Issues of sexuality inevitably come up when you teach a class that surveys the history of film because it is tied in the very fabric of the art form. In a previous quarter we were discussing Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952) - as beautiful and sweet as any film that has ever been made. De Sica’s films directly responded to Italy’s previous fascist regime which promoted the ideal citizen as a holistic venture. There is a certain way to look, act and think. All outsiders of this segment were ostracized. The Italian Neo-Realisist filmmakers that followed Mussolini’s propaganda were determined to show the beautiful within the imperfect reality that we all live in.
One such character in Umberto D. was the innocent servant Maria who essentially acted as a more open-minded and less judgmental foil to the film’s other characters. She was unwed and pregnant with a child that had two possible fathers. When discussing the script I saw her as a window character that enabled the hero, Umberto D, to succeed. Essential and beautiful - as well as deeply flawed. When I asked the students what their opinion of the character was without divulging my own, one girl disdainfully opined that she was “a total skank”.
I never thought of this student as trashy or unintelligent. She was well manicured and attractive, more articulate than most with a relatively broad cinematic vocabulary for a freshman. She also has a child of her own. Maybe she was making a joke but no one laughed; her opinion was actually shared by many of her peers. I was astonished. I understand that having a baby out of wedlock with an unknown father might be blasphemous enough to shame a woman into secrecy in the 1950s but these were young men and women entering college in 2009 that live in a major metropolis. These things happen in a city. They will always happen. Everywhere. And although we’ve been through the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s and bare more skin in popular culture than ever, many people in America still have the same antiquated thoughts on sexuality. Men who sleep around are conquerors, women who do are sluts. Seemingly harmless words in detail, these ideas are insidious in the larger consciousness. Jaclyn Fridman goes on to succinctly demonstrate how far this goes:
“I think it’s important to understand a few key things. The first is that rape is everyone’s business, not just because we all should care about it, but because it impacts every one of us directly, whatever our gender, whether or not we’re a survivor or a perpetrator. When we have sex right now, we’re having sex in the context of a rape-enabling culture, one that shames women for having sexual appetites and shames men for not ‘scoring’ at every opportunity. We all take that into bed with us, at least in part, and the things that make women safer and give women better access to their own authentic sexualities also directly benefit men in numerous ways.”
This is exactly the type of real and pervasive social inequity that De Sica was fighting against. Inequality affects everyone, not just the victims, not just those who directly perpetuate it. Yet we as a culture allow it everywhere, even in our own bedrooms and the language we use everyday.
