Ekstase: The first female orgasm in movie history
Hedy Lamarr was well ahead of her time. When Meg Ryan caused an entire restaurant to cringe so hard that they snapped their jaws and made a silent vow to never make eye contact with their fellow diner ever again with her chasm-quivering groans in When Harry Met Sally, the uproar surrounding the fully clothed and non-intercourse-based scene was indicative of the lingering conservative taboo surrounding the female orgasm. This was something that Lamarr was trying to subvert way back in 1933.
Ekstaste was a Czech film that came with the following synopsis: “Eva has just gotten married to an older gentleman. She leaves him one day, she meets a young man and they fall in love. Fate brings the husband together with the lover that has taken Eva from him.” While that might sound like standard fodder, it was actually so subversive and liberating in its approach that none other than Adolf Hitler banned the film in a fit of rage.
You see, not only does the film feature Lamarr swimming naked and a topless close-up before depicting the first female orgasm in movie history, but it also frames this as a women escaping the dull, ordered predeterminism of the patriarchy. Lamarr’s character has no call from the stilted marriage she is cajoled into with an older man, so she does something about it, and decides to follow her own path. It is perhaps this alongside the famed climax that got it banned by the US and condemned by the Pope.
Moreover, even beyond the screen, Lamarr’s life came with a backstory that put conservative’s noses out of joint. After starring in a play in her late teens, Lamarr became an object of desire for the Austrian aristocrat and arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. He possessively pursued her, and she was soon pressured into marrying him despite her family’s concerns regarding his ties to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
After marriage Mandl, who was 15 years her senior, began preventing her from performing. As she wrote in her autobiography: “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.”
So one day, she disguised herself as a maid, pocketed some jewellery and fled his property, eventually reaching London where she met with MGM executives and soon earned herself the nickname ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Films’. The fact her own story mirrors Ekstase only adds to the visceral reality behind the picture. It might seem like melodrama, but from the female gaze in conservative times it was anything but.
This is the crux of the movie. It is about the power of female perseverance against the odds in search for liberation during an era where that was violently curtailed. This is why the nudity is not glamorised and Lamarr is never objectified. There is a naturalness to the scene, and this alone proved shocking. In fact, it still does, as director Gina Prince-Bythewood told Shadow & Act when her film Love & Basketball received an R-rating back in 2000: “Their argument was that the scene was too real, which is so bizarre.”
She added: “There’s no nudity whatsoever in it, there’s no grinding. So you’re giving me an R because it felt too real, but that was the whole point.” This shows that despite Lamarr helping to begin the journey way back in 1933, we still have a long way to go before the concept of female pleasure is fully reconciled within society without biased taboo.
