My Skeleton Key: Teeth (2007)
Take this key, open my horror-rotted brain, and pick it apart
hey y’all! it’s time I get a little personal again. not too much, though! i’ve gotta keep my therapist fed. i’m finally making my way to see Teeth: The Musical this week! just like the musical, the original film is deeply unserious. but i still think it contributes a lot to feminist horror. most people won’t deny that nor the strong stance it takes about sexual assault and consent. there’s a sliver of something that gets a bit overlooked in the conversation, though. this is a little different from my usual newsletters, but that’s the point. let’s have a little fun, dissect some horror, and even ourselves if the mask fits.
reading (well, listening to) feel it all by sex therapist casey tanner, they wrote their book around the topic of sex miseducation.
i’m sure some of y’all, like me, have an insular understanding of what that is. we had to sit in prudish gender-specific sex-ed lectures that shied away from anything promoting sexual exploration. before that, your parent(s) may have sat you down and gave you a summed up birds & bees talk while their hands clammed up. as an adult, sexuality is perhaps one of the only areas in life where i feel infantile.
like dawn, in teeth, i was raised in a religion that promoted sex as a virtuous obligation after marriage. i had questions and thoughts the way any child would. religion builds a barrier of shame around that curiosity though. when the sexual curiosity started to verge away from boys and onto girls, i was repressing thoughts and feelings like i’d never repressed before. dawn’s sexual trauma and “impure thoughts” motivated her to thump her bible harder. experiencing sexual trauma at a young age when you believe sexual behaviors are a sin can leave you feeling like you have to work overtime to be “good” in this way.
sex miseducation comes in many forms. did your parent or guardian make sex feel like a taboo topic? did a leaked nude turn into an objectifying school day conversation? what about the first time you were objectified? dawn, a white girl, is objectified for her purity. for Black people, historical stereotypes have painted us as inherently sexual: Black women more so than men. the incessant late night snapchats from male classmates only made me hate myself. did you know that sex education should include the way that identity prejudice influences our experience with sexuality?
consent is only consent if everyone involved understands the reality of the situation. dawn spends the first half of the movie being preyed on by various men. the best part of the movie is when she finally has a consensual sexual experience only to act out of rage when she finds out it wasn’t 100% consensual. because consent is taught on a linear scale of “no means no”, we haven’t always acknowledged our own non-consensual experiences.
transparently, this was always a sore topic for me, and it’s mainly because of miseducation. i didn’t know how to put certain feelings into words, because I was never taught how to discuss sex coherently. casey’s book is gentle and thorough about the ways we interact and don’t interact with sex. the more i read and reflect, i feel even more empathy for dawn and for myself.
i’m mad that we couldn’t have a proper introduction to sex. i’m mad that we were made to feel powerless. i’m mad that others’ miseducation imposed on our education. but dawn gains her power back by educating herself on her body. and feel it all is doing that for me. even if you feel secure in your sexuality, i still recommend this read for the sake of understanding others. there’s a chance you may even learn something about yourself in the process. and there’s nothing wrong with that!