Lady Bird meets American Pie in the sweetly innocent sex comedy Yes, God, Yes
Film Features Watch This
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: We’re highlighting some of the best movies of 2020 so far that we didn’t review.
Yes, God, Yes (2019)
A lot has changed since the heyday of teen sex comedies in the early ’80s—not least the revelation that adolescent girls are just as horny as their male counterparts. More recently, projects on the big screen (The To Do List) and the small (Big Mouth) have begun to plumb the depths (pun intended) of puberty’s lustful purgatory from a female perspective. But even amid this new wave, you’d be hard pressed (pun also intended) to find a masturbation comedy as sweet and sensitive as Yes, God, Yes.
Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer stars as Alice, a good girl who attends church with her dad every Sunday and is sincerely worried that she’s going to hell because she stumbled into a dirty AOL chat one afternoon after school. The film shares its early-’00s setting and softly lit Catholic-school milieu with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. And like that film, this is a semi-autobiographical project for writer-director Karen Maine, who first made the film-festival scene as a co-writer of Obvious Child. But Yes, God, Yes is positively sex-crazed compared to those movies, though it focuses less on actually doing the deed than the single-minded desires that drive teenagers to distraction.
That’s because Alice is deeply repressed and wholly inexperienced, and afraid both of her own body and the feeling she gets when she sees hunky but devout camp counselor Adam (John Henry Ward). She’s not going to run out and lose her virginity just to see what it feels like—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s a huge deal for Alice just to circle “turned on” on an emotions worksheet at a church-sponsored weekend retreat. And her honesty will backfire, as Maine steers the story into a gentle satire of Christian sexual hypocrisy that eventually leads to Alice receiving advice from a wise middle-aged lesbian on life, love, and the importance of protecting your passwords.
Although Yes, God, Yes will be painfully relatable to ex-evangelicals and recovering Catholics who were raised in the same buttoned-up environment as its main character, Maine doesn’t approach the material from a place of condemnation. True, camp leader Father Murphy (Veep’s Timothy Simons) provides some of the film’s cheesiest (and funniest) moments, like when he asks his charges to stare at a painting of Jesus and really feel the lyrics to Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” But his faith is earnest, and Alice’s confusion about the mixed messages she’s getting from her teachers and from her hormones doesn’t seriously challenge her belief in God.
Yes, God, Yes is a reassuring film rather than a bitter one, letting teenagers know that not only are they not evil, but their inner turmoil is also completely normal. Dyer enhances the film’s relatability with her meek, anxious performance, playing Alice as a baby bird pushed out of the nest who’s staring at the ground with wide eyes and terror in her heart. But although she’s a tender soul, Alice isn’t completely without agency. She just needs to learn to trust herself and make her own way in the world—which, in her case, means rewinding the sex scene in Titanic multiple times while her dad is asleep upstairs.
Availability: Yes, God, Yes is available for digital rental and purchase through Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, or VUDU.
70 Comments
Eh, I vaguely liked this and it is quite sweet as the review mentions, while Dyer is great in the lead role, but it would probably have worked best as a short film, there’s not enough material here for a full movie and it goes to the “Why gosh, aren’t Christians c***s?” well far too often. Which is something I completely agree with, too, so it’s not like I had an issue with the sentiment, it’s just I wish the film had a bit more to say.
From the review and your description, it sounds a bit like Saved! Which had Martin Donovan and was very cute (like Martin Donovan) but also a bit thin (not unlike Martin Donovan). Really, the bar for “repressed Christian teen learns about her body” has been set very high by a little film called Teeth.
I found it a bit more substantial than Saved! even as its much-slimmer length, maybe because it has far fewer yuks about the dorkiness of Christian culture. In addition to what Katie mentions, something I think the movie does really well and is relatively unusual is really focus on a character who is working this stuff out herself for a lot of the movie. Dyer has so often been shuffled into that Stranger Things ensemble and she really holds her own in scenes where she is barely doing anything from a pure “action” perspective. There’s loneliness in her solitude (and she does wind up getting advice from someone older/wiser) but there’s eventual comfort in it, too, which to me made the difference between the cuteness of Saved! and the genuine recommendation I’d give this one.
