Sex Scenes Cut Again?

Evan Rachel Wood has gone on a totally awesome tirade about the MPAA demanding that a scene of a male actor going down on her be cut from the movie Charlie Countryman. The scene does not appear in the final cut of the movie and Wood says that's because the MPAA was going to give the movie the dreaded NC-17 rating unless the scene was cut.

In a series of tweets, she said this:
After seeing the new cut of Charlie Countryman, I would like to share my disappointment with the MPAA, who thought it was necessary to censor a woman's sexuality once again. The scene where the two main characters make "love" was altered because someone felt that seeing a man give a woman oral sex made people "uncomfortable," but the scenes in which people are murdered by having their heads blown off remained intact and unaltered.
This is a symptom of a society that wants to shame women and put them down for enjoying sex, especially when (gasp) the man isn't getting off as well! It's hard for me to believe that had the roles been reversed it still would have been cut or had the female character been raped it would have been cut. It's time for people to grow up. Accept that women are sexual beings. Accept that some men like pleasuring women. Accept that women don't have to just be fucked and say thank you. We are allowed and entitled to enjoy ourselves. It's time we put our foot down. Thanks for listening.

I want to track her down and give her a high five and a hug. If we would just do exactly what she says and start seeing that in movies, more and more women would realize that their sexuality - their sexual pleasure - is beautiful and they have a right to it and to enjoy it.

Now the writer of the movie is backing away from this, saying that he doesn't know exactly what was filmed because it was a closed set and he was not involved with discussions with the MPAA. I haven't seen any comment from the director and producer who would have been the ones to have that discussion.

But given the MPAA's history with censorship of female pleasure, it's easy to believe that Wood is right. There have been many examples where depictions of female sexual pleasure have earned movies NC-17 ratings - or been cut in order to avoid them. Watch the movie 'This Film is Not Yet Rated' for many examples of that.

Wood points out the confounding question of why female pleasure in a consensual act is deemed obscene or too much for anyone who is not an adult but it's okay to show someone getting their heads blown off. We are far more comfortable with violence than we are with sex. I watched the trailer for Charlie Countryman and the trailer actually shows that scene. There is a man with a gun standing over a man bent over a table at a restaurant and his head is blown off and scattered all over the table! That is in the trailer! Brains all over a dinner table! This is something that, hopefully, is quite a rare occurrence in real life and most of us are not likely to ever see. It is, in real life, horrific, and should be considered obscene. But a guy going down on a woman is something many of us will actually experience and most of us would have quite enjoyed. AND - and this is the most important and about it - it hurts no one unlike gun violence. And yet we are still not okay with depicting that in a movie.