Over just thirteen minutes, Carpinteri and Parks’ ‘Dirty Towel’ explores the powerful and lingering effects of sexual shame and the role they play in defining our sense of self-worth while also exploring the role parents play in creating those niggling doubts that haunt our early sexual experiences and encourage us to hide. Dirty Towel is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival from June 7 to June 16. BOOK TICKETS
At what age do we learn shame? Parents regularly pass their own sense of shame to their children, sometimes unknowingly and occasionally on purpose. Some parents encourage us to feel shame about our bodies as we grow. Awareness of the body starts early and is fundamental to our confidence and esteem, but some children are made to feel that their bodies are the wrong shape or the wrong size from an early age due to parents who struggle with their own body image. However, maybe the greatest shame we learn from parents, religious groups and broader society is the shame of sex.
Sexual shame often starts during puberty, although its roots go back much further, as we listen to our parents talk and observe their behaviours. It encourages us to view sex and sexual activity as immoral and dirty, something to be hidden and never discussed. The effects of this sexual shame can be dire as the individual experiences guilt as a result of pleasure. Every one of us, no matter where we live in the world, carries this sexual shame to varying degrees, whether it be guilt after masturbation, a sense of being dirty after sexual intercourse or the kinks we keep silent about due to fear of being labelled abnormal.
Directed by Callie Carpinteri, Dirty Towel is a short, salient and sensitive exploration of sexual shame, parental control and the need to take back that control in developing one’s self-worth.
Written by Carpinteri and Emma Parks, who also stars alongside Laura Coover, Ben Krieger, and Laurel Nail, Dirty Towel opens with a loving but cold mum speaking to her young daughter, Charlie, about sex for the first time. The mum uses the analogy of a clean towel to demonstrate her point, as she states that when a clean towel becomes dirty, it is never the same, and as the dirt continues to build, it is eventually discarded. Charlie sits and listens intently to her mother before we jump forward in time to the same girl as a teenager, about to have sex for the first time with a boy she works with at the local coffee shop.
Can Charlie move beyond the image of that dirty towel her mum planted in her brain years before? And were her mum’s words more about her own experience of sex rather than concern for her child?
Over just thirteen minutes, Carpinteri and Parks’ Dirty Towel explores the powerful and lingering effects of sexual shame and the role they play in defining our sense of self-worth while also exploring the role parents play in creating those niggling doubts that haunt our early sexual experiences and encourage us to hide. Bold, sensitive and beautifully shot and performed, plans are currently afoot to base a feature film on Dirty Towel’s core messages, exploring how parental experiences of sex are often passed on to children through words, actions, and fears.
Follow Us