The Lasting Impact of a Concussion
by Mary Nyiri

(Spoiler: Some language may be offensive to some readers! Skip this article if you are offended by obscene, explicit body part and/or sex words!)

There are so many incredible films! Has a film ever:
Made you drop everything and take a night train to Lisbon?
Kept you from getting home before midnight?
Awakened the realization that you turned down the best offer you ever had?
Showed you the detrimental side effects of a passive-aggressive relationship?
Caused your dark blood to boil with outrage?
Explained who Camille Claudel is and what’s up with the year 1915?

That’s an affirmative on most of the questions from me. But sometimes I am surprised at how little effect a provocative film has on the real world, like Bowling for Columbine or that quasiscientific one by Al Gore. Even real film footage of little kids crying after gunshots and multiple funerals and Gabby Giffords trying to speak again shown multiple times on television appears to have no impact on millions of people who believe they have a Constitutional right to carry an automatic weapon that wasn’t even invented when the Constitution was written. Give everyone a Brown Bess smooth bore flintlock musket, why don’t we?

Maybe we are too accustomed to violence on the screen and have heard too many doomsday reports on the climate while the sun shines and our routine lives suffer little interruption. Sex, however, resonates with everyone. And I believe a film can have a very real impact on our sex lives. For instance, how many women have used a Rapid Rabbit vibrator? Okay, I had not even heard of it because I left the U.S. before Sex and the City, until it came up in a completely normal conversation about sex toys at the erotic Christmas market in Hamburg last December. Research into this allegedly awesome sex partner without testicles revealed that I could easily buy online a Platinum Rampant Rapid Rabbit! (RRRrrr!) Millions of rabbits have been sold allowing millions of women to have millions of safe sex orgasms. And you can even look to YouTube for do-it-to-yourself videos, as long as you let your personal privacy be totally invaded by logging on to assure, well who knows who, that you are of legal age to go rabbit hunting.

The film Concussion (U.S.A. 2012) unexpectedly challenged and changed my concept of female sexuality, especially at the fitness club. To understand why, let me briefly tell you about the film. In Concussion, directed by Stacie Passon, forty-something Abby (Robin Weigert) is married to a divorce attorney with whom she shares two children. After being whacked in the head by a baseball, Abby seems knocked into consciousness. She realizes that PTA meetings, school plays and spinning at the fitness club just don’t satisfy her anymore. Neither does her spouse Kate (Julie Fain Lawrence) who falls asleep while stroking Abby’s pubic hair. So Abby returns to work. With her business partner Justin (Jonathan Tchaikovsky), she renovates a studio apartment in the city. She has dirty sex with a female prostitute. She decorates her studio apartment in pure white with the huge bed prominently taking center stage. Craving cleaner sex, she tells Justin about her whore-ific experience. Not just a hunk with a hammer, Justin the multi-taskmaster also happens to help run high-priced call girls for girls through a friend known only as The Girl. Abby devours the titillating tits of the girl that The Girl hooks her up with but the bummer is that Abby can only afford once, which is not enough. Luckily, she has the perfect set for her next act as call girl Eleanor for The Girl. She can get paid to get laid! As a precaution though, Eleanor insists on meeting her “Janes” for coffee first.

***Another spoiler here!***If you have read this far, you are curious and perhaps slightly amused. ***If you read any further, you may be shocked and outraged.***Stop now so as not to be offended!***

Or, as I call them, cunt coffees. (The C Word has a long history dating back anatomically to the 13th century and there is a movement for women to take back the word, which meant female genitalia, as thoroughly explained on Wikipedia.) All ages of women come for Eleanor and each jaunty Jane would cause any heterosexual teenage boy to jet his jism. For variety, the Janes are of different ethnic origins but similar waistlines with just one young overweight college student (who is lovely). Eleanor is the shy student’s first sex partner and as the older, experienced, mommy darest, she gently educates her in lesbian lovemaking and then gives advice on weight loss (!). The student doesn’t shed pounds but after the tantric tutoring decides to probe a penis. Eleanor entertains married-to-men-moms, who just want a bit of pussy on the side, with hugging, kissing, touching and licking of breasts and bottoms and, well, actually, that’s it. We never get details! I sat fidgeting in my tight jeans through 93 minutes of female fucking and still don’t know precisely how to do it. The voyeur in me is deeply disappointed. So what did I learn from this film and how has it has changed my life?

I learned that there are women mommies married to men daddies and professional women and hard working women and ordinary women but mostly hot women in fitness studios who want to fuck other women. I never knew it was so epidemic! There are women sexually evaluating other women at PTA meetings, in the grocery store, at the fitness studio, perhaps even flirting with me in the WC! There are women who may want me not for my dark chocolate soufflé recipe, but to lick the melted chocolate off who knows what. I had NO idea how predatory women are until I saw Concussion. That whack on the head for Abby was a real wake up smack for me, too. Now at the fitness club I not only have to keep the naughty bits covered when ogling male octogenarians are cruising around, but when trashy tarts or bawdy babes or depraved dames or lascivious ladies prowl as well. I can no longer skinny dip in blissful ignorance of the carnality surrounding me. No more literally hanging out in the sauna enjoying a friendly rub of lemon-salt over my back and bum from a wanton woman who might be simply copping a feel of the forbidden fruit. I am no longer safe among my sauna sisters. My hedonistic European lifestyle is over. Showering after gym class while still wearing our bra and panties wasn’t just because we were all shy after all. Or am I just too much of a prude to unleash my inner femme?

Okay, so maybe this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek (my own!). But with all the beautiful, highly educated, articulate women featured in Concussion, there was great potential to provide some insight into alternative lifestyles and lesbian identity instead of presenting the equivalent of gay guys fucking in toilets, albeit very luxurious stalls, not like at a rest stop off the interstate. It is, however, really true that going to my fitness club will never be the same. As a university student I was surprised and then shocked to be approached for sex by a woman, thinking it was obvious that I was not a dyke. Now as a fifty-something fitness freak, I would be shocked (gravity is not my friend) not surprised (life lessons learned) if a woman showed a sexual interest in me. The problem is that since the film, I have this heightened sense of the sensuality surrounding me, as if somehow some women now know that I know that these women are hot to trot and I could hold the reins! So even a bad film can make an impact. If you have read this far and feel offended, then you read on despite appropriate warnings and have only your own curiosity to blame and maybe some hidden desires to confront. Want to talk about it? Let’s meet for coffee first (double wink ; ) ; ) !).