29.04.2020

Speaking of the cult of virginity in American films, how about American Pie? Whilst at the time of release, this film probably did more damage than good by making the sexual insecurities of teenagers a laughingstock rather than a possible topic of discussion, it certainly serves as a time capsule to America’s relationship to sexuality. The self-deprecating humor is derived from the concept that these boys embark upon the uncertain seas of female sexuality, that stormy and unforgiving sea fare that only the manliest and most accomplished of them may navigate without utterly embarrassing themselves. Their penises are the measuring stick of their manhood, and the only way to test it is to stick it in something – sock, apple pie, woman. This is the road to manhood, and it is paved with cum and shame.

It is no secret that America, and consequently Hollywood, has a difficult relationship to sexuality. The fact that the “R-rated” comedies, rather than actually address sex, have this strange peeping-Tom-relationship to it where the only sexuality at display is somehow warped and deranged, speaks volumes of the constipation that American films of the time have around the subject. This might possibly be due to the censorship laws that imposed a rather Catholic morality upon sexuality, which we know by now isn’t the healthiest. In comparison to more recent versions of the attempts to discuss adolescent sexuality, such as the British Netflix production Sex Education, American Pie reads like a terrible testament to the absurd notions in American sex education about the virtues of abstinence and the pertaining idea that sex is and always will be somehow traumatic – your first time is meant to be some humiliating ordeal, if you’re a boy, and downright unpleasant and undesirable if you’re a girl. 

Mixed in with the Catholic guilt there is a Portnoy’s Complaint-esque theme of inadequate manhood. Getting walked in on by parents when masturbating, drinking cum out of a beer cup while trying to hit on a girl, prematurely ejaculating when trying to get it on with the hot exchange student whilst being broadcasted over webcam to the whole school, having diarrhea in the girls toilets because your mates gave you laxatives– it’s like a bunch of writers came together and wrote down every came-to-school-naked dream they ever had. The discrepancy between the obsessing over the possession/penetration of the female body and the anxiety of performance is made out to be pretty much the whole essence of male sexuality. Women in this scenario are meant to be these silent, empty receptacles for the male sexual performance, a silent panel of judges that will then lift up the score cards afterwards.

This anxiety is played out in the weird soft porn/nightmare hybrid scene with the “sexy exchange student” Nadia. I won’t even go into the absurd stereotypical Eastern-European sex doll that made the crossover from porn to comedy briefly in the late nineties and early noughties, but for those who haven’t seen the film, imagine a twenty-six-year-old lingerie model in a school girl outfit and you’re pretty close. Nadia, for no good reason, gets naked in Jason’s bedroom, who is our anti-hero, our Portnoy in this film. Unbeknown to Nadia, Jason has set up a webcam so that the whole thing streams live. Leaving Nadia to undress in his room, Jason sprints to his friend’s house in order to see the striptease himself. After undressing, Nadia takes out Jason’s porn magazines and rather than being disgusted, which the boys sitting in front of the computer are anticipating, she begins to masturbate on his bed – the boys are now effectively watching an underaged girl (with the body of a grown-ass woman) masturbate to photos of other women identical to her. 

The scene is so outrageous that there is no need to explain to the contemporary eye all the levels of nonsensical, outdated misogyny that goes on, I’d hope. What is more interesting is the dichotomy between watching and performing that Jason grapples with. The peeping-Tom-factor of her being filmed without her knowledge is interesting in so far as Jason is shown able to enjoy it only whilst separated from the reality of the female body by this familiar, virtual interface. The glee over having this coveted object in his bedroom quickly turns into panic as he is prompted to go over and “seduce” her, i.e. become the man in the porn that he was first passively observing. The confidence by which he had objectified her sitting by the computer watching crumbles in the face of the mounting performance anxiety. Jason of course fails this manhood test and prematurely ejaculates not once, but twice, broadcasted over the internet to everyone watching.

