Sausage Party: The SSL Review
So I watched Sausage Party recently, and if you've heard anything about it (cartoon but dirty, hotdog and bun - that sort of thing), you're probably not surprised that it has some discussion / depiction of female orgasm or masturbation in it - which means I can do an SSL Review. And thus here we are.
What's An SSL Review?
I critique the depiction/discussion based on the realism and on how the depiction/discussion reflects our sexual culture and how it adds to the larger cultural discussion about female orgasm and female sexuality in general.
Movies run the gamut. They can be great movies but pound home common, yet incorrect understandings of how women's bodies get to orgasm (Fight Club for instance). They could also be a shit movie but depict really realistic and progressive female orgasm situations (honestly, this is more rare - usually good SSL Reviews coincide with it also being a generally well done movie, but it doesn't have to be the case).
How Was Sausage Party?
Sausage Party, for me was both a pretty crap movie and crap on the SSL Review front. Now, take my opinion with a grain of salt. The people behind us were cracking. the. fuck. up. They loved it, and honestly, how hard they were laughing made the whole thing more enjoyable for me too. So, you might LOVE it. I just thought it seemed so phoned in. It seemed like they thought of the first joke that came to their head, decided it was great, and moved on. I mean a lot of the jokes revolved around ethnic stereotypes, which can be funny in the right way, but man, most ethnic stereotype jokes are like the oldest most overused material in the world. Are other people not utterly bored of jokes about a Jews being nervous, yet? I did think the cart-related disaster scene at the beginning was pretty good, but I'm just saying it wasn't that funny to me. You judge for yourself, though. Maybe me not liking it will lower your expectations and thus heighten your enjoyment of it. I hope I have done that for you.
Okay, so the SSL review is below. You can see all the SSL Reviews HERE. There's a lot.
Just the Gist
Lately, I've been trying to really get detailed about these reviews. I watch it where I can rewind and I can get specific details about what exactly was happening in each SSL-Reviewable scene. This is not going to be that way. I saw it in the theater, I don't feel like watching it again, and I get the gist. So, this will be an overview kind of SSL Review.
There was male masturbation in the movie, but I did not see any female masturbation. There was female orgasm though, which 'came' during the ending orgy scene. Yes, all the food in the grocery store went ahead and fucked in every possible way until they could fuck no more. It had some funny parts, but man, it could have been so much more outrageous - like really f'd up, but I digress.
The only female roles I remember from the whole movie were a hotdog bun and a hard taco shell. Most of the food were males, and a lot of the orgy sex involved male on male action (I mean as muuh as that can be depicted with food). In general - and I may find myself wrong later - but I don't remember any of the quick flashes to food doing the nasty, insinuating any kind of clitoral stimulation. I know that's a wierd thing to say, but I did see tons of stuff that insinuated penis play. There was mostly insertion in all kinds of different ways happening and licking balls and stuff like that. If I go back through it one day and see some more interesting and clit-centric food sex acts, I'll amend this for sure.
A Hotdog and A Bun? Could This Movie Get More Wild?
The bun and the hotdog (they never say hotdog - just sausage...it was clearly a hotdog. Is that some regional thing where people call hotdogs sausages, or something?) have been obsessed with the future time where they will get to come together once they are bought. It's very sexually charged and there is even jokes about positions, and jackhammering, and how long the hot dog lasts. So the connotation is clearly that the hotdog goes into the bun just like a penis goes into a vagina. It's a sexual euphemism as old as hotdogs and buns - nothing subtle there. (Below is the classically probably unintentionally dirty intermission hotdog in bun reel - lest you forgot)
Okay, so when the orgy happens, the hotdog and bun do it. They lay and kiss. The dog goes into the bun, the whole deal. We don't see a lot of it, but we hear her orgasming while they are "having sex" - (the dog is in bun, if ya know what I mean - but seriously, it is literally in the bun). At one point the dog steps away, and is masturbating with 2 other foods, and as the camera moves we see it is because they are watching the taco eating the bun out. The taco is down in the bottom of the bun in between where her tiny legs come out, so it's about the right place where a human clit/vulva area would be. She's also vocally coming during that.
Hotdog And Bun? ppsshh. How About Hotdog and Clit?
So, okay, first this is all food, so it's hard to speak about realism, but the taco eating the bun out part, when translated to human bodies would give the audience a fair and realistic sense of what could cause a woman to orgasm - mouth on outer clitoral glans/vulva area. So that's good.
The other stuff, the whole hotdog into bun and then bun orgasms thing is not realistic when translated to human bodies because P-in-V intercourse does not lady-gasms make. I'll spare the detailed explanation, but let's just say the majority of women never orgasm during intercourse at all, and even though a minority of women say they can orgasm from intercourse alone, no female orgasm has ever been recorded in scientific literature that resulted from stimulation inside the vagina. The clit, baby. Women need clit stimulation, not vaginal.
So, the whole hotdog in bun thing when related to human bodies is something that would get the hotdog off, but not the bun. The bun needs clit stimulation, but the clit was never even mentioned or referenced or insinuated...Everything female-sexual in this movie was related to the vagina...the hole. And that, my friends, is a beautifully sad and perfect reflection of our whole society's obsession with believing that intercourse is equally orgasmic for men and women.
We're so obsessed with wrongly believing it, that the clit just plain gets ignored - because the clit is inconvenient in that scenario. It's crazy, though. It's like talking about male orgasms and not mentioning/insinuating the penis AT ALL.
The Vulva Rating
So, I'm giving this movie a 1 vulva rating. I'm being generous because it did have 1 realistic (when translated to human bodies) depiction of female orgasm....a taco with her mouth on the between the legs part of a bun. However, it loses lots of vulvas because the whole premise of the movie and all the sexual jokes about the hotdog and bun come from this deeply ingrained, yet absolutely incorrect belief that intercourse is as orgasmic for female as it is for males. That ingrained belief is precisely the thing I want to rip an ax through. The deepness of that belief makes it hard to think clearly about why we believe it. It allows people to know that most women do not orgasm during intercourse, but still not seriously question why the vast majority of advise about, depictions of, and jokes about female orgasm insinuate women orgasm from a penis in their vagina.
Sausage Party just reinforced that already entrenched beleif, and on top of that, it didn't even pretend to give a obligatory nod to the clit. If anyone was wondering what Sophia Wallace means in her Cliteracy work by saying the clitoris is nearly invisible in our society - this is what she means. And BTW, this movie needed some fresh jokes. The clit is a truly untapped humor source - and the writers of Sausage Part missed out.
It gets 1 vulva. \
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