess an interesting question would be, what makes the two countries so different with respect to this? And why are both of them more permissive than the supposedly "free" United States of America? (end of rant)

Anyway, there's a photo associated with this article that is not to be missed. :-)

(Apologies for all the parentheticals in this post--I had an expository writing teacher in high school who claimed that good writing style does not include parentheticals. I've always agreed with that sentiment, although I find that my brain tends to be so associative that it's difficult to cram in everything I want to say without using them. The teacher's point, though, was that writing isn't just about what I want to write, but also about what the reader wants to read. And parentheticals are a pain in the ass to read through.)