Q: What the heck is soft X?
A: The most erotic (and shortest lived) of all trash sex film genres

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The best thing about our system of government is that everything not explicitly forbidden is permitted. Shock jocks  say everything imaginable short of being thrown off the radio. Porn producers feature girls on their 18th birthday. Hollywood is expert at maximizing sex and violence within the PG-13 rating. Regular movies skate to the edge of T&A and T&A movies skate to the edge of frontal nudity, and so on.

The thing not shown on TV is nipples. The thing not shown in contemporary cable softcore is genitalia.

In Soft X (roughly 1969-1971) the thing not being shown was explicit sex, but you could be anatomically explicit, go right to the edge of sex and were free to imply whatever you wanted.

I take a dim view of content standards in art so the soft-x genre tickles me to death as an inadvertent parody of content standards.

These movies could not be classed as porn because they run up to the limit and stop... and loiter. And the longer they play at not exceeding the limit the more comical the limit appears.

By virtuously following the rules these movies manage to turn even the most straightforward matrimonial sex into a bizarre fetish activity so ritualized and self-conscious that it seems dirtier than a xxx movie.

The two best examples of why no government should ever get involved with art are Soviet neo-realism and American soft-x. For all practical purposes these movies were directed by the government, and it shows. (In that sense they're like the crass "pornos" the party doles out in the proletarian sector in Orwell's 1984)

In the daring movies piece I talk about the vicarious thrill of movies that push the envelope. The idea is that a movie's daring is relative. An edgy old movie is often more thrilling than a tame new movie.

Nowhere is the "edge" so literal or visible as in these odd movies. When an actor makes a project of touching every centimeter of a partner except right there it's like a daredevil stunt... like if he happened to slip a siren would go off or the roof would collapse. (The old electric "Operation" game comes to mind.)

For all my unkind comments, these are incredibly sexy movies.

Censorship is stupid and immoral but that doesn't mean it's never had any positive aesthetic effect. Heck, I think most of the world's best movies were made in America before 1960 and all those films were all censored. I can love the bizarre, symbolic Hollywood codes devised to circumvent the censorship even as I decry the censorship as evil. I can also appreciate the Great Wall of China while decrying slavery, or whatever other forced-labor schemes were necessary to construct such a thing.

The genre is marked by explicit nudity and lots and lots of simulated sex acts. A proper soft-X movie is technically softcore but much stronger than typical softcore because it takes whatever can be shown and shows it a lot.

Nobody will ever define "erotica" and "pornography" to everyone's satisfaction, but most would agree that erotica is more suggestive or relies more upon imagination while pornography is bluntly literal. A true soft-X movie is literal and explicit while relying on implication at every turn. The genre is either the most erotic form of pornography or the most literal form of erotica. Whatever it is, it's engaging. 

Unfortunately soft-X is a long-dead genre in America. And if someone started making soft-X again tomorrow it wouldn't be the same because we would feel on some level that we were being cheated. Today soft-X film-makers would be making a creative or commercial choice to stop short of "whatever the law allows" rather than having that artistic reserve forced on them. And it would show somehow.

In Europe the formula has survived in a small way with the genitalia-yes, intercourse-no erotic cinema of folks like Jess Franco, Erwin Dietrich and Tinto Brass. Those European exploitation movies are 100 times glossier and more professional than old American soft-X which was a really grungy little genre while it lasted. The only similarity between old American soft-X and Tinto Brass style movies is that they share a similar range of sexual content.

A word about European soft-X style movies

Sometimes foreign movies show less than American movies because they are from more permissive societies. Sometimes European movies show more because they're from a more restrictive society. Here's how that works... 

In America we have the MPAA film ratings that define anything over R as being equally smutty and there's not really a mainstream theatrical market for anything above an R rating. A hypothetical American soft-X film would end up in a porn store the same as if it was XXX so what's the point?

But in Europe there was/is a *mainstream* market for movies just short of hardcore because they can be shown in mainstream theaters that would not show an XXX film.  Thus there's a commercial reason to make such films.

So a more permissive market causes the creation of some movies tamer than XXX.

And the opposite can happen. Many British horror films had some nudity that was cut for the American releases. Great Britain has always been very restrictive when it comes to film violence and almost all horror movies get rated 18. Since British horror films are automatically restricted to adult audiences why not to throw in some nudity? But America doesn't care much about violence and we let kids watch horror movies, so we would import horror films rated M and cut out the nudity so they could be rated PG.

The UK was more restrictive which led to stronger content.

Until about 1972 all adult films had an element of suspense because you could *almost* see whatever was forbidden. In the 1950s "adults only" movies featured scantier costumes and more scandalous themes than the MPAA production code allowed. There was a lot of implication of toplessness. ("I could swear you could see her nipple when she reached for the towel") In the 1960s bared breasts became commonplace and a glimpse of pubic hair became the tantalizing forbidden zone. Then full nudity became permissible for women provided they kept their legs together, though penises were verboten. The advent of XXX eventually ended all suspense.

