What Should A Slave Girl Look Like?
Whip Dance Slave in Hercules, Samson and Ulysses
A fully-dressed slave girl performs a whip dance, complete with whipper.
A fully-dressed slave girl performs a whip dance, complete with whipper.
OK, here's the reason Dr. Frankenfurter loved the old "Steve Reeves movies," in "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and why Captain Oveur asks little Timmy in "Airplane", "Do you like gladiator movies?"
"Are you sure this doesn't make us look gay?"
"Oh, no, not at all, we're just settling our differences manly man style."
These two images from the 1965 peplum Samson, Hercules and Ulysses pretty much explain it all. In one picture we have a dancing slavegirl doing a whip dance (complete with partner wielding a whip). In another we have Hercules and Samson wrassling over a little disagreement they're having.
You'll note that the dancing slave girl is pretty much fully clothed, while Samson and Hercules wear nothing but leather diapers as they wrestle so, um, vigorously. Put in such visually stark terms, you'd have to conclude that peplum (Italian sword and sandal films of the 50s and 60s) were gay gay gay productions created by gay gay gay Italians to entice young boys into the gay gay gay lifestyle. And this may be true in some cases.
However, I think a more likely explanation is that censors of the time were indifferent to male nudity as long as the groin, crotch and buttocks were covered, but were VERY sensitive to female nudity of all kinds. (Remember Genie in the 19-frickin-70s, unable to show her belly button on TV? Yeah, me neither. But it DID happen. The censors were unbelievably insane where women's bodies are concerned, in those days.
The conclusion of the whip dance has the fully clothed slave girl extending her hands to be bound by the lash, with a gentle stroke of the whip wrapping it around her wrists. This is full-bore kink stuff, but because the woman isn't naked, half naked or anywhere close to naked, it flew right under the radar.
The creators of peplum were simply taking what slack the censors would give them. They would probably have dressed female characters skimpily, too, if they could have done it without incurring the censors' wrath. The gay imagery of pepla (plural of peplum) just flew under the radar with regard to the mainstream, however eagerly enjoyed by fellows like Dr. Frankenfurter and Captain Oveur.
Just copying the peplum would not work nowadays because A) the old censorship rules aren't in force any more, even on basic cable TV, and
B) the mainstream is a lot more sophisticated about gay imagery and themes than it used to be.
"Are you ABSOLUTELY sure this doesn't make us look gay?"
"No, really, it doesn't. Feels pretty good, but in a very manly way."
What this means is that if your movie has mostly naked men throughout, sometimes wrasslin' other mostly naked men, with mostly clothed women, everyone's going to assume you're doing it deliberately, for very gay reasons.
If you're going to have mostly naked guys, you're gonna need mostly naked women to counterbalance, as it were.
And the best and easiest (literally) source of mostly nekkid women in a sword and sandal flick is, you guessed it, nekkid slave girls. They don't even have to have a reason to be naked ... they're slavegirls.
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