THE PORN GULAG: "PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW"

by Andy Nowicki

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.

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