Introduction

A fairly sober warning should be given to any potential readers of this book. If notions of political correctness are important to you, it might perhaps be best to steer clear of what follows. Sexuality and the treatment of sex on film has long been a minefield for a variety of reasons, but it has perhaps become even more so now that it is essential for any writer to parade his or her ideological credentials or attitudes; even the sentence you have just read had to be non-gender specific. One might say that the Damoclean sword of ‘avoidance of offence’ in the sexual arena fell in the 1980s with the surprising and unlikely marriage between the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse and anti-pornography feminists. While the former was famous for her ‘Cleanup TV’ campaign and battles with such dramatists as Dennis Potter, the latter concurred with her view that the female body had become objectified in popular and even serious culture. Personally, I argued in vain with feminists of my acquaintance who supported her censorship initiatives, believing that they (my friends and colleagues) had far more in common with someone like myself, who had no objection to either female or male nudity. Their fragile alliance was with a woman who, for instance, objected to such feminist shibboleths as abortion and felt that her own sex was best served by a devotion to family, church and conservative values — the German mantra ‘Kinder, Küche und Kirche’, in fact.