This weird insertion of porn into the plot is quite showing. Once again, I’d love to swallow the bait and blame it all on the objectification of women (vaginas lay on the same continuum as socks and pies, after all). It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation though – did the objectification of women cause the disconnect between men and their sexuality, or did women get objectified in order to remove the conflict of performance anxiety and allow it to be processed safely, from the confines of one’s bedroom, over and over again without the fear of failure? Is the character of Nadia really just the ultimate culmination of male anxiety over their own sexual prowess? After all, the understanding of female sexuality in this film is somewhere between quantum theory and mythology, and with that fear of failure looming in the backs of these boys heads, the safety of your mate’s bedroom and some webcam girl you can project all your insecurities on sure sounds appealing.

American Pie was produced around the same time that Sex and the City was at its peak, around the same time that people started talking about G-spots (not so much clitorises, because eternal thanks to Freud), and this cult of female sexuality and the idea that you can make a girl cum by licking her elbow or whatever fresh hell they used to teach on internet forums was popularized. This is most evident in the scene where the character Kevin gets the secret coordinates to a book that contains the collected sex tips from the generations before him –   a weirdly familiar concept from the stock footage of cultural memory I have from that time. This is followed by a scene where Kevin attempts to perform the “tongue tornado” on his girlfriend Vicky, aided by the illustration in the book. Oy vey. 

Firstly, the very idea that the knowledge of female sexuality is some secret holy book full of info graphs and hieroglyphs that gets passed through this brotherhood cult, and most importantly that this is the only way to unlock the mysteries of the vagina is arguably wild. The idea that men are in possession of this knowledge rather than women, and that one must under no circumstance ask a woman because one would reveal their inadequacy and lose all manhood and consequent power position is also a real treat. Furthermore, that the book and the female vagina have any connection, as if the vagina is this object you operate, that you follow instructions to do the thing and then it works, is a bit of a piss-take on the idea that men would be this incapable of grasping interpersonal relations. The premise of men’s shortcomings in independently cracking the female enigma in nineties and noughties American comedy is a staple, and really just speak volumes of this anxiety in the American psyche. Also, supposedly the reason for Kevin’s “performance” is to persuade Vicky to let him stick it in – the idea that oral sex is foreplay can just get in the bin. Actually, the term foreplay can get in the bin. 

Now, the iconic scene where the main character Jason fucks the apple pie and gets walked in on by his father must almost be considered art. It’s actually too cringe to watch, but the level of self-hatred that is portrayed in the form of that defiled pie on the kitchen table, as Jason and his father talk about how to explain it to Jason’s mother, is incredible. One is inclined to appreciate the symbolic value of the apple pie and the consequent defiling of it. Afterwards, as the pie sits on the table like a body they need to get rid of, the father says “we’ll just tell your mom we ate it all”, the camera shows Jason’s appalled face that is evidently imagining eating the pie he’s just fucked. There is a lot to unpack here, probably more than my theoretical prowess can undertake. 

Really, the symbolism of the penis as the murder weapon and the pie as the suburban America with the white-picket fence and the moral codes, defiled through this unprohibited adolescent sexuality is something. Firstly, it treats male sexuality as something inherently threatening to an orderly society. As the female sexuality in the film is absent for most part (Allison Hannigan’s character did famously stick a flute in her pussy at bandcamp, but that’s about it), all of the sexual impulses are deposited on the male, making it rather predatory by the very disposition that they are the only ones in possession of it. In so far as the pie is also white womanhood in all its domesticity, Jason defiling it really does present the highest form of moral corruption. The treatment of erections as some incarnation of inner demons of perversity must really be quite the burden to bear for a fifteen-year-old, I’d imagine. Secondly, the fact that the father is there, ready to protect his son’s secret to a point of “getting rid of the body”, suggests that the defiling, impure male sexuality is a shared shame, passed on from generation to generation. The suggestion that they would eat the pie that’s been fucked is a real interesting one – why is it included? Because it has some inherent ha-ha-factor due to its grossness or because it would be a form of self-punishment, lying in the bed you made for yourself? I’m just riffing here, allow it. 