“she really holds her own in scenes where she is barely doing anything from a pure “action” perspective.”Yes, this is what makes the movie — she’s watching everything and processing it and coming to uncomfortable conclusions, and aside from the big speech at the end this is all on her face instead of in dialogue. This movie keeps getting billed as sweet and whatnot but it did not feel that way to me at all — Alice’s faith is genuine and the movie never treats it with anything but respect, but is very clear about how other people, both well-meaning and not, use that to box her in and deny her herself. Dyer is so good at silently acting because Alice has to keep her questioning tamped down, so it doesn’t draw more attention and more restriction. I come from a fairly weak Protestant background so I’m outside a lot of specifics here, but the way people try to control a young person going through some confusion in this movie was more unnerving than most horror flicks I’ve seen this year.
Now that I’ve actually seen the movie, I agree 100% – the way it handles the conflict with her best friend (they make up by the end of the movie, but their friendship is a hopeless tangle of judgment, lies, and mistrust) really gets at the isolation of being thoughtful at that age, in that milieu.
And the bar for Martin Donovan and religion on film has already been set pretty much in the highest:
Teeth only set a high bar for broadness. Although I suppose my negative reaction was judging it as a horror movie rather than coming-of-age.
I was perplexed the first time I saw it, but then I realized that the crux of the movie isn’t the teeth. It’s that every single man she encounters (besides her dad) tries to rape her. The movie is less like horror or teen-drama and more like the origin story of a superhero whose power is castrating rapists (and it takes place in a veritable Gotham City of rapists).
Yeah, Teeth is a fantastic film, and one I preferred a great deal to this.
And I didn’t know about the Donovan film, I’m a big fan of his thanks to his work with Hal Hartley, so will have to check it out.
Saved is perfectly good, and my friend who grew up evangelical said that it’s pretty accurate to her life experience, as light-hearted satires go. Pretty sure it’s also one of the first movies to star Mandy Moore, back when she was primarily a singer.
Judging by IMDB it actually started out as a short, and has been extended into a full feature.I agree that it’s pleasant enough, but I can’t really see it resonating with any actual teens: the religious ones won’t be allowed to see it, and none of them are going to relate to the early-Internet period setting. So it seems more like a nostalgia pieces for people in their late 20–early 40s, and for that crowd it feels a little too on-the-nose.It reminded me a good deal of The Half of It, due to similar settings and takes on religion.
I liked it a lot in general but will cheerfully concede to being pandered to and loving it with the AIM scenes. Such, such were the days…
I’m in just at the mention of Obvious Child- downright fantastic film!
Seconded! I *loved* that movie. It was so down to earth but also romantic. The scene where they hook up while dancing to Obvious Child? So cute
not least the revelation that adolescent girls are just as horny as their male counterparts
I recall reading that research showed that males are more prone to masturbation, viewing of pornography, and being willing to agree with sleep with a person they just met (i.e a grad student conducting a psych study). I suppose those are all based on actions rather than internal mental states, but I’m not aware of any measurement of the latter which we could chalk up as a “revelation”.
Did said research indicate if this was a physiological truth or a sociological truth? Because “prone to” could mean either. Are males physiologically more libidinous or are they just sociologically more encouraged to act on their libido?
The things mentioned above were descriptive rather than causal analyses. Disentangling physiology and sociology would require atypical circumstances. There have been case studies of people like David Reimer who were raised as girls even though they were born males, but I don’t recall anything about masturbation (his penis was removed after a botched circumcision, hence being raised as a girl) or porn. There’s also some research on prenatal exposure to testosterone in girls (usually the first effect noted is digit ratio), and while I think there were some effects found on sexual behavior I don’t know if they were things comparable to all those psych studies on broader populations. There’s also some research on people taking hormones later in life, which is a less random population but could be useful for within-person studies. Andrew Sullivan wrote about how he felt in response to testosterone injections back in 2000, and while it’s not comparable data a section seemed worth quoting:
And then after a few days, as the testosterone peaks and starts to
decline, the feeling alters a little. I find myself less reserved than
usual, and more garrulous. The same energy is there, but it seems less
directed toward action than toward interaction, less toward pride than
toward lust. The odd thing is that, however much experience I have
with it, this lust peak still takes me unawares. It is not like
feeling hungry, a feeling you recognize and satiate. It creeps up on
you. It is only a few days later that I look back and realize that I
spent hours of the recent past socializing in a bar or checking out
every potential date who came vaguely over my horizon. You realize
more acutely than before that lust is a chemical. It comes; it goes.
