Roleplay – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Katie Mathews on ROLEPLAY (SXSW2024)

March 25, 2024March 25, 2024 Nadine Whitney documentary, Goat in the Road Productions, hookup culture, Katie Mathews, Roleplay, sexual politics on campus, SXSW2024, Tulane University

Katie Mathew: I’m certainly not an expert in the history of sexual education in America but I wonder if we haven’t ever escaped our Puritan roots in the colonization of this country. Sex is still somehow taboo. With the continuously disappearing line between State and (Conservative Christian) Church, sex for pleasure (or a non-cis-straight-white man’s right to desire and enjoy sex) is demonized. Unfortunately curiosity and hunger for knowledge doesn’t disappear when suppressed. Young people are receiving misinformation or misogynistic information about sex from the internet, peers, and certain types of porn. Awareness, dialogue, and education is KEY to healthier and safer sexual relationships.

Festivals Reviews

ROLEPLAY (SXSW2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

March 12, 2024March 25, 2024 Leslie Combemale documentary, Goat in the Road Productions, hookup culture, Katie Mathews, Roleplay, sexual politics on campus, SXSW2024, Tulane University

The basis for the film is the work done with students of Tulane University. Toxic masculinity, white privilege, gender norms, and the longterm impact of sexual stereotypes are examined, often in ways that call into question not only the perspectives of those onscreen, but those held by members of the documentary’s audience. Mathews allows the students shown on camera to be themselves fully, regardless of how viewers might judge them. We are then served far more complicated personalities, who are living in a challenging world in which nearly every decision around gender and sex leads to its own mine field, and this extends to behavior in which racism or homophobia clearly plays a part. In some spheres of college life, sexual assault has been essentially normalized.