So yes—in one version of the story, “prude” is synonym for sadist.
—Cameron Awkward-Rich, “A Prude’s Manifesto”
In popular culture, the slasher genre is known for killing off anyone who has sex, and many a slasher movie—including genre codifier Friday the 13th—has been interpreted as a conservative, anti-sex morality tract. But how much do these interpretations hold up under scrutiny? The answer is… complicated. What interests me about these films, though, isn’t as much the films themselves as the way that certain interpretations of them have been taken up in popular culture, imagining the survivors as always virginal and the killers as punitive avatars of anti-sexuality.
In order to dig into these perceptions, I’ve chosen to focus on the Friday the 13th franchise, best known for the hockey mask-wearing Jason Voorhees. The Friday movies are salient here not just for their immense influence and popularity, but also because Jason’s backstory readily lends itself to moralizing about irresponsible sex. So if there were ever an anti-sex killer, you’d think it would be Jason.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort.]
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