IDEOLOGIZED SMUT AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

by Andy Nowicki

Why did the sexual revolution take place? How did traditional notions of wedlock first get undermined? Who sought to effect this massive change, and to what end?

These questions are aptly investigated elsewhere, and are beyond the scope of my inquiry, which is composed for an altogether different purpose. That said, I think it must be acknowledged that these “changes and rearranges” didn’t just happen by accident. These trends were, to a greater or lesser degree, shoved upon us by those who have the power and resources to engage in effective trend-setting and opinion-shaping.

How much have they created ex nihilo, or contrived from scratch, and to what extent have they merely taken advantage of opportunities which in fact arose quite organically?

Were The Beatles manufactured in a Tavistock Institute test lab, as some allege, or did they come about entirely on their own, yet were talked into hitching a ride along with the same Zeitgeist-planners who projected the counter-culture into prominence and notoriety?

Similarly, was the Laurel Canyon music scene a CIA front from the get-go, with the members of various bands being quite witting accomplices of this centrally-orchestrated effort to degenerate the morals of the public, to erode traditional attitudes on sexuality, and generally to loose “mere anarchy upon the world,” the better to create a crisis, in order to enhance their central power and control through the time-tested “problem-reaction-solution” dialectic? Or was this scene, and the “hippie” lifestyle and degraded morals it promoted (“Tune in, turn on, drop out”; “make love, not war,” etc.), merely opportunistically hijacked by the controllers, the better to wreak their planned cultural chaos?

Were the halter-top, the miniskirt, the bikini, the push-up bra, and similar items of apparel invented and marketed with the idea of making ladies into whores, and thus stoking every manner of unrest between men and women, as well as an overall dissipation of chastity? Or did the whore-conditioning come first, and in some sense organically, over time, with the help of such subtly pro-sexualizing anthems as “Georgy Girl”?

These are questions about which reasonable people may differ, but the overall trajectory of events couldn’t be clearer to those with discernment. The sexual revolution surely didn’t come about by happenstance; it was a “revolution from above,” as it were; its tenets were actively supported and promoted by those with clout and influence. It was relentlessly foisted upon the populace through the various venues of popular entertainment.

Of course, we shouldn’t be so naïve here as to think that sex hasn’t always “sold”; there need not be a spurious agenda behind the marketing of salacious material. But prior to the onset of the sexual revolution, there existed no tendentious rationalization of smut as “art”;  for most of recorded history, in fact, smut was simply and unadornedly smutty; salacious pornography existed for the sake of satiating man’s ample appetite for salacity, nothing more.

With the sexual revolution’s onset, however, smut has become an ideological instrument, through which the smut-consumer gets forcibly “reeducated.” Often this happens through a weirdly discombobulating procedure by which the viewer is both systematically tantalized and traumatized, in a manner similar to the “Ludovico Technique” of torture applied on Alex in “A Clockwork Orange.”

Ideologized smut: instrument of simultaneous tantalization and trauma

The eyes of the smut-propaganda consumer are prized open—not by force, as in Alex’s case—but by the base allurement of the subject matter, after which he is subjected to embarrassment and humiliation by proxy, the result of which is indeed a kind of brainwashing, through which lust is inwardly weaponized, leading to decreased self-control and increased debasement of spirit.

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Perhaps the most relevant pop-culture template in this regard is the dynamic on display in Mike Nichol’s 1967 film “The Graduate,” wherein Dustin Hoffman’s character is both tantalized and traumatized by the prospect of carnal relations with Ann Bancroft’s now-iconic “Mrs. Robinson.”

Hoffman’s character, a fidgety and virginal young man named Benjamin Braddock, clearly finds the advances of this older woman—a family friend, no less-- highly disconcerting, yet he eventually yields to temptation, touching off a love affair that is ultimately emotionally devastating in its consequences for everyone involved.

For the viewer, prurient interest is aroused at the same time that anxiety is abundantly generated; there is something heartlessly predatory about Mrs. Robinson, as well as the carelessness she displays in the very act of angling to deflower this hapless youngster. She seems altogether motivated less by attraction to Benjamin than by sheer boredom. In fact, it would appear to be Benjamin’s very vulnerable awkwardness that leads her to want him carnally; a sort of ruthless psychic succubus, Mrs. Robinson seeks to drain the last vestiges of Benjamin’s innocence for sport.

Another motivator, of course, is the contempt that she feels for her bland and juiceless husband. Mrs. Robinson clearly loathes his cringing benignity and general absence of anything resembling gumption. She takes young Benjamin on as a “project,” to see if she can “make a man” of him (though of course she wishes to accomplish this strictly on her own terms, which casts this entire motivation in doubt—how “manly” can he really become if he is really just her pet, after all?).

The entire queasy dynamic of the seduction depicted in “The Graduate” provokes the viewer to simultaneous embarrassment and arousal; indeed, humiliation seems in general to be the very point of this entire cinematic exercise.

The “graduate” of the title forfeits his dignity and goodness, and graduates to corruption and sacrilege. His final act is to disrupt a matrimonial sacrament and steal the bride for himself. The fact that this bride is the daughter of the very woman who used him to cuckold her husband only serves to underline the extent of the outrage that has been perpetrated.


Throughout the course of the plot, the viewer vicariously accompanies Benjamin from a pitiful beginning to a terrible end, wherein he has effectively cast himself from grace.

A ruined bride, a man cast from grace

Undoubtedly "The Graduate" “works” as drama, and perhaps even as “art”; however, the film’s lasting influence is more on the loins-level; for all of its lofty thematic intentions, it is as a soft-porn propaganda piece that it has had the greatest impact as a purveyor of a deeply destructive revolution which has inverted sexual morality, leading to the current baleful status quo (that is, the wreckage of the “current year”), wherein chastity is scorned while concupiscence is revered.