One of the most controversial movies of the 1990s, Thelma & Louise pushed every hot button of the new decade: date rape, sexual harassment, the failure of the feminist movement to create real change for the working class, and how pissed off women were, or were not, entitled to be about all of the above. Though it made more noise as a media phenomenon than at the box office, Thelma & Louise made so many people so mad that it had the feeling of a turning point. We’ll talk about the anger the movie communicated, the anger it inspired, and debate its lasting legacy.

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Hosted by Flea, founding member and bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, This Little Light is a podcast about falling in love with music. Flea interviews musical guests from all genres to discuss the teachers who guided them, the influences that inspired them, and how the lessons they learned as young musicians have shaped their creativity, resilience, and careers. This Little Light, a production of Cadence13 and Parallel, available now with new episodes dropping weekly, is available for free wherever you get your podcasts.

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An enigmatic sex symbol dating back to the 70s, Theresa Russell made a play for Hollywood stardom in the late 80s and early 90s, making a number of films about the sexual commodification and role playing. Ken Russell’s Whore was marketed as a gritty answer to Pretty Woman, showing the “truth” about Los Angeles street prostitution. In Impulse, a neo-noir romance in which Russell plays an undercover cop posing as a sex working in a hopelessly corrupt LAPD, Russell was directed by Sondra Locke, longtime girlfriend and co-star of Clint Eastwood. When Eastwood dumped Locke while she was directing the movie, she fought back, instigating a series of lawsuits that revealed that Eastwood and his studio had conspired against her.

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The first blockbuster about sex of the 90s, Pretty Woman both reinvigorated Richard Gere’s career, and turned Julia Roberts into the biggest female movie star of the era. We’ll dissect the gender politics of this fantasy about love between a streetwalker and a corporate villain, analyze its lasting appeal, and trace the wild rollercoaster ride of the first few years of Roberts’ movie stardom. Virtually unknown before 1989, within a year of Pretty Woman’s release Roberts was considered the most bankable woman in movies, a controversial icon of 90s womanhood and, eventually, a romantic antihero whose performances and personal life were put on a pedestal by a breathless media, only to be swiftly knocked down.

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Erotic 80s began with a prologue about the short lived heyday of the X rating, pornography, and feminism. Erotic 90s begins with a prologue about the disastrous rollout of NC-17 –the X rating’s replacement – and the evolving state of both porn and feminism at the dawn of the 90s. Topics include David Lynch, Harvey Weinstein, “pro-porn” feminism, “the new morality,” video stores, Magic Johnson, date rape, and much more. 

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American independent film is launched into the mainstream by Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, starring James Spader as an impotent man who gets off on filming women talking about sex. Videotape also plays a role in a Spader film released almost simultaneously, Bad Influence, in which he plays a meek yuppie at the mercy of alpha male Rob Lowe – who was trying to rehabilitate his career after a tape leaked shot by the actor and documenting his real-life threesomes — one with a 16 year-old girl. We close the first half of this season talking about Lowe, Spader and how camcorder mediation of sex changed pop culture forever.

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The 1988 baseball blockbuster Bull Durham confirms Kevin Costner as the ultimate squeaky-clean, all-American heartthrob, building on a sexual persona sparked the year before with the neonoir No Way Out. Today we’ll talk about why Costner was the quintessential safe hunk for the 80s, his alchemic chemistry with co-star Sean Young in No Way Out, and her subsequent rocky road through Hollywood misogyny.

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The erotic thriller goes commercially mainstream with Fatal Attraction, a film which starts a national conversation about whether or not women can “have it all” – “it all” meaning both careers and marriage. Is Fatal Attraction an indictment of working women as “witches” and a call to roll back women’s rights, or a snapshot of extreme toxic masculinity? Plus: Dirty Dancing. Is it evil?

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Billed as the hottest Hollywood film since Last Tango, 9 ½ Weeks was considered to have missed the mark by everyone who made it – including director Adrian Lyne, stars Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, producer/writer Zalman King and his wife, writer Patricia Knop. Today we’ll talk about why this intoxicating and troubling film is worth a second look, how to square away the arguably feminist finished product from a production process that robbed Basinger of agency, and we’ll explore the film Rourke and King re-teamed on as a re-do, Wild Orchid. We’ll also talk about Rourke’s “bad boy” persona, and his problematic relationship with his second wife and co-star, supermodel Carre Otis.

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Just as the AIDS-related death of Rock Hudson was finally forcing straight people – and Hollywood – to acknowledge that epidemic, a film was released that transposed the new climate of sexual fear into a murder mystery. The sleeper hit of 1985, Jagged Edge turned Glenn Close from a respected actress into a star, and established the brand of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who would later write Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Almost a decade after radical feminists began to call for a crackdown on violent sexual imagery, Jagged Edge tried to have its cake and eat it, too: infusing its sex and violence – and its depiction of a career woman – with a fundamentally conservative point of view.

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