No Sex Please: Film, Feminism and Sex in the 1970s and 1980s

This text aims to explore the representation of sex and relationships within the context of the sex positive and negative debates of second wave feminism and experimental film. Using examples from Vivienne Dick (Liberty’s Booty, 1980), Bette Gordon (Anybody’s Woman, 1981) and Tessa Hughes-Freeland (Baby Doll, 1982) this chapter discusses why these artists filmmakers and their work have been elided because of the Anglophone second wave feminist debates, dominated by the sex negative position. This context has made a hostile environment for these artists who have focused on the lived experience of women as sexually active agents. Dick, Gordon and Hughes-Freeland, through their films, deliver an empathetic portrayal of the complexities of women’s lives as lived rather than as abstract categories of representation. Often shot on a near zero budget, working with friends and filming them, using fast montages, and an extreme form of parallel editing (as opposed to “long look” work) these films proffered a punk aesthetic that offered its own negation of the expectations and politics of femininity within the works that speak urgently to the concerns of young women today in exploring community, care and a flat organizational approach to their world.