In soft-X they show everything they can and show it a lot, so it's not a tease. The constant promise of something more is more akin to suspense. You know intellectually that they're not going to show certain things, but everything is arranged to maintain the feeling that they might. 

Suspense is entertaining. We get on roller coasters knowing it's not going to fly off the rails, but we derive entertainment from the apprehension that it might. Most patrons of old carnival sideshows knew full well they were not going to see a real mermaid anymore than magic fans expect to see a woman actually sawed in half.

Often you just know they're doing it, but they're not. They use dozens of little tricks employing the basic tenants of magic– mis-direction, optical illusions, and (most importantly) acting. There's quite a lot people can do with acting. A woman gets on top of a man and haltingly eases herself onto him,  stopping to readjust things with her hand until he's in all the way and moving slowly until the internal lubrication is even. Except the guy's penis isn't erect and is sitting in plain sight arranged as far from the action as possible! It's crazy.

Sometimes they play on the audiences knowledge of the rules. When the camera stops just short of something it creates the implication is that the camera has to stop because the people are really doing it when the camera is actually avoiding showing that they AREN'T doing it. Keeping the illusion alive. 

Other soft-X films take a charming "who cares" attitude and will zoom right in on the nuts and bolts of these near-miss non-couplings. I love those films... they're cute, somehow. It become bewildering why these people are acting like they are having intercourse when you can so plainly see they aren't. It's like they're so sex crazed that they don't even need to consummate their passion.

The activities in soft-X movies are a little different than sex in XXX movies. Soft X movies have a lot of caressing and rolling around and focus on the entirety of the bodies involved. Fellatio is the most visually overt of the major sex acts and thus the hardest to fake. XXX movies tend to be fellatio-heavy because it's so visual. Soft X movies have more (pretend) intercourse and cunnilingus. Without male orgasm Soft X sex is free-form... it's not leading up to a point, so there's no narrative logic to the acts.

Did audiences know what they were supposed to imagine?

It's hard to put ourselves in the shoes of a 1970 soft-X filmgoer. Had they ever seen a hardcore film?

The whole logic of the genre seems to be that you know exactly what you're not seeing and your mind fills in the blanks. But isn't it likely that some filmgoers didn't know what x, y and z look like? Fellatio is a particular issue because it can only be faked by covering up a lot of what's (not) going on. And fellatio was not a universal practice in 1970. Presumably frequenting prostitutes was also not a universal practice, so were many filmgoers left to imagine a hidden act that they'd heard of but never seen?

I raise this amazingly trivial question because it once struck me that the mock-fellatio in soft-X movies is odd because there are no physical limitations. Without an actual object to deal with actress can act out whatever she thinks is sexy looking–call it sexual air-guitar. But the audience can only really appreciate such fanciful deviations from reality if they're familiar with the reality. So it may be that soft-X movies are sexier to an audience familiar with XXX. Funny how that works...

It's an inconsistent genre. Some films have tons of realistic simulated intercourse but are somewhat anatomically shy. Others are full of lengthy anatomical close-ups but with highly unconvincing sex. Frequently things happen that seem to beg the definition of hardcore, and sometimes the actors are really having sex, but filmed in such a way you can't see "it." Sometimes the productions are almost as professional as "real" movies while others are as seedy as the seediest porn film. And so on...

The easiest way to distinguish Soft X from conventional sexploitation is that Soft X films have male frontal nudity–generally of the soft variety, hence the name. Full male nudity was (and remains) a big taboo. There were many 1970s European sex films where nude women often have their legs open while the men remain entirely covered.

Why has the penis always been the biggest film taboo?

The image of an erect penis has a weird effect on people. I don't get it. I see the social effect but I don't grok the underlying instinct. But, for whatever reason, a lot of people draw the line at the penis. Is it instinctual or a cultural attitude so ancient we've forgotten the original reason?

Perhaps cavemen running around aroused was a major aggressive act and  wearing pants is one of our numerous social measures to minimize fighting within the tribe.

Or perhaps male homosexuality is was very common among early people and visual displays were a key element of the behavior. If suppressing homosexuality was adaptive for civilizations (as it seems to have been, for whatever reason) then our whole visible penis taboo might exist only to regulate male behavior with males.

Every 1960s town's "art theatre" was probably, among other things, a notorious meeting spot for gay men. I'm guessing that vice cops were hypersensitive to  movie content they felt would appeal to a homosexual audience. (Women and children didn't tend to hang out in 1960s adult theatres so they weren't likely to be corrupted by the movies no matter what was in them.)

Not even a theory, just a thought.

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