I grew up the child of two black-sheep theater kids who came from religious families. Mom and Dad’s response to any media was “We’ll watch it first.”
Then they would sit us down and watch it with us. They never declined anything, that I remember. Why did they watch it first, you may ask? To prepare. There’d be Dad, pausing the VHS and going “Okay, first bathroom break. Have we spotted any foreshadowing?” We’d have Mom going “Does anyone have any questions?” They would remind us of other works with similar themes, they would ask us to make predictions, and if something had really, just spectacularly adult content, they would ask us why we thought the creators made that choice. Was it to shock? Was it part of the theme of the piece? Was it expressing an idea or telling the audience something important? Was it there to distract us from something else so we could be surprised later?
Were my parents tremendous nerds? YES.
But they let us watch stuff other kids never got to see, and though sure, it was absolutely homework to get through it with them, if somebody like, say, our creepy Maude Flanders religious neighbor or a teacher asked if we’d seen this or heard that, we could speak intelligently about it and as such, other kids trusted our opinions above all else. If we panned a movie, nobody else saw it. If we said a movie was great, even the Mormon moms let their kids see it. Mom and Dad were that good.
As a result, we kids were able to intelligently dissect the ever-loving crap out of absolutely anything, our English teachers adored us and the time I turned in a scholarly paper with a two-page bibliography for World Cultures class discussing the impact of religious repression on American teenage culture and citing O'Brien et. al not only won me a small scholarship, but beat out six other AP kids for the research paper contest and got four other parents to relent and let my friends come to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
We saw three teachers there in costume. It was epic.
And yeah, we know that it’s a problematic period piece, but so is Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure,’ which one of my same friends who saw it that night chose to write a comparison paper on. Her discussion of how the sexual mores and transgressions for 1977 have made ‘Rocky’ just as much a problem play as the 1604 norms make ‘Measure,’ and for much the same reasons was shockingly well received, and the class period where she presented her paper, comparing the very nice community theater actress who had portrayed Mistress Overdone (a classmate’s mother, as it happened,) to Magenta, Angelo to Brad, and so on, why, we still talked about it at our ten-year reunion.
Of course she’s a professor now. Everyone in this story is either a teacher, a professor, an adjunct, retired or owns at least six pair of fishnet stockings. Several both.
Academia is really quite a lot spicier than people realize, and purity culture has never had any rightful place in the theater, the classroom or the humanities. Purity culture trying to infest academia? Outside of mathematics, no. Just no. Math alone may be pure. The instant we see a puritan of any kind, therefore, we must chase them right over to the STEM side with field hockey sticks and let the engineering majors logic them into insensibility, the physics majors contradict them unconscious and the geologists finish it with a rock. I trust the chemistry majors to clean up the resulting mess with optimized efficiency.
The humanities are by, for and about humans. We don’t do purity, darling. Have you met people?