Softcore films

Obscenity laws made hard core inaccessible or illegal in many places and soft core was something you could take a date to.

I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, which is right next door to the province of Quebec . I remember my first (and only) exposure to the Emmanuelle films was as an early teen. After midnight one of the French language TV channels would air them or some other softcore porn / erotic film. I recall one scene that apparently took place in a Bangkok bar where one of the naked dancers would smoke a cigarette through her asshole. Farah Fawcett would be appalled!

There are yet other mysteries to explore.

Why did people ride horse drawn carriages when cars are so much faster?

Why did people send letters when text or email is so much easier?

I remember “Sneak Previews” covering an Emmanuel film. Roger Ebert gave it a purple and promisin’, while Gene Siskel gave it a thumbs down, way down!

"Emmanuelle" is such a popular topic on gay websites!

When I was a kid, my parents had an ONTV cable box subscription that featured late-night ‘softcore’ films. I remember titles like Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman, Last Tango in Paris, In Praise of Older Women, and even the X-rated Cinderella.

It's too bad really, because some softcore films (gay & straight) were hotter than the xxx movies. I guess i come from an era where we recognized that at times less can be more. Personally I find a hot man with no shirt on, a hairy chest, in very tight jeans with a huge moose knuckle even sexier than most completely naked men. The thought of whats hidden in those jeans is a major turn on.

[quote] I recall one scene that apparently took place in a Bangkok bar where one of the naked dancers would smoke a cigarette through her asshole.

In the original "Emmanuelle," a naked dancer "smokes" a cigarette through her vagina in a Bangkok bar. I wonder if that's what you're thinking of.

The truly trenchant...Deadly Weapons

Chatterbox

It was a way for our puritanical/catholic/hebrew families to dip a toe into a racy, more sexually liberal world. Pour yourself a strong grass hopper and slip into something more comfortable.

Any good ones with guys

[quote]R12 The most famous was the 1974 Emmanuelle: the Joys of a Woman starring Sylvia Kristel. It had about a million official and unofficial sequels

One book listed a later EMMANUEL plot as, “A beautiful woman washes up on an island inhabited by a shipwrecked sailor. This delights him.”

[quote] one of the naked dancers would smoke a cigarette through her asshole.

Eye ame not dancer but eye smoke cigarette vith poosey. If client pays extra moneys.

David Duchovny and Billy Wirth have a sexy shirtless fight over a dead broad they both loved in the Red Shoe Diaries movie, on tubi now. Lots of hot, hard asses on the tv show too!

[quote]Any good ones with guys

I can't think of any good ones. If they were they were usually XXX movies which were heavily censored. There were "educational" gay sex videos in the '80s and '90s, like Karma Sutra guides. Not explicitly hardcore, but couples that were obviously having sex, usually filmed with a romantic or sensual tone.

Radley Metzger was something of a pioneer in arthouse erotica with Therese and isabelle, Carmen, Baby, Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet

R2, yeah, Quebec has had a more liberal attitude towards sex for a long time. For many years it has also been possible to get into films in Quebec movie theatres when you are several years younger than other provinces. eg. you can get into films in Quebec at 13 that you have to be 17 to see in Ontario. The movie rating classification system is different.

If your parents had a Skinemax subscription, you could sneak into the living room when they were asleep and watch those movies with the sound down. Obviously the internet changed everything, but back in the dark ages, you took whatever you could get.

The Australian version of the UK ‘s Channel 4 is the free-to-air SBS. Apart from well regarded local news and current affairs documentaries, features non-English language ethnic programming, including international news, soccer and subtitled TV shows (Inspector Rex was probably their most watched show outside of Eurovision and the World Cup) captioned by their in house translators.

Outside of this, what most people watch SBS for would be the daily selection of world movies and Arthouse cinema. At 9:30pm every night you could watch a movie in French or Arabic or Korean. And there was an excellent chance that nudity would be featured.

Erotic Ghost Story in Cantonese must have been very popular because I swear it’s one point during the 1990s-2000s it was on every 3 or 4 months.

