“Spectatoring”, Dissociation and Camp Miasma

This is an article about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) dir. Jane Schoenbrun. I saw it at the Canadian premiere, and am reporting back. If you have not seen it yet (which is probable since it isn’t out yet) please be aware that there are some spoilers in the article. I have tried to avoid anything too plot heavy, and left things vague as much as possible. Direct quotes are primarily from the trailer. However, if you are of the wrongheaded mentality that knowing anything about what happens in a narrative ruins the narrative, you may wish to sit this article out.

I survive on the income I make from Substack. Once a month I write an article about media I enjoy. These are paid articles that are intended as thank you and as a reward to my paying subscribers. The idea is that it allows me to give them something special extra, without paywalling any of my more ‘hard hitting’ or pertinent articles. The paid ones are often a little more raw, and on a lot less serious topics. They bounce around and allow themselves to have fun with it. This is one such article. Enjoy.

Do you sufficiently know your body? Do you know your own body enough? Should you know it more? Should you know it better? Are you sufficiently in it? Do you feel embodied? Can you feel everywhere? Can you relax your forehead muscles? Do it for me now. How many hours a day do you spend fully at home with yourself? A real woman doesn’t rely on distractions. Womanhood is about knowing your cycle intuitively, without an app. A real woman is never surprised by her period. Trans women get periods too, and the ones that are good real true women know when they’re bleeding even though there will never be blood. Women just know. You’ve let all this bullshit distract you. What are you doing masturbating like that? A woman truly in touch with her own femininity wouldn’t need that. A good woman, one who knew herself, wouldn’t need a vibrator. She wouldn’t need pornography. Hell, a really embodied woman doesn’t even need to fantasize. She must lie there and commune with her vulva. Afterall, if you picture a man, aren’t you fantasizing about patriarchy? Worse, picturing a woman is projecting a narcissism of minor difference, a male fantasy fed through a female brain. You must lie there and commune with your body. Express the intimacy you’ve learned to have with yourself. It does not matter if you don’t cum. Orgasm is a male goal. The joy of a woman’s body needs no other than itself. So, let me ask again, do you know your body sufficiently? Are you one with it? Do you never hide? You must unlearn patriarchy and the male gaze. You must practice wellness.

Since at least the 1970 publication of Masters and Johnson, women have been asked to consider how present they are during sex. Today we call it dissociation. Masters and Johnson called it “spectatoring”. They described it as this negative tendency to imagine oneself outside one’s own body, watching the sex happen as if from a distance. By 1977 men were already using it against women. In Anne Hall the titular character goes to smoke a joint before sex, leading her boyfriend Alvy to complain “I don’t know why you have to get high every time we make love.” She explains that it relaxes her, and his bloated ego takes a hit. It has to be about him: “you have to be artificially relaxed before we can go to bed?”. She insists that it makes no difference, but he shuts her down with a cruel joke “Well, I’ll give you a shot of sodium pentothal. You can sleep through it”. He talks her into going without the weed, and the movie confirms his suspicions. He immediately notices that “It’s like you’re- you’re removed” and “distant”. An overlay representing her inner self, ghostlike, moves up from the bed and sits down on a chair, watching as the couple try to fuck. Her inner self sits there and looks around for a drawing pad to occupy herself. Alvy notices and confronts Annie again. She insists that she needs the weed, and he shoots back that “it ruins it for me if you have grass”. The male ego cannot understand that it isn’t about him. Annie’s own relationship with sex, with her body, ultimately with pleasure is positioned as an issue for the man. He cannot evaluate if he’s actually ‘performed well’ if he knows that she has taken a substance to aid her enjoyment. He must prove to himself that he can bring her to orgasm without aid. Nowhere does her desire to have fun, to make things easier for herself, play into things.

