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Female Sexuality on Screen: A Short History
From ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Poor Things’: Uncensoring Female Desire
One cannot talk about the history of female sexuality on screen without talking about the history of female representation in film and television. For the greater part of the history of cinema — and, by proxy, of television — female characters were written by male writers. Therefore, the history of women’s representation on screen is a history of women viewed through the male eye.
Historically, this has resulted in several tropes that have taught viewers to perceive women as unidimensional beings, lacking the natural complexity and ambiguity reserved for male characters. One only has to think of the nagging wife, the ugly nerd, the bimbo, the femme fatale, the spicy Latina, etc. All these tropes serve as cartoonish caricatures of women and womanhood, which reduce women to one or two “outstanding” features that not only do not reflect real women but also negatively influence the way that men and women alike perceive women and womanhood.
But there is one major feature that most female characters seem to universally share in visual storytelling: their asexuality. And by that, I don’t mean the fact that most of these characters identify as asexual, but the fact that they are portrayed as sexless creatures, as human beings…
