On “Suburban Dykes,” And The Advent of Sublimely Sexy Sexual Awareness (Medium)

Read the full article by Marcus K. Dowling at Medium.com

Stream Suburban Dykes and a myriad of other classic, modern, sensual art-house favorites, on demand, via an inexpensive monthly membership at PinkLabel.TV.

When who, when, where, why and how you fuck is so politically charged that it stimulates raw, explosive, and emotionally liberating orgasms, it’s worth a deeper dive. Thus, in observing the era in which Fatale Media’s Suburban Dykes was released, a sense of what the truest sense of American freedom can inspire is frankly explored and celebrated.

When a market — like say, the porn market — experiences a both a softening, then growth by a factor of over 500% in under a decade, two things happen. Foremost, in the top tenth percentile of the marketplace, a hyper-commercialization occurs because profit is basically guaranteed. In the bottom tenth of the marketplace — because the top ten percent is so lucrative — what replaces commercialization is a progressed level of creative freedom that is driven by income allowing a budget for that expression to commercially exist. Therefore, in America in 1990, what was occurring in lesbian porn was not just expected, the marketplace encouraged it.

In 1990, the Centers for Disease Control listed roughly 30,000 women as having full blown AIDS in America. As for HIV, there were 735,000 Americans overall living with the illness. As well, two years after this, AIDS would be listed as the number one cause of death for US men aged 25–44. By this measure alone, the need to craft porn that’s as erotic as it is educational is obvious. To then add in sex that is as engrossing as the 17-minute long seduction and threesome between Hartley, Pepper, and Sharon Mitchell just adds to driving home the point that safety is sexy. It’s a scintillating tour de force that, especially when Hartley’s doe-eyed ingenue and Mitchell’s butch lesbian power femme energies combine, is eye-arresting magic.

It’s now 2019, and three decades have passed since Suburban Dykes’ debut. The United States of 1990 is absolutely not the United States of 2019. Impressively, in many ways, this film foretold our much more sexually aware and liberated future.