The term penis applies to many intromittent organs, but not to all. As an example, the intromittent organ of most cephalopoda is the hectocotylus, a specialized arm, and male spiders use their pedipalps. Even within the Vertebrata
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In Emma Thompson’s new film, finally an older woman gets to be sexual on screen. Why did it take so long?
In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the sight of Emma Thompson, 63, showing her entire naked female body is still more surprising than it should be
There’s a moment in the 1989 classic Shirley Valentine when the unworldly housewife from Liverpool, off on an impromptu girlie trip to the Greek islands, allows a local taverna owner to make love to her on a fishing boat with cries of, “Oh, he kissed me stretch marks.” We don’t see the stretch marks but we do see all the lumpy, bumpy flesh that goes with them.
Pauline Collins was 47 when she played the role and for many, such generous displays of the middle-aged female form were too much to bear. “She was not the sort of actress American audiences expect to carry a film that contains a nude scene,” wrote one journalist from the Chicago Tribune, primly.
Thirty-three years later, mature nude scenes are still definitely not part of the mainstream. Now Emma Thompson is having a good go at bettering Shirley, getting her entire kit off at 63 in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a film in which she plays a prissy widow who hires a much younger sex worker (Daryl McCormack).
“Once people are past the age of 42, people say she’s so sexy… for her age,” Thompson’s character laments in one of her brilliantly neurotic overtures.
Thompson looks incredible throughout, but yes there are the saggy post-breastfeeding boobs, the wrinkled, rounded abdomen, the untrimmed pubic hair that lurks between Rubenesque thighs – not the taut, young female body we are so used to seeing on screen. A real, lived-in body, used and flawed and beautiful.
Thompson has admitted that in real life she retains more hang-ups than her character ends up with. “I can’t stand in front of a mirror like that,” she told audiences at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, comparing herself with her character Nancy, who looks at herself naked in a full-length mirror. “I have to tuck something in, turn to the side, I can’t just stand there, why would I do that? It’s horrifying.”
It’s interesting that she uses the word horrifying because older women’s bodies have often been used as horror tropes in cinema. Take the marketing campaign for M Night Shyamalan’s premature-ageing horror Old, out last year. The poster is just two legs on a beach: one shapely, youthful female calf, the other still obviously female but wrinkled, sun-spotted skin stretched over a skeletal foot.
There are plenty of men in the movie, but it is the woman’s leg that is used to highlight the contrast between old and young. Obviously, because what could be worse than a woman losing her skin elasticity?
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The cinematic tradition sometimes known as “hagsploitation”, harnessing our innate fear of ageing women, is longstanding. Remember Jack Nicholson’s – and our own – immediate repulsion in The Shining (1980) when the nubile subject of his embrace in Room 237 transforms into a decaying crone? It’s a shorthand: young means attractive and therefore worthy of our attention; old means unattractive and why would we want to pay any attention to something that doesn’t look good?
But this isn’t just about getting your kit off. Historically, older women have been shut out of Hollywood. The original hagsploitation movie was What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, a 1962 darkly comic thriller that riffed off the idea that actresses past 40 can’t get any good gigs. It starred Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as two ageing actress sisters at loggerheads and its commercial success was a complete surprise to producers.
Even today, the odds for older actresses are poor. In the latest statistics from the Screen Actors Guild in 2019, women aged 40 and above only filled 25.4 per cent of speaking roles on screen.
If older women are meant to be either mute, a horror trope or not there at all, it’s no great surprise that it’s taken a while to see them exploring their sexuality as part of mainstream cinema. But things have changed since Shirley, even if there has not been a huge preponderance of mature naked bums on boats.
Filmmaker Nancy Meyers propelled romcoms starring older women into cinemas in the Noughties with Something’s Gotta Give in 2004, in which Diane Keaton, 58, is pursued both by an older lothario played by Jack Nicholson and a young doctor played by Keanu Reaves. Meyers followed that up with It’s Complicated in 2009 in which Meryl Streep, 60, and Alec Baldwin are a divorced couple who start sleeping together again.
Both movies are funny and sweet and show older women prioritising their sex lives. Crucially, they are also enjoyable films for audiences of all ages. These are not just romcoms for the The Full Monty/Calendar Girls demographic. Coming soon is What Happens Later, a romcom starring and directed by 90s sweetheart Meg Ryan, 60, and David Duchovny.
Recently, TV has taken up the mantle. In And Just Like That, the Sex and the City spin-off, three out of the original four main cast members play their characters older, not necessarily wiser and still completely obsessed with sex. Charlotte gives her husband a blow job and gets caught by her daughter; Carrie asks Big to touch himself in front of her.
It’s not sexy so much as deeply intimate. See, it says, these are still the same people. They might be older but they still like sex and seriously questionable fashion ensembles.
In Mare of Easttown, released by HBO last year, Kate Winslet, who plays the titular character – a beer-swilling, morose, middle-aged detective – has said she intervened to ensure her visibly protruding belly during a sex scene with Guy Pearce’s character wasn’t edited out in post-production.
Winslet said: “She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.”
This is a woman who wants to have sex on date night and a bit of a muffin top isn’t going to stop her. The latest series of Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears’s State of the Union, in which Brendan Gleeson and Patricia Clarkson (62) play a divorcing couple, is another fantastic exploration of older characters being allowed a decent sex life.
So yes, things have moved on a bit since Shirley. We’re used to seeing women past 40 discuss orgasms and get it on on screen and we’re even used to seeing a bit of middle-aged flab. Thompson’s full-length nude scene still feels vitally provocative, and more familiarity with what older bodies actually look like would be the logical next step.
However, there’s still something missing, even in Leo Grande, and that’s ease. Older female protagonists are still so often written as uneasy with their bodies and their sexuality. The narrative allows them to grow and change but the fact that they usually begin ashamed leaves a lingering sense that they ought to be.
In fairness, it’s probably true to life to suggest that women inspecting their naked bodies in full-length mirrors don’t always love what they see (as Thompson’s comments prove). But still, when older bodies can just appear on screen without a journey to acceptance to render them more palatable, that will be true cinematic equality.
After all, you don’t see Jack Nicholson worrying about his muffin top.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is in cinemas now
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