I think we got our answer after watching “Filming Desire” in class.  Several of the filmmakers that were interviewed discussed the difficulty of shooting a woman’s sexuality without exploiting it for the male character’s pleasure.  One of the filmmakers stated that all female film directors had to reinvent how to make a film because all of the usual film tropes have been created by men and many objectify and insult women.  They said creating a feminist love scene was one of the most difficult parts of making the film, more difficult then any scenes with action sequences or large groups of people.  These filmmakers said they wanted to do their best to not objectify their female characters, given that many women on screen are objectified before they even begin speaking.

Nonetheless, it does appear that a feminist sex scene is possible.  It is possible to show the woman getting just as much respect and pleasure from the sexual act as the man.  Many filmmakers choose to do this by not explicitly showing the sexual act.  They will never show the naked body of a woman and the sex is implied or talked about in a voice over.  If a naked body is shown it is shown in its entirety, never cut up into segments.  This is a way around the inherent objectification that exists in many viewers that cannot be prevented by the filmmaker.  This is a reason shooting lesbian sex scenes or even romantic scenes between two women is difficult.  As the filmmakers in the documentary and as Kaplan writes about in “The Avant Gardes in Europe and the US” any relationship between two women is seen as pornographic and can be objectified even more than when it is a man and a woman together.  Thus although the feminist sex scene is possible, it is only possible when considering and working around the inherent opinions of the viewer.