Gene’s thumb may have been down, but, believe me, his dick was UP!

r2 and r18 I also grew up in Ottawa. We didn't realize that CITY TV in Toronto also had Friday soft core films. Ontario had VERY strict censorship laws (could not show an erection, could not show a person's mouth making contact with another person's breasts or genitals, etc...) until the early 2000s when streaming and file sharing made censorship obsolete.

You could rent a butchered 35 minute porn film in Ottawa, or cross the bridge to Quebec and rent the uncensored 90 minute version. When I was in (French, overwhelmingly Catholic) high school in the early 1980s, our grade 13 (when we were all 18 or 19) social studies teacher assigned a project where we all had to go to one of the porn cinemas Hull in groups and watch a porn film and write about our observations and reactions. Parents were upset but we were all of age.

We 'observed' a science teacher in a dark corner of he cinema.

Porn was for perverts.

My folks used softcore porn as an excuse to never pay for cable. If I wanted porn, I had to force myself past the curtain at my local video store. And it felt like all eyes were on my browsing….

[quote]social studies teacher assigned a project where we all had to go to one of the porn cinemas Hull in groups and watch a porn film and write about our observations and reactions. Parents were upset but we were all of age.

Yikes, even back then that teacher really could have gotten into a lot of trouble.

BTW which high school was that?

r25 Ecole Secondaire Charlebois (now closed) in Alta Vista.

This particular teacher was an elderly widowed woman who (it was rumoured) grew pot in her backyard and taught without her teeth as her dentures didn't fit properly (think Anne Ramsey) but she really excelled at getting us to challenge ourselves and our assumptions about the world.

Women do not like hardcore porn because the focus is always on the man’s orgasm

Does anyone remember one called Liz or something similar? It was on good old Skinimax back in the day, but it was about an exchange student (in her 30s), it was old, maybe a cut-down porn film, and I remember a scene where she can see a guy nude through the bottom of a water glass, and then they fuck.

Bette Midler had a joke about starring in the Jewish version of "Emmanuelle"-- "Temple Emmanuelle."

David Lipman who for years was the Judge on "Law & Order made a few hardcore and even wrote and directed and co-starred in one called "Big Thumbs". A soft version was on cable in the 80's but now it's a lost film. Since Lipman owned it he probably pulled it after he went mainstream.

"Emmanuelle," of course, was the inspiration for the fake film "Rochelle, Rochelle" that kept popping up on Seinfeld.

I vaguely remember a scene with a hot tattoo guy in a locker room

[quote] It's too bad really, because some softcore films (gay & straight) were hotter than the xxx movies. I guess i come from an era where we recognized that at times less can be more. Personally I find a hot man with no shirt on, a hairy chest, in very tight jeans with a huge moose knuckle even sexier than most completely naked men. The thought of whats hidden in those jeans is a major turn on.

R7 Very true. Something I've noticed, in hindsight, is that the softcore stuff often cast models that were far more aesthetically beautiful than the ones in the XXX stuff. The guys especially.

I remember when I was 12 or 13, my parents rented the VHS of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1981), starring queen of soft core, Sylvia Kristel. Just before popping it on, my dad banished us kids to the den. But I snuck out to catch a glimpse through the kitchen pass-through-- just in time to catch hunky Nicholas Clay disrobe and take a bath. I was smitten.

Prince Andrew's girlfriend Koo Stark was in some softcore movies. I wonder if he ever introduced her to his parents.

We'll never run out of T.W.A.T.

When I was a kid, there was one called "Melody in Love" a bunch of us watched at a sleepover. At some point, someone recorded it on VHS, and we passed out around for months. It was insanely dumb, but even for super gay me, it was exciting to see all the nudity.

Years later, I saw this parody on SNL, and knew it wasn't the only one who remembered "Melody in Love"

Sorry about the bad link.

[quote]R33 the softcore stuff often cast models that were far more aesthetically beautiful than the ones in the XXX stuff. The guys especially.

Well, of course. Real XXX porn is essentially a career killer. But soft core porn features regular out of work actors who might have gone to drama school or been actual fashion models. Real actors who are either on their way up or the way down, and so are willing to take their clothes off and simulate sex.

They’re not runaways that some sleezy pimp recruited from a bus stop.

Danny Pape was a Skinemax favorite of mine.

R34, yeah, Nicholas Clay did a lot of great nudity in those days: