An ‘alarming cautionary tale’: Castrating the Faux Feminism of Teeth (2007)

Two years ago, writing in celebration of the film’s tenth anniversary, Vice critic Sirin Kale identified Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein 2007) as ‘an incisor-sharp commentary on male entitlement, consent, and sexual violence’. Yet just as the title of her article refers to Teeth as a ‘Feminist Horror Classic’, it is curious that Kale does not define the film in direct relation to feminism. This is not to say that issues of male entitlement, consent and sexual violence are not feminist concerns. Rather, Kale implies how Teeth critiques masculinity through these concerns, without politicising it in a feminist context.

Retrosexual: The Notorious Work of Bettie Page and Irving and Paula Klaw 

by Ellen Wright of De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Model Bettie Page and filmmaker/photographers Irving and Paula Klaw have left a curious cultural legacy. Their work together, between 1952 and 1957, often filmed in a studio above the Klaw’s photo and bookshop, resulted in a catalogue of pin-up and fetish photographs, a clutch of burlesque revue B-movies and a number of short, silent 8mm and 16mm, mail order fetish ‘specialty’ films, intended for home exhibition. In these films Page, clad in lingerie, stockings and vertiginously high heels, would enact requested fetish and BDSM scenarios, either alone or with other young women. 

Book Review – Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure

Review of Lynn Comella’s Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Duke University Press. September 2017 (HB £79.00 and PB £20.99). 296 pages. 41 illustrations.

Review by Caroline West, Dublin City University.