The following passage is taken from Andy Nowicki's collection of essays, Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 3: On Being Unwanted. Volume 1 and Volume 2 are also available for purchase.
A lesser-known film than "The Graduate," but one which charts roughly the same
thematic course, albeit in a rather more openly sleazy manner, is Roger Vadim’s
1971 movie “Pretty Maids All In a Row.”
Here, the loins-level soft-porn orientation is much more up front, any protestations of artistic intent have scant merit. The open aim is clearly exploitation and titillation. The fact that a film of this kind could be made with “A-list” Hollywood stars like Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson—along with notable names like Telly Savalis and Roddy McDowell in supporting roles—demonstrates the degree to which the propagandistic efforts to “degenerate the faithful” had truly gone mainstream.
Here, the loins-level soft-porn orientation is much more up front, any protestations of artistic intent have scant merit. The open aim is clearly exploitation and titillation. The fact that a film of this kind could be made with “A-list” Hollywood stars like Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson—along with notable names like Telly Savalis and Roddy McDowell in supporting roles—demonstrates the degree to which the propagandistic efforts to “degenerate the faithful” had truly gone mainstream.
In “Pretty Maids,” a high school football coach and guidance counselor (Hudson) has numerous trysts with several students, all of whom are shapely, leggy, buxom, and perpetually horny. Periodically, for reasons never fully revealed, he murders them. Another storyline involves a sexy teacher (Dickinson) seducing a virginal teenage boy. The latter plot is a reiteration of the queasy “Mrs. Robinson” dynamic; once again, the older woman’s forwardness causes the boy extreme discomfort as well as intense arousal, until he at last capitulates to her advances.
As a propaganda piece, then, “Pretty Maids” advances along
the same track as “The Graduate,” bringing the viewer to a similarly desultory
state of spirit. Here the “lady-killer” is an actual killer, who gets away with his crimes, and is even
ultimately considered a hero; moreover, he manipulates his colleague
(Dickinson) into indulging in an illicit affair with a boy, who in turn is
corrupted, with the suggestion in the end that he will grow to be just like his
“lady-killer” mentor.
It is true enough that the movie—lurid and ludicrous though
it is—could be seen as a kind of “cautionary tale.” The wages of sin, for many
of the debauched nubile girls depicted—is indeed death; the very man who
pleasures them via fornication is the one who violently deprives them of their
lives. But of course the movie is marketed towards young men, and they are the primary targets, and recipients, of its
softcore propagandistic poisoning.
The film presents a hypersexualized culture in a kind of
weirdly idealized way; in the high school it depicts, gorgeous young girls are
always plentiful, carnally precocious, and “rarin’ to go”; moreover, the
idealized man (the hyper-macho Hudson sporting his porn-star ’stache) is one for
whom normal rules of morality do not apply; he is an unrestrained id without
consequence, and the perverse “God” of this pornographic world; his young
mentor worships him and, after a youthful bout of awkwardness,
eventually begins to emulate his behavior and enjoy his own bevy of nubile
conquests, along with (one presumes) the option to commit murder in the future,
should such an appetite ever manifest itself.
The loins-level appeal of this fantasy realm is obvious, but
it just as obviously runs counter to reality, where sex is in fact a deeply
consequential act, and where beautiful girls, along with plain ones—are rarely
rarin’ to go, particularly if you are someone besides a high-status “Rock
Hudson-with-a-porn-star-’stache” type of guy living in the post-sexual revolution West.
Thus the porn world presented in “Pretty Maids” operates as
a psy-op on multiple fronts. Not only does it manage to degenerate the morals
of its viewers via exposure to female nudity and general smutty content, not
only does it operate on the same arousal/embarrassment dialectic discussed
above, whereby the viewer becomes complicit in his own humiliation even as he
is corrupted… but on top of these effects, it also provokes in the viewer a
powerful despair borne of cognitive
dissonance.
Put simply, the viewer knows well that the real world has
nothing in common with the softcore porn world he is “consuming” in the privacy
of his mind-space. In the real world, he is generally unwanted by women, unless
he is rich, high-status and good-looking (in which case he has little need for
porn in the first place), yet when he watches porn he sees a stand-in for
himself becoming successful with a legion of sexy girls. In porn world, the
sexy girls in question all seem to be terminal nymphomaniacs, while in the real
world their actual-world stand-ins are more often cold, haughty, and completely
uninterested in sex (at least, with him).
Unless he is mentally unbalanced, the viewer is of course
perfectly able to distinguish between the sexed-up “porn world” of his
mind-space and the rather more drab and lonely real world his actual body and soul inhabits. But a sort of
cognitive dissonance nevertheless can be said to take place, in his case.
Living in porn world has trained his mind to expect certain results, and to
respond with desultory sulkiness when those results don’t come to pass. Though
his higher self knows better, his loins—those tragic, untreasured, undesired
loins attached to the body of the low-status male!—have been conditioned to
expect something entirely different. He is in some sense absurdly trained to
expect even that which his reason has quite fittingly led him to dismiss.
It amounts to a final humiliation. Though the insidious
practice of an infernal psychic alchemy, his enemy has managed to fasten him to
his yoke, and to do so in a cunning fashion, by directly appealing to that which draws him in. He is finally
undermined, and enslaved, even as he ostentatiously scoffs at the means of his
enslavement. He is hoisted by the petard of his own useless, fruitless lusts,
shamed by his conditioned disinclination to keep himself in check.
Connected content: Ideologized Smut and the Sexual Revolution
Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Affirmative Right, is the author of eight books, including Under the Nihil, The Columbine Pilgrim, Considering Suicide, and Beauty and the Least. Visit his Soundcloud page and his YouTube channel. His author page is Alt Right Novelist.
