[Trigger warning: this article contains discussion of sexual assault]
Some of you may have seen my review of InRealLife over on ORGZine. Something that didn’t quite fit in that context but that I still wanted to discuss was the squicky nature of the film when it came to sex and sexuality – online or AFK.
One of the stories that Beeban Kidron was (unsubtly) trying to tell in the film is that, thanks to the internet, young people are forgetting how to have sex “properly”. There’s a scene fairly early on where 15-year-old Ryan, having talked us through the kinds of porn he watches, bemoans how he is no longer able to form a connection with girls. From memory, the argument goes like this: I want them to do the things that women in porn do, but if they do those, they are slags, and the others have had their hearts broken. (The thought occurs that Ryan might have less of a problem with forming connections if he dropped the slut-shaming.) The final scene of the film is the queer couple who meet online and eventually have an AFK meeting, lying in bed together and transferring data between their phones using NFC. Subtle, isn’t it? Add to this the following quote from Kidron’s CiF piece and a picture emerges:

As teenagers increasingly learn about sex from pornography, their sexual norms change. I sat with a group of boys who, when asked about where they imagined ejaculating, took more than 20 minutes and considerable prompting to come up with a word that indicated vagina. “In the face”, “over the tits”, “up the arse” and “blow job” came to their minds immediately – they were all 15.

What’s disturbing about this is that Kidron clearly has an idea of what “proper” sexuality looks like, and penis in vagina intercourse is high on the list of criteria. Now, don’t get me wrong: young men objectifying and slut-shaming women is never a good thing, regardless of how they came by those attitudes. But thinking beyond penis in vagina (PiV) intercourse in your grasp of human sexuality? I’m all for that.
Let’s face it, PiV is simply not the most pleasurable way to have sex for the vast majority of women. Only about a quarter orgasm from penetration alone. And yeah, PiV may be fun for some, or sometimes, as part of a wider experience, but its fetishisation in our culture is deeply problematic for both men and women. Do I want young people to learn about other forms of sexual pleasure from porn? Depends on the porn, frankly. But do I think a move away from PiV in our sexual culture is problematic in and of itself? Hell no. Subtlety like that, however, eludes Beeban Kidron.
The second, and much more problematic aspect was the treatment of 15-year-old Page, the only young woman featured in the film. Page describes how a group of young men stole her phone, made her follow them to a house and sexually assaulted her. She says she let this happen in order to get her phone back, because this is how much her phone means to her.
Page’s treatment by Kidron is deeply disturbing and offensive to survivors of sexual assault. Taken within the wider context of the film and the addiction narrative, Page’s story looks rather like the stereotype of the crack whore. Attitudes to sex work aside, at no point in the film is it acknowledged that what Page experienced was sexual assault, and that it was not her fault. Page is clearly traumatised by the incident, blaming herself and trying to deal with it by rationalising it. Yet Kidron chooses to serve her own ends by portraying her simply as a “fallen woman”, willing to do anything to get her next hit.
That last issue in particular really makes me doubt Kidron’s integrity and credibility as a documentary maker. It rather looks like she needed a fallen woman to make her addiction narrative stand up, and if that meant using a sexual assault survivor in this way then so be it.