Late in the noughties I took post graduate papers in Feminist Studies and Sex in Film at The University of Auckland. During this time I wrote some slight pieces about the works I was reading and from time to time I’ll publish them here. This is one of them.
The generic characteristics of the stag film are:
• Social bonding of exclusively male audience;
• Heterosexual expression of the male group desire for the female body;
• Designed to arouse;
• Absence of sound, colour or professional actors;
• Short length;
• Rudimentary narrative coherence (worse during hard-core sequences);
• Instructive re hidden mechanisms of sexual function;
• Viewed from ‘the point of view of the phallus’;
• Clinical objectifying of female body;
• Addresses male viewer;
• Puerile reactions to visible sexual difference;
• Primitive texts;
• Remained ‘primitive’ after ‘legitimate’ films developed to full-length narratives due to official invisibility;
• Earlier stags narratively more sophisticated than later examples;
• Obsessive/repetitive focus on sexual coupling;
• Ending via cessation of genital show;
• Genital ‘show’ rather than genital ‘event’;
• Incorporating voyeurism in narrative to arouse the viewer and link watching character with viewer;
• Failure to sustain voyeuristic penetration during hard-core sequences;
• Direct address to camera – audience encouraged to talk to/reach into the screen;
• Profound misogyny;
• Emphasis on ‘meat’ shots;
• Associated with brothels;
• Retains theatrical elements of striptease;
• Amateurish nature of performance/production reinforces ‘real’ nature of the genre;
• Male audience moving towards but never achieving identification with male protagonist;
• Shows more of the female body than any previous form of sexual show;
dykiegirl 