It waxes; it wanes. You are not helpless in front of it, but you are
certainly not fully in control.
As for the reason, I recall Dawkins noting that the fundamental difference between males & females across species is that sperm is cheap & eggs are expensive. Thus, sex has a far higher risk/reward ratio for males. Interestingly, I later came across something of a counter-example: among a species of (I believe) cave spiders, sperm comes in packets with nutrients for the offspring, with the result being that females raping males is far more common than in other species.
Ah, so you’re just a pedant, then. Cuz I don’t give a shit. I just thought you were being ridiculous to nitpick one sentence among many in this fucking film review.
I am a pedant, and I’ve enjoyed the resulting conversation even if you haven’t.
It may be instructive to us both to break this down a bit. Instructive to me as a demonstration that po-faced sarcasm, especially on the internet, is folly. A lesson I have had demonstrated before but I clearly need repeated. Instructive to you as a demonstration of what is and is not conversation. This is partly my fault due to said sarcasm. You seem to have misunderstood it as an effort to engage. But you then laying out the preview to your human sexual physiology dissertation as a “conversational” response is, in a word, fucking bananas. Okay, two words. My dude (if I might presume, given the hard lean towards mansplaining), that’s not conversation. That’s monologue. Which I enjoy, when written by Willy Shakes. Richard the Third you ain’t. Maybe Dogberry?To be less glib and self-back-pattingly clever, what is the deal with your response? Truly? Why nitpick THAT sentiment? What is worth objecting to in “not least the revelation that adolescent girls are as horny as their male counterparts”? Especially in the context of a romantic comedy film review? It really feels tangential and like you wanted an excuse to dig a gender war trench.
My idea of taking writing seriously involves analyzing even individual sentences (we don’t do the same to, say, the babbling of an infant because we don’t respect them as speakers). And I hope that people do the same when they read what I write. Elsewhere in this thread merchantfan has applied that sort of scrutiny to my comments, and again I think that’s all for the better. As Andrew Gelman likes to say, God is in every, so start scrutinizing any “leaf” in a review and there can be a lot to unpack.
Not to be “that guy”, but I just skimmed a couple dozen of your other article responses and you don’t really drill down like this in them. You definitely have an interest in sexual biology, which seems earnest if a little intense, but otherwise this deep dive doesn’t seem in keeping with the other posts. You’re pretty defensive of Ignaty (I *think* that’s his name), which I appreciate as a fellow fan of the Gawker Media film critics (much as he gets on my nerves with his sucking of arthouse cock, I very much respect Dowd; and I love Caroline’s romcom series), so I again don’t get the hard-on for this particular line in this particular review.
Skimming my recent comments here gives a limited view of what I’m “intensely” interested in. I was about to write that I don’t think I’ve read any books specifically dedicated to the topic, but then I remembered I reviewed “Demonic Males” in 2008 and that sort of qualifies. You can read more at my blog to see what actually occupies most of my writing. Here I just happened to pull a loose thread which got a lot of responses. When I bring up news accuracy bonds or prediction markets on other threads here (things I would like people to talk more about), people don’t care nearly as much.
So is the shtick then to provoke people into falling down a rabbit hole of your pet subjects? Or push traffic to your blog? Cuz I have to say, getting pedantic with a writer I mostly like about a deeply UNprovocative line in a fairly innocuous romcom review is not working. All it’s managing to do is annoy me. To your credit you’ve been civil and at least appear earnest in your intent. I just don’t see the point of the initial objection. In my own pedantic way I suppose I’m being hyper vigilant about sexism. I’m generally not as confrontational or dismissive as ol’ recognitions but I, too, am catching a whiff of gender essentialism. Your initial response was, if I may rephrase it with subtext as text, “It’s not a revelation that adolescent girls are as horny as boys because there’s no documented physiological science proving this to be true”. And while that may be the case (and I honestly DO NOT CARE if it is the case), it is deeply inessential to a reading of the subsequent film review. You’ve honed in on a Lilliputian sentiment in context and turned it into a Brobdingnagian tangent. And for what? To throw down on contemporary notions of adolescent female libido?Again: What. Is. The. Point?
