Voyeurism and Masturbation in Nudist Imagery and Film Spectatorship
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2-2021 The One-Armed Viewer: Voyeurism and Masturbation in Nudist Imagery and Film Spectatorship Benjamin Eleanor Adam The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4152 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE ONE-ARMED VIEWER: VOYEURISM AND MASURBATION IN NUDIST IMAGERY AND FILM SPECTATORSHIP by BENJAMIN ELEANOR ADAM A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2021 © 2021 BENJAMIN ELEANOR ADAM All Rights Reserved ii The One-Armed Viewer: Voyeurism and Masturbation in Nudist Imagery and Film Spectatorship This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Patricia Clough Chair of Examining Committee Date Lynn Chancer Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Lynn Chancer Amy Herzog Jeffrey Escoffier THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Acknowledgments I am grateful to my family for their encouragement and patience as I worked my way through graduate school. Thank you Mom, Carl, Dad, Nancy, Eva, Lucy, Max, and Hattie, especially for our morale-boosting family Zooms. A special thanks to Janice, Joshua, Naomi, and Beth for dealing generously with my attempts to amuse them with the various puns and Hamlet references in this dissertation. Thank you for your love and companionship, Viola. Thank you to my extended family as well including my cousins, aunts, and uncles. Thank you, Donna and John for your encouragement and generosity. Since we met over vegan popcorn at a Purchase College Freshman orientation, Beth Gibbons has been my closest friend and confidante. Thanks for being my bestie, for your love and support, and for so many and so much. Thank you to my committee including Patricia Clough, Jeffrey Escoffier, Amy Herzog, and Lynn Chancer. As this project slowly came together over many years they stuck with me, and my dissertation would not have been possible without them. Thank you Patricia and Jeffrey for meeting with me so many times to read drafts, talk through ideas and new directions, and for your friendship and kindness. Thank you, Jeffrey for your invaluable mentorship in porn studies, and for many enjoyable and stimulating conversations. Thank you to CUNY Faculty including Susan Besse, Dagmar Herzog, and Patricia Clough for your life-changing classes and ongoing support, and to my colleagues and friends at Baruch College and the Graduate Center. Your guidance has been invaluable. In the Summer of 2020 I was elated to discover a DIY composting project in McGolrick Park organized to replace the City’s recently defunded program. As I soon learned, compost collection is one of many initiatives of North Brooklyn Mutual Aid, and I am honored and grateful iv for the opportunity to do solidarity-building survival work with them. Thank you, neighbors. We keep us well. v Preface The following timeline (Figure 1) illustrates the context relevant to this dissertation, including important landmarks and transitions in the history of obscenity law and censorship, the political economy, and in sexually oriented films and literature. The first wave of nudist camp films began in the early 1930s with Elysia, and The Unashamed. Postwar films in the second wave included Garden of Eden (the first to be filmed in color), Naked Venus, and Daughter of the Sun. Concurrently, nudists produced still-images of nudity in the pamphlets, books, and other literature of their movement, alongside the more explicit content produced by softcore pornographers including magazines like Playboy and Modern Man. Both nudist camp films, and the nudie-cuties into which they evolved were short lived but represented important moments in the history of the incorporation of consumer sexual desire into the legal marketplace leading ultimately to the advent of hardcore film in the 1970s. The context of this transformation also includes the wider political, economic, and cultural milieu of corporate consumer capitalism and the maturity discourse. As I argue below, as the contours of the marketplace were reshaped in response to the shift in the political economy from one which suppressed and excluded explicit sexual desire to one which cultivated and included it as a form of consumerism, nudist representations likewise shifted from naturalized depictions of a rarefied nudist pornotopia in early still-imagery and nudist camp films to the culturally-stripped, technologically-realized nude of the nudie cutie in the late 1950s. I also place the development of nudie cuties in the context of the parsimonious sanctioning of pleasures available to heterosexual men in the 1950s. Linking their right to pleasure to a normative orientation to the institutions of the family, market, and nation, the maturity discourse excluded many men who were unable or unwilling to abide by these norms. vi Below, I argue that the films of Russ Meyer offered a compelling counterdiscourse of perverse enjoyment for the single working-class voyeurs who filled grindhouse theaters, and I trace this counterdiscourse from its expression of the pleasures of getting away with it, to the jouissance of being caught. Although this dissertation is not focused on obscenity law or the self-imposed censorship of Hollywood film, these restrictions provide the primary context for the framing requirements and transformations detailed below. Beginning with the importation of the Hicklin standard, and through what is known today as the secondary effects doctrine, obscenity law has restricted from the marketplace imagery thought to “deprave and corrupt” or to otherwise exert its negative influence on susceptible groups within a given population. The framing strategies developed by bona fide nudists, softcore pornographers, and other content producers was therefore designed to rekey nude still-imagery and film in various ways: as the documentation and literature of the nudist movement; as the evidence of dispassionate and scientific inquiry, or as efforts at moral education. Two Supreme Court decisions in particular are important context for these framing strategies. In Parmalee v. the United States (1940), the Court ruled that nudity was not “obscene per se and under all circumstances,” and narrowed the scope and applicability of obscenity law to what it described as insincere, pruriently-oriented, or disreputable representations. Similarly, the 1959 Roth decision established the minimum baseline for legal imagery, which it ruled could be not be “without redeeming social importance.” These prerequisites for access to the marketplace forced producers to represent the narrative form and aesthetics of nude still-imagery and film using square-ups designed to obscure their sexual nature. This dissertation traces the square-up from a contrived and disingenuous legal necessity to its status as a central plot-device associated with the sexual tease of nudie cuties. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... iv Preface ................................................................................................................................ vi 0. Introduction................................................................................................................. 1 1. Framing the Natural Nude ........................................................................................ 31 2. Nudist Pornotopias and the Natural Nude ............................................................... 51 3. “How Eve Was Changed into Cheesecake”: Tittyboom! and the Technologically- Realized Nude............................................................................................................ 85 4. (m)Other Eve, and the Pornographic Gaze ............................................................. 114 5. Conclusion: Nudie Cuties and the One-Armed Viewer ............................................ 128 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 136 List of Figures Figure 1. A timeline of context relevant to this dissertation. ............................................ viii 1938 1954 1959 1961 1966 1970 1933 Nudist Camp Films Nudie Cuties 1959-1964 Hardcore Sexploitation 1933 1953 1958 1933 – 1963 Nudist Still Imagery and Pin-Ups 1945-1960s Maturity Discourse, Corporate/Consumer Capitalism. Hicklin People v. Burke Standard Roth v. U.S. 1934 1957 NY’s anti- Miller 1873 – 1915 Parmalee v. U.S. Burstyn v. Wilson nudism statute 1973 Comstock Era 1940 1957 Ulysses Trial 1949 1933 Excelsior Picture Corp. v. Regents 1957 Figure 1. A timeline of context relevant to this dissertation. viii Introduction Let’s Go Naked: The Literature and Imagery of Nudism in the U.S. One afternoon in 1932, a group of teenage boys crowded around the display window of a bookseller on Wall St.1 On display among various manuals, bibles, and pulp novels were copies of Let’s Go Naked, an illustrated nudist guidebook. Each copy