Jasira Maroun is only 13 but she has discovered orgasms. She has them often. She is pretty, appealing and has just become sexually active with a teenage boy. She has also stripped naked for her next-door neighbour, a married man in his 30s. Jasira is truthful and likeable and has a moral code. She is going where her body and her new desires take her. She is not a victim, and she still has her sensual innocence.
These are the details at the heart of the new film Towelhead, which has belatedly made its way to Australia after causing controversy in the US, where it was renamed Nothing Is Private to appease the oppressive sensibilities of the cultural thought police.
It is a timely story, given the experiences of Bill Henson, who made an honest effort to portray the reality of pre-adolescent sensuality. For his choice of subject, Henson has been thrown under the bus as a voyeur. Not one of the main protagonists in this contretemps has emerged with their reputation enhanced. Hysteria and opportunism engulfed both Henson and the entire issue of pubescent sexuality.
Towelhead confronts the issue full on. The film is based on the book of the same name by Alicia Erian, who, like her main character and alter ego, Jasira, is the mixed-race child of a Middle Eastern father and a white, Western mother. Like Jasira, the author grew up in Syracuse, New York State, her parents broke up, and she was shipped off to Houston to live with her father in her early teens. Like Jasira, she is sensual and intrigued by the women in Playboy. Like Jasira, she was beaten by her father and the relationship fractured when she was 13. They remain estranged.
Fact and fiction are entwined in Towelhead, which is protective of the sensuality of the young. It is a deeply ambiguous subject because Western society has created a sexual twilight zone in which children and teenagers have no choice but to live in a culture saturated with sexual imagery, sexual innuendo, and subtle forms of sexual pressure. Every week, in every way, the boundaries of voyeurism and exhibitionism are expanded into the mainstream.
Simultaneous with the release of Towelhead comes Candy Girl, a memoir by Diablo Cody, the reigning Academy Award winner for best screenplay (for her brilliant script for Juno). She describes, and exploits, her year spent as a stripper, peep-show hostess and phone sex worker when she was 24 (six years ago) and still known as Brook Busey-Hunt, before she left Minnesota and reinvented herself in Hollywood.
It began with a whim to go to amateur night at the local strip club, but became an obsession: "I wanted to feel the way I had felt on-stage again. Agitated. Afraid . . . I wanted to be like the tongue-waggling video sluts I'd idolised as a kid."
This is not as aberrant as one might assume. Sex Lives Of Australian Women, by Joan Sauers, published this year by Random House, based on a survey completed by 1806 women, finds that two-thirds of women said they masturbated regularly and "the most common scenario in our sexual fantasies, described by hundreds of women, was having sex with multiple partners".
Another recurring theme was "imagining themselves as sex workers, strippers, and lap dancers . . . A lot of women fantasise about sex with strangers . . . Bondage and discipline fantasies are very common".
Exhibitionism is also booming. Twenty-two per cent of the surveyed women aged between 20 and 29 had been filmed or taped while having sex. Unlike most women, Busey-Hunt/Cody acted on her fantasies: "I had [wanted] to be a kind of wanton slutburger Magdalene, who had been vilified in the churches of my youth."
What links Candy Girl and Towelhead is their depiction of the widespread sexual demand for very young women. By far the fantasy role that Busey-Hunt/Cody encountered a huge demand for was the "barely legal" horny teenage girl. Out in the real world, teenagers are becoming more knowing much earlier, thanks to the internet.
Again, Sauers is useful. In Sex Lives Of Australian Teenagers (Random House, 2007), based on a survey of 300 teenagers, which found children were getting most of their information about sex from internet porn sites rather than their parents or sex education programs. Sauers found that 97 per cent of girls, and 100 per cent of boys, had seen porn by the time they turned 15. A third of girls had had a sexual experience by the age of 13.
A generation ago, Cody would have been a scarlet women and Candy Girl a shocking book. Now it's just another raunchy memoir and Cody is just another of the legion of exhibitionists unleashed via cyberspace and TV. One only need visit the upscale meat palaces in the city on a Friday night to see the standard uniform for young women in these pick-up mosh pits is glove-tight, ultra-short skirts, bare legs and towering stilettos, the cliche of porn morphed into mainstream of fashion.
As for the internet revolution, far from merely being a paradise for deviance, it may have created a more accurate mirror of who we collectively are as a society, in conflict with the laws and conventions we have constructed. This information revolution has made it harder to protect the innocence of childhood, and navigate the awkward and furtive evolution from asexual youth to sexual adolescence, the passage from innocence to desire.
Frankly, it is our culture saturated with debt, consumerism, two-income families, one-parent households and a coarsening public domain that has done more to truncate the innocence of youth than random perverts, a reality we have barely begun to acknowledge.
Source: smh.com.au
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