By the nineteen eighties feminists were beginning to agree with Alvy, played and written by Woody Allen. The anti-porn, anti-sex feminists of the eighties were beginning to get suspicious of whether or not women were getting off in the right way. Orgasm was declared a male goal. The aid of vibrators, straps, pornography, and yes, even sometimes imagination was written off as perverted, improper, and male. It had once been that feminism was the theory and pervert-style lesbianism was the practice. Now, sex was meant to be an expression of intimacy, the way a kiss says I love you. It wasn’t supposed to be fun or pleasurable.^[1] Somehow, as the decades passed, this impulse perverted itself and morphed into our new idea of Wellness. Wellness is a billion-dollar industry, and it sounds so much nicer than sex. Wellness includes massages, and yoga, thermal bath cycles at Scandinavian style spas. Wellness includes meditation, therapy and journaling. It includes diet and exercise. And yes, it also includes buying the right vibrator for you. Wellness too is part of the war against “spectatoring”. Afterall, wellness is about female empowerment, or at very least, female embodiment. There’s just so much in this busy modern world of ours that distracts you and takes you out of your body. It’s even harder for women. So much is asked of the modern woman, the modern mother. Wellness is here to help you relax. Wellness is here to help you find you in you. Let Wellness help you reconnect with yourself. Take some me-time. You deserve it. This podcast will teach you how to really feel like you’re inside your body again. Let it teach you how to learn the subtleties of your body, of you.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) says no, fuck you. What was the look in Orpheus’ eyes like when he saw Eurydice still in the shadows, clawed back into the underworld? There would have been fear, and shame, and, well, maybe something else. Maybe he saw her seeing him. Maybe, for a second, in that fatale held glance she ripped something from him as she met his stare. She got to watch him the whole time. Was she afraid too? Or was she staring at the back of the man who she loved, who was leading her away to safety. Did she still have love in her eyes when he saw them? And why did he interrupt the straight path to heterosexual bliss he was walking with her, in front of her, guiding her to it. What if their eyes met in mutual relief? What if they saw what the audience sees at the end of The Graduate (1967)? What if when Orpheus diverted from his march to heterosexual marriage he turned around and saw that Eurydice was relieved? What if he saw his own relief reflected in her eyes as she disappeared back into the land of what we do in the night? When he looked at her, she looked at her through his eyes, and he looked at him through hers.

If Camp Miasma is about anything it is about the tension between of “spectatoring”, embodiment, and carnal pleasure. It is about a young nerdy queer director named Kris who had her queer awakening watching the original Camp Miasma movie, an in-universe slasher series not unlike Friday the 13^th. Specifically, her queer awakening came as she looked into the eyes of the final girl, played by an actress called Billy, as Billy is killed by the movie’s villain, Little Death^[2]. Little Death kills her mid intercourse, following Scream logic. But the sex is bad, and she has been shoddily manipulated into it. Still, somehow as the murdered ghost of an autogynephile now known as Little Death stabs his spear into her body, the final girl appears to cum. The original film is notably directed by a Ray Blanchard, a man who surely by non-legally binding coincidence shares a name with the man who coined the term autogynephilia: the pseudoscientific belief that trans women attracted to women are not actually attracted to women, but projecting onto the women a perverted narcissism, a view of themselves as sexy women. Autogynephilia, if it has any merit at all (which is dubious) provides us with the insight that sometimes (cis and trans) women are turned on by “spectatoring” themselves, by imagining how they look from outside themselves. Kris watches Billy watching Little Death watch Billy cum and die. This is why she is gay. Or at least how she knew that she was.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder), now an adult and an acclaimed indie director, has been given permission to restart the Camp Miasma franchise and she has travelled to Billy’s (Gillian Anderson) house to attempt to convince her to be in the movie. The studio barely know who Billy is. No one really cares. All they want is for a young queer (but not trans) director to adapt the IP of Camp Miasma thus allowing them to paper over the franchise’s transphobic past. Kris has other ideas. This series means so much to Kris. And Kris wants Billy. Billy, it turns out, lives as a recluse on the property, the old campground, the was used as the set for the original Camp Miasma. A snowstorm strands the two together. And then, seemingly taking inspiration for Marcela Fernández Violante’s Misterio (1980) the movie world and the more plain reality Kris is from blur as the two women’s passions burn and Kris’ heart thaws.

