Ace Enjoys SEX: HOW IT WORKS

Today I am proud to bring you a Post-Credit Coda first--a guest-written movie review! My old friend Ace McKnight will be your guide today, and he will be whisking you through the details of a delightful little documentary called Sex: How It Works. I've known this interesting guy for a long time now, and I really appreciate his adding content to my blog. I always encourage that sort of thing. If anyone else out there wants to contribute, let me know. I would be happy to curate!

Enough from me. You came here to hear Ace talk about Sex: How It Works, and he will not disappoint.

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Greetings, all. I've been commissioned by my old friend RR to write a review for a movie that he turned me on to called Sex: How It Works.

I speak to RR when I can, casually. I've just recently come off a long and strenuous digital cleanse. As happens when you are incommunicado for months at a time, I returned to the virtualscape to discover a large stockpile of missives rotting away in my respective social media archives. RR likes to keep me abreast of his consumption of media, and one movie in particular caught my eye. This movie was of course Sex: How It Works, an informational film that RR described as, "The worst sex thing I have ever seen." Being a natural born Curious George, and having known (biblically and otherwise) a number of preeminent sexologists in my time on this swirling blue and green sphere, I am eager to digest any sort of physiological propaganda thrust upon the masses.

Being that I was living the life of a vagabond at the time and had no acceptable viewing devices of my own, I endeavored to watch the film at one of Korea's famed Netflix bars (I won't tell you which bar and I won't tell you which Korea). I had no currency to speak of but the proprietor owed me a favor. I sat down at the widest most plasmoid screen available, complete with a complimentary pair of sleek Bose headphones, and I got down to the dirty business.

The first and last contextualizing detail to mention about the film is that it is a two hour long National Geographic documentary from the year 2013. I will let the trailer further set the tone for you, as they say a video is worth a thousand pictures, and thus a million words. The trailer is available nowhere on the internet but for the film's IMDB page.

www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1573824793

The beginning of the film is in fact identical to the trailer. After a preliminary title card recommending viewer discretion, the film begins with rapid fire images of naked individuals going at each other wrapped in shame-veiling bedsheets, a computer imaged pounding heart and synaptic system, and a man looking at a can of whipped cream in a refrigerator. Meanwhile the jaunty narrator informs us that, "Every hour, millions of us are doing it--but there's still a lot about sex we don't understand. We're going to head to the bedroom--and the lab--to unlock the mysterious world of sex we all live in."

And we're off.

The movie stumbles through various scientishtic narrative threads as if it were one of its own profoundly intoxicated experiment subjects. These threads include but are not limited to:

-a sexologist who means to discover and define what exactly it is that sends certain members of the opposite sex caroming into each other's pants
-a man who has a very expensive pump inserted into his penis so that he may cultivate an erection
-an engaged couple who are waiting until marriage (complete with onscreen countdown clock: 5 Days Until Sex)
-a little fellow with no proper social conditioning who seeks the aid of a pick-up artist--in order to pick up women, as it were
-a group of men in lab coats who watch a woman masturbate for science

These narrative threads intertwine and dance round each other much like the structure of Babel, except instead of the disjointed threads weaving together to reveal the interconnectivity of modern life, these disjointed threads weave together to reveal a cautionary tale about pop psychology.

Doctor Linda hard at work.

Creative types often say that the greatest sin a piece of entertainment can commit is to be boring. Sex: How It Works tries above all else to titillate. This involves a lot of people giggling about the awkwardness of the sexy science at hand, as well as frequent intercuts to attractive people gnoshing at each other. I cannot tell you I was not entertained.

Perhaps the most notable aesthetic aspect of the film is its tendency to descend incomprehensibly into distracting and inexplicable CGI sequences that seldom illustrate anything tangible to the viewer. A meager yet more than sufficient budget must be spent somehow, I suppose.

The participants say things like, "I'd be absolutely guttered if I had a low sperm count." Three shirtless men with sunglasses on their heads stand on a beach and insist that oh yes they absolutely CAN give a girl an orgasm. A man's father walks through a field with him lamenting the fact that his son can't get an erection--they are both carrying guns and the father wears an orange hat that says "Pheasants Forever." Everybody is taking themselves rather seriously.