The schtick is to talk of many things: of shoes, and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Pulling tangential items out of a conversational mental is suboptimal in some respects, but one of the benefits of internet commenting compared to IRL conversation is that you can just scroll past the comments about shoes if you find that uninteresting compared to ships.
My sense of netiquette is that you don’t co-opt someone else’s thread for your own fucking amusement. You have your own blog for that. And how hilarious that you would position yourself as the Walrus and/or the Carpenter, two selfish, greedy blowhards.It’s not about “interesting”. How vain do you have to be for that justification to make any sense at all? Was this romcom review not sufficiently stimulating to you? If not, take your own advice and jog on! No need to dive into a gender tension tangent.
It might be your sense of netiquette, but my observation over the course of many threads (including at this very site) is that they can go off in any direction the commentariat finds interesting. And precisely because people can scroll past what they’re not interested in, that’s considered acceptable. It’s really better when you can minimize any subthread of responses, which Disqus supports, but unfortunately we have Kinja here and we’re limited to not clicking the button to expand a list of comments.The review itself was only mildly interesting, but I found that bit striking because it referred to something as a “revelation” when it actually seemed arguable. And the result is that I learned that while 50% of praying mantis matings in the lab might result in sexual cannibalism, only 30% do in the wild, and the males try to avoid it in contrast their black widow counterparts. No day is a complete waste when you learn something new.
The majority of responses this has engendered have been, in essence, “What the fuck are you doing?” That’s not “interest”, that’s aggravation.“The sky is blue” is an arguable statement if an argumentative motherfucker decides to take up the debate. And if someone has a weird, dumb bug up their ass about gender they might see casual equivalence statements as provocation to argue.“The review itself was only mildly interesting”Get bent. You’re not the spice to this review’s potato salad. What a selfish attitude.
I think it’s more that the risk of getting pregnant is much scarier for the person who has to carry it- and bad sex with a stranger is more likely to still feel good to someone with a penis than someone with a vagina since the vagina is a more difficult instrument to play. Feeling like a masturbation aid while you risk pregnancy isn’t a great prospect
I agree that risk would be a factor, but as I noted above it could have downstream consequences in terms of mental states. We could look at other species which don’t have pregnancy. For example, many fish lay unfertilized eggs which are subsequently fertilized by males. Other species lay eggs which are already fertilized, but still don’t have that development period of internal gestation.
Eh- plenty of female mammals are just as happy to get their freak on as males. When a cat or dog is in heat you don’t go “oh well they’re female, so we don’t have to be as careful about keeping them in the house- it’s not like they’re going to have loads of sex with whatever male of their species they encounter”. For female monkeys it’s more likely that practices like infanticide slow how many males they mate with- the lack of sexual swelling in orangutans is likely one of the reasons there’s more forced copulation/rape, though orangutans are also just violent jerks in many respects. The fact that we’re bipedal could be a factor- human women are much more likely to die in childbirth than a female animal that mates when it ovulates. Evolutionarily speaking, being horny during ovulation works against our chance of surviving long enough to nurture children to adulthood since the more you fuck the more likely you are to die. Not to mention the fact that human men are more likely to randomly murder women than your average animal. That might be why relationships play a greater role in Western erotica focused on women- the joint idea that (1) she’s not risking her life for nothing and (2) that he isn’t going to murder her
Plausible. Although for a species that more closely resembles Louis C. K’s joke about a woman dating a bear, there are praying mantises & black widows which are often eaten after mating.
