A few months ago, I went to the cinema to watch Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s new film. As a teenage girl, I had a special fondness for her films and their capacity to show the inner world of a lonely girl. Her characters, like Charlotte in Lost in Translation or Marie Antoinette in the film of same name, talked to me in a particular way. I saw myself a lot in their search for human connection and, at the same time, in their need for isolation.
I know that many people dislike her cinema and think her movies don’t have anything to say because they don’t really have a plot. But for me they have something that not so many films have: a special atmosphere with a definite identity and aesthetic, through particular attention to details, colours, lights, and, last but not least, music. I always loved her soundtracks, especially Marie Antoinette’s; I also bought the CD and thanks to it I discovered artists like The Strokes.
This atmosphere felt so familiar that I had my own rituals with some of her films, for instance, I used to rewatch Lost in Translation, together with Pride and Prejudice, in the period around my birthday, the long days of the end of June. With Marie Antoinette I developed almost a form of obsession as a thirteen-year-old girl, rewatching it compulsively for days, focusing especially on some scenes that I particularly liked. The Virgin Suicides was not a film that I knew by heart like the other two, but I still remember that day in late summer when I watched it at home, during a period spent in Totnes (England). I still remember the video shop where I rented it and the guy who was working there who gave me a CD he produced as a present. I rented this film together with American Beauty and Donnie Darko, so in my mind, these films are all a bit connected to that slow and sunny weekend by myself.
As I often do, I’ve lost myself in my thoughts. So, back to the beginning. When some months ago I went to watch Priscilla, I guess I was kind of nostalgically looking for those feelings I used to have as a teenage girl who was discovering the world. Feelings I haven’t completely lost, although now I’m an adult and I’m way more disillusioned, but also a little bit more stable. I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed. Priscilla did its job. It especially reminded me of Marie Antoinette, as it portrays a young girl imprisoned in a golden cage who’s trying to escape by creating her identity.
There was another detail that I noticed and that also reminded me of Marie Antoinette, something that back then I didn’t pay much attention to. There is more than one scene where Priscilla approaches him and Elvis rejects her. And she clearly expresses her frustration, by saying:
“I am a woman with needs who needs to be desired”
In the same way, Marie Antoinette tries to have sex with her husband Louis XVI and he keeps rejecting her. For eight long years. This is actually historically accurate since apparently their marriage wasn’t “consummated” for that time period, due to the king’s insecurity and maybe physical issues. These scenes made me realise that the image of an (attractive) woman who’s sexually rejected by a man is something that isn’t represented at all in our society, as if it were something absolutely impossible.
I remember growing up with this rumor that men are always willing to have sex, that they need it, otherwise, they physically suffer, that they can’t control themselves. I think we are all sadly familiar with this image of the wild and sex-obsessed man and we women are used to seeing ourselves as victims or objects of someone else’s sexual desire that we can either accept or reject, instead of considering ourselves also as desiring subjects.
Having conversations with many people I know, I noticed that often it’s still mainly considered a universal truth that women have a lower sexual desire than men or that for women sex is just something romantic and mental. As if sex wasn’t something that belonged to them, but it’s only something they could adapt to. I remember that as a young girl, I noticed that boys were not expected to change their bodies to start having a sexual life, while girls had to shave their legs and pubis (because being hairy “there” was considered disgusting or dirty), look “available” and put on makeup or wear sexy clothes to be sexually desirable. As if women had to make themselves sexual and couldn’t just be it. As if sex wasn’t really something they wanted or needed, but just something they could give to others. I also noticed that often women with a very active sexual life had somehow to be “recognizable” by playing the role of the bad girl, hypersexualised, provocative, and sexy, while it never seemed to me that a man had to do something special with his appearance and attitude to own his sexuality. It was simply expected as something natural.
On the other hand, growing up I think I’ve never seen the representation of a man who simply didn’t feel like having sex, because he was tired, depressed, had a headache, or for any other reason. In the same way, it seemed that it was simply impossible to force a man to have sex or to abuse him since he always has to be willing to do it, any time, no matter how he feels.
For this reason, when it happened to me to be with a man who didn’t feel like having sex and rejected me, and this actually happened several times with my first sexual partner and also with other people over the years, I was speechless. I didn’t know what to think, I simply wasn’t prepared for that eventuality. So I assumed that something had to be wrong with me, and therefore I felt guilty and ashamed.
When we speak about consent -which is a hot topic I don’t mean to address here because it’s very complex and delicate- we hardly ever consider the man as the person who should also give consent, because he’s always expected to be available. Thanks to the many conversations I had with men in my life about sex, I was then able to recognise how frequently they are unaware of their deep desires and needs, too often I had the impression that men too are used to playing a part, the one of the macho man, or, if they’re less lucky, to look at it with envy and bitterness. Too often I felt that the men I talked to were trying more to perform a role rather than listening to their true nature. And many times I had the impression that a lot of men actually like more showing that they have sex than actually having it. Because sex involves vulnerability and not so many men are comfortable with it in our world.
So probably I wasn’t entirely right when as a girl I thought that only women had to perform their sexuality, like I’ve written before.
Back to Sofia Coppola’s movies, it felt so refreshing to see the representation of a man who says no to sex, especially to an attractive woman. In Elvis’s case, due to a latent depression, and for Louis XVI more probably due to a simple lack of interest in sex.
Yes, it’s possible, men can have a headache, too. And that’s totally fine, as long as we start acknowledging it.