In a movie where the sex is sex and the violence is also sex, but also still violence, it is a little difficult to say when the sex starts, but the normie sex starts shockingly early in the film. This is not your standard lesbian Hollywood film where copulation must occur near the film’s (tragic) climax. No, here performance and performativity truly blend, and role play is all there ever really is. But I am getting ahead of myself, and don’t want to spoil the whole damn thing. Afterall, I am publishing this before most of you even have the chance to see the movie. I’m trying to write this damn thing by only telling you what you absolutely need to know. And what you absolutely need to know is that the lesbian sex is super relatable.

Kris, despite her childhood lesbian awakening, has never quite been able to make sex work for her. In the trailer (and in the movie duh), she says “sex seems so easy for so many people, but I’ve never been able to get there with someone else unless I’m really far away in my head.” She says this line to justify her weed use during sex. She needs to dissociate to cum. She doesn’t really know what she wants in sex, but she knows that if she’s too present she’ll think too much, get anxious, be overly intellectual about her own body, and ultimately “fail”. That is, she won’t have the sex she wants to have. Except, the sex she has on weed also isn’t the sex she wants to have. The movie positions this as something she needs to be freed from. Hannah Einbinder, does an incredible job of portraying this anxiety, one that seems to carry over between roles, from her character in Hacks. We know Kris wants something more. She wants what she sees in Billy’s eyes. She wants what she saw in Billy’s eyes as Little Death’s spear plunged into her womb.

Despite all her charming awkwardness and self loathing, Kris isn’t about to pass up the opportunity to try to get with Billy. So instead of slowly escalating flirting to touching to kissing over the course of the night, Kris decides to surprise Billy by standing naked in her kitchen/living room and offering herself up to her just like that. For both their sakes thank fuck no one misread anything. Billy says yes and then we get to see it. We get to see what is wrong with Kris. The older woman lays on her side, caressing Kris’s body below her. Kris bubbles with anxious nervous happy energy. Billy’s hand slides down Kris’ stomach, disappearing, we know, to hover, gently touching, Kris’s vulva. With a smile Billy asks how Kris likes to be touched, how she can please her. Kris, well, Kris can’t answer. The younger woman spits out “dealer’s choice” with a strained laugh. She has no clue how her own pleasure functions. She does not want to think about it. Thinking about it will make her cease up. She needs weed. She needs to be far away. She needs to dissociate. She has a pussy, sure, but beyond basic maintenance, she really doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s for other people. Other people know what they want to do with it. If she just gets high and lets them do whatever they do, maybe something will feel good. Maybe something will work. While I’m sure this feeling is common to many cis and trans women, if you’ve ever had bottom surgery, you especially know exactly what Kris is feeling in this moment. It is the feeling of being an adult, and therefore being expected to know your own body, your own genitals, your own pleasure, and having absolutely no clue how to do that. Fuck I could use a joint.

The trailer opens with Billy, Gillian Anderson, doing her best Scarlet from Gone With The Wind as she says “Out here, there are certain nights when you just get this feeling that some psycho killer who’s going to chop you up into a million pieces. Oh, I like that feeling.” It turns out, so does Kris. Kris has been fantasizing about being a slasher movie bimbo chased by Little Death. Kris can feel sexy when she imagines herself from Little Death’s point of view. That’s what Billy and Kris share. They’re cis women who long for the violent gaze of a predatory, serial killing autogynephile. At least, they long for it as long as it’s not real. They’re into CNC (consent-non-consent, a form of roleplay). “Spectatoring” themselves from the positionality of Little Death is what finally saves Kris from her sexual stupor, from her not knowing her body. Little Death can plunge into her body, and she can be him while he does.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma then, is a movie about the tribulations and joys of being outside yourself during sex. It is about how dissociation and a lack of knowledge of ones’ body, a lack of presence in it, can make sex hard and unenjoyable. But it is also about how being outside oneself, and viewing yourself as another might, can give you the sexual knowledge and gratification that you have been longing for. It’s dialectical. Does it work for you?

^[1] I’m paraphrasing Gayle Rubin’s “The Leather Menace” here, which is a great essay you all should read.

^[2] If you don’t get the reference/joke, I’m not explaining it. Learn some French.