Praying mantis females actually have only eaten their mates under stress conditions when they were starving. And those examples aren’t as relevant since they’re not mammals. In general there aren’t a lot of animals (especially mammals) that kill potential mates- infanticide and killing your rivals can be useful but it doesn’t make sense to kill potential mates and take them out of the running to produce more offspring
My understanding is that sexual cannibalism is relatively common in some species, not aberrant behavior. Males of those species sometimes have adaptations seemingly tailored in response to it. You’re right that it’s different from what we see in mammals, which is part of what makes it interesting. Naked mole rats are interesting because they’re the only mammal who seem to have converged on something like insect eusociality, but I’ve never heard of them engaging in sexual cannibalism.Speaking of eusocial insects and whether males are necessary after mating, the very high degree of relatedness found in many of them appears to be because* one mating event is enough to supply the queen for life. In that case you could kill the male afterward, though I’m not aware of queens doing so in any such eusocial species.
*Haplodiploid genetics is another big part, although I think termites don’t have that and are instead heavily inbred.
Yes, but not for praying mantises- those original observations were under lab conditions that were incredibly stressful and unnatural
I didn’t see any mention of that in the wikipedia article on sexual cannibalism, but doing some searching I see this blog post says it occurs “about 30 percent of the time” (helpfully providing a cite that could be used for that aforementioned wiki page), while also noting how males anticipate and try to avoid this risk. They do distinguish them from black widows, where the males seem to be willing meals.
Gender essentialism sucks. Also, this is a really bad time to be using Andrew Sullivan as a reference for anything.
I remember before you complained about me citing Jesse Singal* and then when challenged were unable to come up with anything objectionable he said or did (and you really spent a long time flailing). With Andrew Sullivan there are some very objectionable things he wrote in the years immediately after the linked essay, and which he himself now realizes to be wrong. Amusingly, one might actually attribute some of his poor thinking to the very psychological effects he describes experiencing in that linked article! I don’t think it qualifies as “essentialism” though. He’s talking about changes over time within himself, rather than an unchanging essence. Additionally, he’s discussing something biological (the effect of hormone injections) rather than a cultural notion of gender.*As I recall, it was about the lack of evidence behind rumor-mongering about Jeff Goldblum. Which makes it extra funny that you couldn’t provide any specifics about what you objected from Singal.
Aw, you still don’t know how to click a link? So sad. Anyway Andrew Sullivan spent the weekend cosplaying as a facism apologist
I did click the link, which was just to a search result page, with his twitter profile near the top. All this time later and you still don’t have anything specific.Over the past weekend did Sullivan admit that he never actually injected testosterone, or that it didn’t actually have the effects he claimed earlier?
It showed a list of pages documenting Singal’s transphobia. All this time later and you still couldn’t figure out how to click on one of them. Sad. And does that somehow make Sullivan not a fascism apologist?
I didn’t see any documentation of what you allege, and if you had any specific documentation you would have linked it rather than twisting in the wind for such an extended period of time. All I see is more of the same accusations from you without anything to back them up.
As for whether or not Sullivan is a fascism apologist, I don’t know as I’m not a regular reader of his. What I linked to was a 2000 piece in which he described his personal experience injecting testosterone. I mentioned possible things he could have written later which would be reasons to discount that specific bit of writing, but I don’t see you claiming any of those things occurred.
Right, because you don’t know how to click links lolAnd I know you don’t know, that’s why I told you
I did click your link, it brought me to a search page, and since you refused to specify any result there, it led to the exact problem I said would occur: you objected to the link there I did select. If YOU don’t specify your objection, I can’t know what it is, but it’s clear you don’t have a specific objection or you would have provided it long ago.
aren’t people talking about how Andrew Sullivan trumpeted a study that tried to ascribe base rate IQ possibilities to different races? Wasn’t Dawkins a total sexist? Not the people I’d quote today so much
I’m not citing Sullivan trumpeting a study, I’m citing his account of his own personal experience injecting testosterone. As for Dawkins, you’ll have to be specific. What other people are talking about now elsewhere is irrelevant to me here, though you may quote or not quote whomever you like for any reason you may have.
prone to masturbation – male stimulation is much simpler than female stimulation.Viewing of pornography – how recent was this and was gthis self-reported?willing to sleep with person they just met – large sociological factors here as well as self-preservation. [Straight] Guys don’t typically consider whether the woman they will be going home with might do things to them to which they do not consent or, you know, murder them. They also do not have to worry about pregnancy.I am not saying they are equal, but you would have to control for a lot of factors on the female side before making a determination.
