Diary of a Nymphomaniac - The SSL Review
Diary of a Nyphomaniac clearly deserves an SSL review because the audience sees Valerie, the main character, while she is building up to and in the midst of orgasm many a time...and thus it is quite easy to critique the movie’s level of realism when it comes to how a woman orgasms – physically. However, I’m going to go about this one a little differently. Normally, I pick apart the 1, 2, maybe 3 instances where an audience member could infer information about the female orgasm. However, there are just too many instances in this movie, and frankly the instances are not interesting enough to spend time on. Why, you ask? Because it is just ridiculous in it's depiction of what brings a woman to orgasm.
Valerie is within the tradition of female characters who are hyper responsive sexually. She orgasms easily from just about anything, but the vast majority of orgasms she has in this movie, clearly arise from straight up intercourse with no additional clitoral stimulation. She is like Samantha from Sex and the City or like so many romance novel heroines, or like Anastasia Steele from the recent Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy. Valerie and those characters like her are, well to be blunt, fake. Yes, her enjoyment of sex is believable, her worries and her life are believable. Her orgasms, however, are just silly – just like Samantha’s and just like Anastasia Steele’s. What’s fake about them?
Well, it's the bull shit all-I-need-is-your-penis-pumping-in-me thing. I've said it a million times in this blog. The organ of sexual pleasure in women is the clit not the vagina. I'll explain a bit (although the movie will explain this in much more detail). The only sexual release recorded that came as the result of pressure or friction inside the quite un-nervy vag is an ejaculation - which means ejaculate spurts through the urethra. That is what "working the G-spot" is known to do.Think of it in terms of males. For both men and women ejaculation and orgasm are 2 different things, and the physiological qualities of an ejaculation are completely different than an orgasm. So it seems reasonable to assume that ejaculation in women (again, the only thing recorded from inside vag rubbing) is similar to a man having an ejaculation minus the usually simultaneous orgasm (this would most likely happen as a result of prostate manipulation without additional penile stimulation). It may well be a physical release, but it's not some kind of mind-blowing uber-orgasm like is so often described in media.
You know what actually can give some knee weakening orgasms during intercourse?? Rubbing the clit against something during the ol' in and out could work just fine. Using a hand (yours or another's) during the act will work great, in fact. A heavenly vibrator on the clitty cat is just dreamy. Or, if you absolutely refuse to pay attention to your clit while you're intercoursing, then according to Masters and Johnson (the people who did the defining physiological studies on male and female orgasms), you can indirectly stimulate the clit when the clitoral hood is pulled back and forth over the clit as the penis pulls on the labia while it's thrusting. Those Rube-Goldberg things are the only type of just-from-intercourse orgasms ever recorded, and they seem most likely to be the type that characters like Valere, Samantha, and Anastasia were experiencing in their mind blowing excursions.
However, those orgasms were the weakest of all the ways the women studied elicited orgasm - both on a physical level and by report of the women themselves. This actually makes sense knowing that the clitoral stimulation in these orgasms were so very, very indirect. Masturbation was the most intense and a clit handies by a skilled partner were the 2nd most intense.
I know I am going to have people reading this; yelling that I don't know shit and that they have 1st hand experiences with deeply amazing "vaginal orgasms." So to you, I say this; I only said that these orgasms you speak of haven't been physiologically recorded (and the ones that look most like these "vaginal orgasms" are super weak). So, if you have these mind-blowing-uber-orgasms just from a a little in and out with no extra clitoral stimulation, then you are very rare indeed, and I suggest you get yourself into the next big physiological orgasm study. I'm not saying the don't exist, just that the only evidence we have is hearsay.
The point here is that characters like Valere, Samantha, and Anastasia make this crazy rare (if even actual) way of orgasming seem normal - or at least seem like it's the way a percentage of normal, albeit lucky women can come. I think it's such a weird warped depiction of the female orgasm, and it's ridiculous that it's strangeness is simply not discussed. I think that characters like these women shouldn't be a written just as particularly sexual women. They should be written as they actually are - which is like almost magically sexual women, like one would write about a person who could communicate with animals, hear people's thoughts, or who have the physical prowess of a Jason Bourne type spy.
So that's my take on this movie. The whole flick is just a big reinforcement of the warped view of lady-gasms I just discussed, and because of that, I give this movie only 1 vulva. I spared it a 0 vulva rating because this movie is not such a bad one in general. If you generally like foreign movies, indie movies, or sexy movies, you'll probably like this one just fine. Unfortunately, though, it just goes against most of the ideals present in my life's work, so, you know....
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