What's YOUR Deviance?
In today's "everything's out there" pervasively sexual, media-driven social landscape, it's hard to imagine things like cross-dressing, homosexuality and even public coitus to be shocking.
Flahback to 1972, when psychologist David Ruben released his now classic treatise "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex(But Were Afraid To Ask)". The Swinging 60s had ended, and the national angst of Watergate, Vietnam, Kent State and other developments was playing out. Flower Power was fading and the "Me Generation" was kicking in.
Who better to reimagine the book as a comedy than the quietly self-absorbed "Noo Yawk" existentialist, Woody Allen. In his hands, the then groundbreaking sexology manual ( noted for it's conversational style in stark contrast to the earlier Kinsey Report), becomes a not-so-groundbreaking but still highly enjoyable series of vignettes that feature, among other things, a 60-year old married, cross-dressing man, an entire sequence in which Italian is the only language spoken - with no subtitles, and a sex scientist gone clearly mad ( a jab at Kinsey?).
The highlight though, is the final sequence which, with the moon landing already three years past, and the US Space program me booming, chooses to remigine a man's body (in particular his sexual response), as one giant Mission Control. Allen, playing one of the innumerable millions of sperm awaiting "launch" wonders such things as "is this a homosexual encounter?" and "what if he's only jerking off?; I don't wanna hit the roof"
You won't, but if you have even a smidgen of a sense ofhumour not subject to the ravages of the the "reality TV era", then you just might hit the floor.
