was emblematic of a year that would witness the mass-marketing of African
American music, dance, and film as mainstream popular culture. For the
young activists, anarchists, and artists engendering these transformations,
liberations that were both political and personal, as well as social and sex-
ual, were inseparable.
These pharmaceutical, industrial, and cultural changes meant that even
when sex, sexuality, and corresponding gender roles were not explicitly the
subject of cinema, they were often just beneath the surface, informing the
ideological tone, formal texture, or narrative structure of a motion picture.
Most of the landmark films—whether they featured virile detectives and
rogue cops as in Shaft, Dirty Harry, or The French Connection; recast the plight
of the prostitute in relationship to members of the opposite sex as in Klute,
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or The Owl and the
Pussycat; celebrated adolescent sexual awakenings as in The Last Picture Show
and Carnal Knowledge; or pathologized sexual violence as in Straw Dogs and
A Clockwork Orange—evinced some narrative concern with sexuality. This
list excludes the dozens of sexploitation vehicles that flourished by sub-
limating hardcore adult porn into softer fare, ultimately launching the
careers of scantily clad, buxom beauties Pam Grier, Margaret Markov, Anitra
Ford, and Teda Bracci in low budget pictures like Women in Cages or The Big
Doll House. What made the film culture unique was that many of these
movies were made quickly, inexpensively, remotely, and without sufficient
motivation for their devices. With the exception of Peter Bogdanovich’s The
Last Picture Show (renowned for its deliberately stylized black and white cin-
ematography) and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (with its western
setting), many of the low budget movies did not conform to conventional
cinema aesthetics. Nor did they mimic the formulas employed in period
pieces and prestige pictures. Instead, they prefigured the social malaise of a
society cast in the shadows of Nixonian secrecy and Vietnam, and they
shared a preoccupation with cinematic excess (Thomson 523) manifest as
blaxploitation, sexploitation, and vigilante violence.
The year witnessed the release of over thirty trashy sexploitation fea-
tures. Films like The Bang Bang Girls, The Female Bunch, Love Me Like I Do, Not
My Daughter, Swedish Fly Girls, and The Velvet Vampire emerged. As such, film
historians and feminists alike noted the early seventies as a moment when
motion pictures were uniquely concerned with sexuality and changing sex-
ual mores. These films opened the floodgates for the graphic representation
of sex on American screens, but this explicit imagery had different conse-
quences for men and women. Despite the gains of the women’s liberation
movement and publications like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex
50 MIA MASK