Let me get back to the cult of virginity. The idea that sex is what makes you a man (or a whore if you were a girl/woman), has never been about the sex that is being had. The very idea that the act of penetration automatically racks up points on some cosmic scoreboard is once again a display of male anxieties around performance and masculinity. The plot premise makes this explicit due to the very fact that these boys are not looking to get rid of their respective virginities because they want to have sex per se (Jason verbalizes this at the prom as he expresses his hatred toward sex, i.e. the pressure to have it), but because they want to impress their friends. That female conquests are in fact a way of making yourself more appealing to your guy friends is another indicator to the inherent crisis in masculinity that these boys have; the absolute devaluation of femininity to the point of instrumentality in achieving status from fellow men is a-fuckedy-fucked-up. Granted, in the course of making hook-up culture more egalitarian, this has extended to women; we too can now claim fame based on the guys we’ve fucked. Long live equality. 

Now, whilst it is a completely normal facet of teenage-dom to want approval from your friends, the very idea of becoming a moral person is based on the idea that you are able to reject a pack-mentality and evaluate morals yourself. This is actually somewhat achieved in the scene where Chris gives the speech to Heather about how prom night was supposed to be the night he loses his virginity but when he’s with her, he doesn’t feel like he’s running toward a goal, looking for the best way to score, but like he’s already won. Sports analogies, the language of love. As a vehement critic and a dedicated heteropessimist, I wanted to find this problematic. However, I was forced to concede that whilst the coming to the realization that women have value beyond their instrumentality in affirming manhood is not exactly a Eureka moment, it’s still the correct conclusion. It is also the only occasion where a female-male relationship is validified through some other means than sex in the film, and to be fair it’s the two of them that end up making sweet spontaneous love in some beach shack. I guess you get what you give up, you know? Chris doesn’t even brag about it to his friends – someone give this man a good boy award. But really, in the end he is the only guy who had sex not because of other men, but because of the girl he was with. Needless to say, he is the exception, not the rule.

There are other good moments; the ending to the storyline of Kevin and Vicky is one of my favorites. She gives one of the more convincing performances of a girl having sex for the first time: the disillusionment that she goes through, the realization that she does not love Kevin nor does she want to sleep with him again, after all the planning and stressing that had gone into the “perfect moment” – then again, Tara Reid who plays Vicky was twenty-four at the time, whilst Thomas Ian Nichols playing Kevin was only nineteen, so no wonder she looks uncomfortable as hell. A less great moment is the revenge fantasy of Finch cuckolding the school bully by having sex with his mom. I understand that it’s probably thrown in there for the underdogs, but I just can’t really get on board with the premise that this was the ultimate power move, and not an adult committing a crime by having sexual relations with an underaged boy? I understand the Freudian logic in it, the Oedipus complex of it all, but Freud was wrong about clitorises and he’s wrong about this one too. 

I think I must’ve been about eight years old when I first saw American Pie. I remember how “sex” back then had similar properties to the sun; if you looked straight at it, it would burn your eyes. My parents had some wisdom in telling us not to watch it, because we were “too young to understand it” – granted, two university degrees later I’m only beginning to grasp the levels of cultural baggage in these films. The original reason why these films got their R-rating is however alarming in its naivete. Seeing boobs or someone jerk-off into a pie is by no measure the reason this film is beyond insane (although making twenty-year-old guys play high-schoolers and then have them finger a pie before sticking their dicks in for gags just wouldn’t make it past the pitching room anymore, but I guess we had to go there to know it was not kosher). The controversy around American Pie involved the sort of technical inclusion of “sex” and crude language, but nothing about the content of what “sex” in this context meant. In retrospect, I honestly find the scene of Stifler accidentally drinking cum out of a beer cup far less morally alarming (although yet another interesting revenge fantasy going on there) than the conflation of teenage girls with fully developed women, for example.

In short, the moral panic around teenagers having sex completely evades the fact that sex has nothing to do with what is happening in the film. Talking about female sexuality as something that does exist on its own is not just some feminist rant; it is precautionary measure against the hijacking of women’s bodies to serve as the platform upon which male sexual anxiety is performed. Similarly, to bust the myth of female sexuality as an empty receptacle allows men the possibility to consider themselves as something other than the performers, the givers and the doers. There is something dark brewing in the innocent slap-stick-ness of American Pie and other films of the time – the compulsive repetition of sexual shame and failure, and the consequent self-hatred that can only be overcome by fulfilling the male quest of sticking your penis in the vagina is really quite harrowing, if you think about it.