At the end of the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, Cliff Robertson delivers a famous line: "You poor dumb son of a bitch, you've done more harm than you know." He's talking to whistleblower Robert Redford, but the statement could equally apply to the movie's director, Sydney Pollack, for foisting such awful sex scenes onto impressionable young minds. Faye Dunaway trembles under Redford like a neurasthenic Chihuahua to indicate how heavily meaningful the experience is, in a way, we hope, that most sex is not (Pauline Kael described it as "death-rattle sex").
Given that great swaths of society learn how to behave by aping what they see onscreen, that all-too-typical 1970s movie set a bad example, for an entire generation, of what sex — straight sex, at least — could and should be like.
Alas, 32 years later, in massively influential blockbusters such as Judd Apatow's Superbad and Knocked Up, we're still watching people have bad, weird, misleading sex onscreen. In Knocked Up, for example, Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, as his pregnant girlfriend, frantically try a number of different positions, but are thwarted by his fear of hurting the fetus, combined with her fear of looking fat.
It is certainly director Apatow's prerogative to present his male point of view, and he is evidently sincere in his presentation of naughty boy-men having awkward, phallocentric sex with neurotic, hormonally imbalanced, ball-breaking mother figures who wear their brassieres to bed, and this may even be how most of the heterosexual world lives. But for a lot of women, that scene, and the entire movie, was not anything we could relate to.
It doesn't have to be this way. Better sex for all, we say! And where else to start than at the movies (and a few TV shows), to see how they've led or misled us through our shared sexual education.
The seventies Klute (1971): Touted at the time as the epitome of the tough, liberated, modern woman, Jane Fonda as a conflicted prostitute fakes it with johns but is unable to "feel" anything during sex. The straight-arrow detective played by Donald Sutherland changes all that in a scene where she seduces him on a trundle bed. But the fascination with "call girls" feels silly, and fear of female sexual power pervades. A few years later, Looking for Mr. Goodbar indelibly equated female promiscuity with death.
Shampoo (1975): Bad sexual politics, good sex. Despite a series of preposterous outfits and a bouffy do, Warren Beatty is believably hot as a himbo who can't be faithful but who genuinely brings women pleasure. With a blow dryer stuffed into his belt, Beatty roams the Hollywood Hills giving women bobs and orgasms.
Lee Grant tells the sexy snipper where to put his hands, and after they have sex, asks for a tissue — a big departure from today's superclean movie sex, where bodily fluids are either absent or considered revolting.
Grant also puts on her bra after sex, reminding us of an era when A-list movie stars didn't have bras and tank tops superglued to their torsos. And Hal Ashby, the film's director, doesn't shoot his sex scenes with a microscope: When Beatty finally beds Julie Christie, we see his pale bum and her gorgeous hair. It's sexy and funny.
To paraphrase his character, Beatty may not love the women he sleeps with, but he does like them.
Network (1976): In this demented 1970s view of equality between the sexes, Faye Dunaway is the soulless (and braless) feminist who screws like a man. "I can't tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am," she tells William Holden. "I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and I can't wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom."
Later, she does exactly that, burbling about TV ratings as she wham-bams Holden, then collapses.
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