#1: I recall now a health/reproductive science teacher telling us that “outdoor plumbing” is simpler than “indoor plumbing”. That was connected to an anecdote about a couple trying to conceive and who should get checked out first by a doctor, but I could see the same principle applying.#2: I think I read this in the ‘00s. It is possible things have changed since then.#3: I’ve noted the risk/reward ratio being different, and this having downstream consequences. I suppose that psychological balancing could be done by either simply adjusting the level of arousal or keeping it at the same level while amplifying some sense of wariness/fear. As for whether it’s necessary to adjust for sociological factors, that depends on whether we’re asking about how people are now (as mental states themselves could be affected by sociological factors) or how people would be under different hypotheticals.
While I generally agree with your statements here, your first point is some ancient bullshit that needs to diaf.No, my girly parts aren’t any more difficult to “manipulate” than dude parts are, but furthering this idea sure gives a lot of lazy guys the idea that they are and so they should immediately give up on trying to figure it out. It doesn’t exactly help instill confidence in young women either to be told up front that we are doomed to fail and be unsatisfied and difficult to figure out, even for ourselves, right off the bat.
First if all, I have never had trouble stimulating my partners and I have never understood the joke that the clitoris is hard to find, but my statement was based on non-fiction tv shows and articles about women discovering their bodies. Further, I know of women who have gotten off, but had trouble reaching full orgasm without a lot of work. I say guys are easy because it can be as easy as 2-3 minutes of up and down. One 38 year old woman I was with told me I gave her her first real orgasm.
I’d say teen girls are more likely to read/write horny fan fic than watch pornography. A brief time on Archive of Our Own will show you there’s a lot of teen girls out there with dirty minds (and you can usually tell when they’re both teenage and girls based on their spelling/narrative ability and the fact the same authors who write tons of fetish fic often also have fic about their favorite characters cuddling, having a meet cute in a coffee shop or nursing one another after an injurie)
Yes, that’s my impression. And writing would more etymologically fit the term “pornography” than the modern definition. However, while I’m not especially knowledgeable on the subject, my impression is that even “romance” or “erotica” with a poor literary reputation like 50 Shades has more non-prurient substance to it than most porn.
Eh- not really? There’s usually some bare bones plot but that’s kind of part of the porn? It’s like the classic scenario with the pizza boy- it’s that some person of whatever desired class finds you overwhelmingly important and beautiful and would do anything for you and then you *bang* – and then they check that you’re OK and make you breakfast. I think it’s based on the fact that vaginas usually take more time to ‘warm up’ than penises- the plot that seems like non-dirty generic filler is actually its own kind of foreplay. The scenarios are sexier when you know the personalities of both people and why they’re fucking. Whereas a lot of mainstream porn made for dudes has women who can miraculously orgasm after 5-7 minutes of intercourse/anal despite their clitoris barely being touched. Fan fic varies- you can super long slow burn fics that taken 5 chapters before they bang or short smut fics that are based on some very specific usually fetish scenario.
I think a lot of what you said is accurate. It still seems relevant to me that something like 50 Shades can be adapted into feature films without NC-17 ratings and those can be commercially viable without the actual porn. The same thing couldn’t really happen with the pizza delivery scenario.
I think the bigger thing is women generally are able to use their imagination in porn more than men- they don’t really need to see genitalia to find something arousing especially if the other elements of a sex scene are there
I wonder what the reason for that difference in imagination might be. And it occurs to me that audio-recordings seem like an unexplained medium for that. It could both permit imagination regarding visuals without requiring the consumer to turn pages or scroll down. Podcasts are huge deal nowadays, so people are willing to just listen to a lot of content.
Maybe? I do know some women who like dirty podcasts or audiobooks. I think text is popular because it’s personal- you’re not impacted by how the person reading the book sounds and you can go at your own pace, rereading certain sections as much as you like without having to rewind and play it again
Different people having different preferred voices sounds like a market opportunity, although I don’t know how common that is in the audiobook industry. There was some talk about who will narrate the new A Song of Ice and Fire books (if they’re ever published) now that Roy Dotrice is dead, and some people noted that they preferred other narrators due to some of his eccentricities (although most also regarded him as unusually adept at distinguishing a large number of characters from each other).And I can’t believe I forgot to note that Pornhub sought to make its videos accessible to the blind via descriptive narration. I had read an interview with a freelancer who contributed such descriptions earlier this year, and the preface to that noted there’s already a long history of the audio medium used for similar material, so evidently I was wondering about something I should have simply remembered was a thing.