The most galling thing about this brand of "edutainment" is the transparency of its motivation. Absolutely no thought has gone into informing the audience about their bodies as biological organisms. Very little effort has even gone into explaining how to facilitate and improve sexual congress. No, the clear and overriding raison d'etre for this piece of work is to make lonely men feel like they're learning how to get laid.

This motivation is never more baldfaced than in a sequence involving a scrawny beta male who wishes to learn from a wise guru known as a pick-up artist how best to get with the ladies. Here the movie quickly shifts from a laughable piece of insipid fluff to an upsetting tract of misogyny. The pick-up artist insists that the little man be aggressive and make engaging small talk as he forces himself upon women in the street. At one point, he is ignored by an attractive woman (as tends to happen when you are verbally assaulted by a stranger), and the pick-up artist encourages him to doggedly pursue her by chasing her down the street and insisting that they trade phone numbers so she can attend a swingin' party with him. Perhaps the only thing that would keep a reasonable woman from calling the police in this situation is that the little man says such disarming things as, "I like your outfits, they're... neat." But since this is a Discovery Channel documentary and therefore features paid extras, the woman does give him her phone number, and we can all feel good about this repressed misogynist's chance of getting some at some point down the line.

At this point I feel it would be best for us to watch a clip together, the only clip from this film that Youtube offers.

In this clip we unravel such scientific discoveries as the fact that alcohol lowers one's inhibitions and alcohol makes one more likely to engage in activities one wouldn't normally engage in. Indeed, it even goes so far as to say that alcohol makes one perceive individuals as more attractive.

Note the scientific experiment in progress. Some of the drunken minglers are wearing massive goggles that somehow track their gaze. Note how this finally proves without a doubt the existence of beer goggles. Note how this is 100% scientific, as there is no way these people would change their normal behavior if they know they are being watched, or if they are talking to someone with massive science goggles on their face. Note how the men ogle the ladies' boobs with mouths agape.

And we end with a slurring blonde woman exclaiming the virtues of "just making out" when it comes to getting in the mood for sex.

Science.

I have been involved in several different scientific communities and am more than familiar with the process of peer review. I do believe that whoever made this film thinks "peer review" means checking out someone's ass.

If you have a spare hour and a half and wish to have a lark at a documentary's expense, you can't go wrong with Sex: How It Works. I must admit that I enjoyed myself immensely, but at what cost? This film represents the contemporary fetish of science as religion. Science has become the font from which we glean our mythological resonance, our capital T Truth, our projected ideal lifestyle. Thus we have all sorts of rackets feeding off of the indolent, innocent, and naive in the name of science. Sex: How It Works is just savvy enough to know how to bamboozle people into watching it. The movie parades its science goggles and its evolutionary psychology and its talk of symmetry of the face around until you cannot but accept its proclamations as reasonable. Unfortunately, these proclamations are not only fraught with good old-fashioned inaccuracies--they are downright malicious, perhaps not in intent but in effect. People will watch our little man chasing two attractive women down the street, and they will believe the tripe about how forcefulness is appealing because it is garbed in the name of Science. People will take the alpha male players' advice as gospel because it is in the name of Science. People will continue to treat women as objects ripe for exploitation because it is in the name of Science.

Just as it is with religion, folks can justify any sort of rancid ideology in the name of Science. Sex: How It Works goes full-on patriarchal misogynistic with its lessons because that is simply the easiest thing to do. There's a reason this documentary is narrowly limited to incredibly heterosexual men and women.

I am many things by nature, but a leader is not one of them. I despise giving lectures because I know that I am nothing to be rallied around. I live my life in the shadows, flitting from one place to the next, blending and mending where I can. Nevertheless, sometimes a documentary is so egregious you must speak out against it.

Or get shitfaced drunk and have a damn good time watching it.

Four stars for entertainment value.

Negative three stars for educational value.

One star for a groovy synth soundtrack.