Word: incest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Herman's feminist perspective suits her subject matter perfectly. The major biological, psychological and social theories of incest (she deals with them one by one) fail to account for the vast contrast between the sexually abusive behavior of fathers and mothers. According to Herman, father-daughter incest ultimately finds its best explanation in the male-dominated structure of society...
ALMOST immediately, the word "incest" brings to mind the word "taboo." American society, like most others, has strong cultural and legal prohibitions against sex between members of the nuclear family. No one likes to talk about incest, but the ugly truth is that men sexually abuse their own daughters far more commonly than most people would guess. Mother-son incest is nearly non-existent by comparison. By writing Father-Daughter Incest. Judith Lewis Herman proposes a solution. In effect, she says for the crimes to end, the facts must be known...
...women ensures the reproduction in each generation of the psychology of male supremacy. It produces sexually aggressive men with little capacity to nurture, nurturant women with undeveloped sexual capacities, and children of both sexes who stand in awe of the power of fathers. Wherever these conditions obtain, father daughter incest is likely to be a common occurrence...
While the characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle...
...mists of the backlot. And there is Malcolm McDowell, quite persuasively feline, as her brother. In his human form he is something of a tomcat, which, of course, means he keeps turning into a big cat, with unfortunate results for the ladies he stalks. He keeps proposing incest as the only safe and sane way for cat people to have a little fun in their lives...