Red Shoe Diaries S01E03 “You Have the Right to Remain Silent”, Aired July 14, 1992 IMDB
Zalman King, a former actor who produced Nine and a Half Weeks and a few other softcore mainstream films, created the anthology series Red Shoe Diaries which became the flagship of 1990s direct-to-cable-TV softcore erotica, free from the constraints of both the MPAA and Broadcast Standards and Practices. The framing device is that Jake (pre-X-Files David Duchovny) is haunted by the suicide of his fiancée. He found her diary and learned she was having an affair with another man. He places ads in newspapers asking women to tell him their stories of desire. The confessional mode, as an inquiry into the “truth” of female sexuality, is built into the series’ premise.
Diaries epitomized a particular visual and storytelling style which, for better or worse, became the hallmark of “female oriented” video erotica: aspirational middle-class style and settings, a focus on female subjectivity, soft jazz soundtracks, and the use of montage, dissolves and other non-naturalist film techniques to further “soften” the already softcore sex scenes. It tried very hard to be “arty”, the kind of porn you could watch at home with your partner without embarrassment, and you didn’t even have to go to a video store to get it. It also tried for mainstream appeal, i.e. heterosexual (with the occasional bit of lesbianism) and vanilla, but there were a number of episodes that portrayed kink.
(See the podcast You Must Remember This for an in-depth exploration of Dairies‘ times and influences, and Andrews, David. 2006. Soft in the middle: the contemporary softcore feature in its contexts. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press.)
“You have…” starred post-Star Trek Denise Crosby and Robert Knepper, and was directed by Zalman King himself.
After the usual opening scene of Jake picking up a letter answering his ad, the episode starts off with Crosby’s character, Mona, at a gym, eying the men working out. While this is an attempt to give some “female gaze”, it doesn’t follow through, as Knepper is fully clothed throughout the episode, and the narrative emphasis is on the revelation of Crosby’s body. For all the interest in the female perspective on sexuality, RSD was very shy about male nudity.
Softcore’s broad acceptance has been conditioned not by a curtailment of the exposure and objectification of the female body but by a rigorously feminized expansion of the same. The implicit industrial assumption is that women will tolerate a sexist brand of spectacle if it is complemented by a diegesis that exudes an opposite inequity. This development likewise assumes that women are more offended by the integration of female nudity with motifs like sadomasochism, misogyny, violence, and transgression than by nudity per se.
[Andrews 2006:14, emphasis in original]
One guy in particular, Nick (Knepper), catches Mona’s eye. He comes in every day and only plays racquetball, without talking to anyone else.
Mona, a uniformed police officer, secretly smashes his car’s tail light, and uses this as a pretext to pull him over. She mock-arrests him and takes him to an abandoned art gallery where she puts him in a chainlink cage and handcuffs him to a barber chair.
The episode is structured like a police interrogation, except what is “revealed” is Mona, both physically and psychologically. At the climax, Nick is on the verge of overpowering Mona, but she remains defiantly defiant.
In the tag, Mona and Nick play racquetball together. Nick demands that Mona wear a dress and meet his grandmother, to which Mona replies, “Bullshit…”
Mona is, possibly, an attempt to portray a masculinized woman, or at least somebody’s idea of a heterosexual butch. It’s also an echo of The Next Generation episode “The Naked Now”, in which Tasha Yar, the tough female security officer played by Crosby, falls under the influence of an alien disease that removes inhibitions, and she puts on lingerie and has a torrid tryst with Mr. Data, the android. In the denouement, Yar tells Data, “It never happened.” In this view, sex for Yar is necessarily a problem; being a sexual subject is inherently a vulnerability that compromises her competence.
Softcore cable erotica was mostly an ’80s and ’90s phenomena, superseded in the new millennium by more liberal sexuality on broadcast TV and especially streaming internet porn. Today, physical and streaming releases are hard to come by. Softcore “slept” until the 2010s when Fifty Shades revived it.
If you compare Diaries and its imitators to Secretary and Fifty Shades, there are several similarities: softcore sex, the emphasis on female subjectivity, the aspirational aesthetic, a woman’s sexual initiation into the world of masculine sexuality. The key difference is that the archetypal Diaries protagonist (standing in for the ideal viewer) is a post-feminist career woman who wants and/or needs to loosen up sexually. In Secretary and Fifty Shades, the protagonists are young, adrift women with zero sexual or life experience. It’s the difference between women and girls. In my view, they constitute related but distinct genres.
