In the response-thread for EYES OF THESERPENT, reader AT-AT Pilot brought up the topic of mythic content with respect to comics using cheesecake art. After making my response there, I decided to build on it with respect to the overall topic of art with a “sexploitation” angle and its possible relation to myth-content.
To define the second term first, “myth-content” arises in fiction when its authors produce what I term “epistemological patterns” in their work. These patterns are drawn from real-world observations about the way things work in different aspects of reality: patterns of the physical and metaphysical properties of the cosmos, or patterns of human beings in both their individual and social matrices. These patterns, when transmuted into literature, should not be valued in the same fashion that scientific data is valued: as reproductions of how those factors function in reality. Rather, the patterns serve to deepen the symbolic universe of each myth-narrative, thus allowing readers to reflect upon all the different factors that make up experience, when seen through the free play of imaginative fantasy.
The first term, “sexploitation,” also requires some analysis. The term seems to have sprung into being as a tag for works that sold themselves to the public by focusing upon spectacular versions of sexual depiction and/or activity. This view assumes a sort of baseline for normative sexual depiction, which might extend even to those works that seek to avoid sex as much as possible, like Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND. Starting from this supposition, one must assume ever-increasing levels of sexual depiction, and for convenience I tallied three such levels in this essay. More on the levels of spectacular depiction later.
While a number of critics have sneered at sexual depiction as taking audiences’ minds away from “better things,” sex and myth are certainly not in conflict in my system—not least because sex is an important aspect of archaic religious mythologies. Since I’ve continually favored the analysis of literary works through the heuristic tool of Joseph Campbell’s four functions, I thought it would prove stimulating to look at four sexploitation works I’ve already reviewed, each from the viewpoint of a particular function.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION arises most often in literary myths involving sexuality, probably because each individual’s sexual nature is as a bedrock of that individual’s personality. In my review of Wally Wood’s PIPSQUEAK PAPERS, I noted that he encoded his fairly misogynistic feelings about women into a short series of riffs taking place in a burlesque (in more than one sense) fantasy-verse. Perhaps the most revealing projection in PIPSQUEAK is the way he undermines the sex-fantasies of main character Pip toward his perpetually nude mate, the nymph Nudina. Pip starts the story as an undersized sprite whose dinky wang can’t possibly satisfy Nudina. He acquires a “second body” that allows him to enjoy the naughty nymph, but soon finds that it’s a drag to always be defending her from rapacious villains. At the end his reward for remaining true to Nudina is that he loses his alternate body and falls into slavery alongside her, in a situation where he can no longer satisfy her and must also put up with the child he sired by her. Whatever psycho-demons Wood sought to lay to rest via this satire, he nevertheless gave them much more complexity than he did in a romp like SALLY FORTH.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION looms forth wherever a given work seeks to show how human society is affected by the disparate natures of men and women. Thus, Russ Meyer’s FASTERPUSSYCAT KILL KILL, which starts out by welcoming the audience to “violence,” shows male and female social roles breaking down by the new breed of the Sixties Women. Three go-go dancers, less criminals than lovers of life in the fast lane, become involved in murder, mostly because of their bad-tempered, karate-chopping leader Varla. Instead of butting heads with the patriarchal order in the form of lawmen, the trio of hot babes—who have abducted a young, naïve woman who witnessed the murder-- comes into conflict with a trio of men living in a remote desert-cabin. Both the three men and the three women have various dark secrets, but none of the characters have “psychologies” as such. The Old Man, father to a normal young man and to a mentally impaired hulk, represents not so much abstract patriarchy as a male sexual desire to prey on women. Varla, hoping to rob the old hermit, pits both her feminine wiles and her penchant for violence against this male prerogative, but her victory proves pyrrhic. She sacrifices both of her female followers to her greed and almost destroys all three men, only to be ignominiously defeated by the girl hostage.
THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION perks up with some loony effects in the 1961 film INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. Though the viewpoint characters are Penn and Philbrick, a pair of goofy army privates, the real stars are the titular stellar villains, the risibly named “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” CREATURES was almost certainly conceived by writer Bruno VeSota as a baggy-pants reaction to a spate of “space Amazon” films seen during American cinema’s sci-fi boom of the 1950s. As one sees in most space-babe films, Puna and Tanga are designed to provide cheesecake-fantasies for the two homely schmucks. Both alien babes are tall and stacked, and though they’ve supposedly been hidden on Earth for ten years, both have coiffed hairdos and walk around in high heels while wearing outfits that look like swimsuits with flared collars attached. They came to Earth to scout the planet for possible conquest by their people, and they’ve just managed to get their damaged ship ready to return to “the black voids of space” when the army-ants come knocking. Yet the big girls are not only spies, but also scientists, and they maintain a small standing army of “vegetable men” as guards (a conceit probably swiped from 1951’s THE THING). Unlike most space Amazons, the two women are both physically and mentally superior to the male leads, and they display impressive mastery of sciences far beyond the Earthmen. Still, the alien ladies are defeated by their biology. Tanga tells Puna that the sympathy she feels toward the puny Earthlings is the stimulation of her “maternal nature.” Nevertheless, after ten years of raising little vege-men in incubators, Puna is hard up enough that even Philbrick’s dubious charms can persuade her to “sleep with the enemy.” Tanga also falls for Penn without putting up that much resistance. Science gives you weapons and technology, but sex, even with shrimpy guys, keeps you warm at night.
THE METAPHYSICAL FUNCTION culminates with in Frank Thorne’s first graphic novel featuring GHITA OFALIZARR. Ghita, a cheerful prostitute who seems willing to have sex with nearly anyone, has her receptive feminine nature (as a metaphysician might see it) invaded by a masculine propensity for violence. Necromantic transference is at the root of it, in that Ghita gets raped by an undead king, one significantly named for a Philistine fertility-god. From then on, Ghita is a reluctant badass, able to slaughter opponents with a sword rather than inviting them to her bed. Late in the story it’s revealed that her transformation was somehow stage-managed by one of her world’s gods: Tammuz, a female deity using the name of a male Sumerian myth-figure. In this raucous ode to conjoined sex and violence, Thorne suggests that both male and female natures proceed from mirroring forces in heaven, which means that Ghita is pretty much stuck between the rock of masculinity and the soft place of femininity for the remainder of her career.
Returning quickly to the topic of the levels, I would judge that the first three of these sexploitation examples fall into the category I term “titillation.” Only GHITA falls into the most overtly spectacular category, “pornification,” insofar as Thorne is evoking the fantasy of endless, cost-free sex and violence, paralleling, though not indebted to, the dominant associations of sexual pornography.
I chose works that fit these more extreme categories since they’re the sort of thing most readers envision when they think “sexploitation.” But to be sure, sexploitation also appears in what I termed the least spectacular category, “glamor.” Examples of glamor-sexploitation might have included such works as the 1966 BATMAN—which repeatedly appealed to older male viewers with sumptuous female eye-candy—and also Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, which I also attribute to the glamor category despite the series’ frequent use of female nudity. I may devote a future essay to discussing the aesthetic that separates the three levels, but for now, that’s all folks.