This article, subtitled Masturbatin'' in the Rain takes as its thesis the idea that the classic Hollywood musical as a vital
genre died as a result of the loosening of censorship during the 1960s. The dancing and singing scenes in musicals of Hollywood''s golden age had acted as symbolic ritual of courtship and mating that acted as a safe method for portraying lovemaking and
sexuality on screen. The essays begins by reimagining the class title dance
sequence from Singin’ in the Rain as a modern day movie in which Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks leaves his girlfriend’s chastity intact and goes out and masturbates in the car as a way of introducing the Freudian overtones at work in the Gene Kelly dance number, complete with falling rain as symbols of sperm and his umbrella as a phallic symbol.
From that point, the perspective examines such famous sequences as the barn raising dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a microcosm of the entire sequence of meeting, dating and sexual encounters between men and woman, as well as the reverse strip tease dance of Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon. The essays uses these specific examples to lead to the consideration of how the increasingly explicit method by which sex could be shown made the symbolism in these Hollywood musicals become utterly obsolete so that by the time the genre finally died, it was reduced merely showing saccharine family stories like My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music in which all sexuality was effectively made null and void. These sexless musicals from mid to late 1960s are contrasted with the energetic sexuality at work in almost every musical sequence from West Side Story, made just a few years before earlier in chronological terms, but a lifetime in terms of what movies were allowed to get away with sexually on screen.