Word: porn
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...these shows attempt to combine music-video artiness (think jumpy film-to-video cuts) with a veneer of semiupscale erotic swank (think Bob Guccione's bachelor pad). You can tell they offer a somewhat better grade of porn than the local adult video store because they don't star actors named Long or Chesty; instead they feature respectable, if not always heavily-employed, talents like Emily Lloyd and Julian Sands, who played the aforementioned George. Red Shoe Diaries is narrated by X-Files star David Duchovny, who has hosted the series since it first aired, pre-X-Files, four years...
...doesn't take long to realize that the common thread linking these series is not so much a preponderance of flesh, or even ludicrous dialogue, but the fact that the shows are meant to be expressions, however bizarrely executed, of female fantasy. This stands in sharp contrast to most porn, a genre in which it would usually be difficult to sell a film featuring a demure young woman who manages to unleash a cross-dresser's inner heterosexual (to cite an example from Strangers). While most of these series are produced by men, they aim--and succeed--at attracting...
...speeches may never have been used. The jaunty, confident head of the family most often, it turns out, lived off his wife's salary as a legal secretary (when he managed occasionally to earn a bit of money, he did so by editing a not very successful soft-porn magazine called Hot Dog). The super-American, his daughter learns, was born not in Ohio, as he claimed, but in Vilna, Lithuania, five years earlier than his supposed birth date. The Jewish convert to right-wing Catholicism, Mary finds, was never accepted as anything but a Jew by his wife...
...right with Melrose, and it only got better. During the 1994-95 season the story lines became more and more compellingly ridiculous. Former porn star Traci Lords showed up to lure Sydney into a polygamous cult, while nutbag Dr. Kimberly Shaw joined a paramilitary self-help group featuring Mackenzie Phillips...
This insistence that "bad" speech is a direct cause of "bad" behavior was not new; 19th-century social purists and some leading conservative feminists fought to suppress "vicious" literature, as well as information about contraception. But a century later, the revival of a feminist anti-porn movement coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of conservative Republicanism buoyed by an intolerant religious right. Left-wing protests of pornography and "hate" speech, in general, helped legitimate growing right-wing censorship campaigns. Their targets differed--activists on the right focused on sex and AIDS education, the study of evolution...