Maybe though I think women as a consumer audience respond more reliably to scenarios than voices- otherwise every Patrick Stewart audiobook would sell like hot cakes. I think things tend to be split – some women do watch mainstream porn, some read romance or erotica, and some use their imaginations or just have sex with their partner. Plus romance novels can be super cheap with ebooks so it would be hard to compete price wise
Good point about price. It seems a consumer with a preference for text over recordings thus has a sort of advantage over other consumers. And it now occurs to me that since I started reading the AV Club regularly, I’ve been reading fewer books and watching more movies/tv 🙁
If it’s any consolation, you generally don’t have to read something dirty as closely as a more ‘serious’ book- most of them are fairly formulaic so you can skip to the good part if you want.
After I heard about Librivox I started listening to more audiobooks, and that worked pretty well for horror stories from Ambrose Bierce or Lafcadio Hearn (or even Don Quixote, though it’s been quite some time since I made any progress on the second book). Eugene Onegin on the other hand was a very poor choice.
This thread is a train wreck. None of you know jackshit about what you are talking about.Here’s an idea- if you don’t have the parts, don’t try to suppose what it feels like to live with them. And that goes to the scientists and their so-called studies too.Btw, the perfect way to invalidate everything you are about to say is to start a comment with the word “male” or “female”. Male what, you dipshit? Swallowtail? Baboon? Goldfish? What male goldfish is sleeping with a person they just met? Ew.
So can male & female scientists collaborate to understand both males & females, or is each doomed to understand only themselves (if that)?Elsewhere in this thread we have talked about other species, but not inter-species sex. Your idea of James Bond as a goldfish is amusing though.
Unless I get to see this cunt finger herself, I ain’t watching this SJW trash.
This film is especially ironic now that we’ve got the Falwell junior ‘revelations’ (not in the biblical sense). The flip side of their mania for ‘purity’ is straying off the sacred path can become downright transgressive. Because if you’re going to hell for the smallest infraction anyway you might as well ‘go big’.
It always brings a smile to my face when some evangelical/fundamentalist Christian “leader” gets brought down, and is shown to be a hypocrite of their own teaching and standards. I was raised in that kind of religiosity (not the Falwell kind, but close enough), and it’s abusive, manipulative, and literally the “do as I say, not as I do” environment. I walked away at the end of 1999 and never looked back.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/25/becki-falwell-confirms-pool-boy-affair-denies-jerry-watched/well, to be fair, the scandal there is his wife cheated on him, not the other way around.
The pool boy has audio of Jerry on the phone with him joking about Becki getting jealous of the pool boy and other girls.
They had a relationship with the pool boy over several years. Jerry like to watch.
And then when it blew up, Jerry blames all the lasciviousness and infidelity on his wife. He was the victim who was wronged by the unbridled and insatiable sexuality of a woman! Shithead religious dudes have been pulling that con since the garden of eden.
I finally watched this last night, and “painfully relatable” hits the nail on the head. I grew up Catholic around the time the movie is set, and it really captures that milieu. Most kids probably believe that adults’ approval is conditional on their good behavior (ie, following the rules), but Catholicism is really overt about it. I also like how the main character resolves her conflict with her best friend by lying (which is pure Catholic teen behavior), while Father Jonah guilts another kid into taking the blame for her transgressions (which is pure Catholic authority figure behavior). There are little touches like the main character playing Caterpillar on her phone and the eye-searing Web 1.0 Yahoo! homepage that work really efficiently as period signifiers. And then there’s the running bit about the kids’ diets being pure shit – they don’t overplay it, but it underscores how little these characters actually reflect on their health or wellbeing while obsessing over their restrictive version of faith. Also, while it’s outside the scope of that review, the setting of the movie isn’t a generic bible-camp retreat. It’s a loosely fictionalized version of Kairos, an emotional bonding/team-building retreat where Catholicism tries to tighten its grip on teens before they go out into the world.