A Little Bit Softer Now

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 16, 2007 3:30PM

When Chicagoist was little, we remember catching glimpses of softcore porn on Cinemax when no one was looking. We watched wide-eyed, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. We also remember as girls, learning much from late-night OnTV, keeping the sound turned down and the giggles to a minimum.

Softcore porn was something we could get our hands around without being horrified. As we got older, we found it taught us way more than high school sex-ed class (although, we did learn how to roll condoms down bananas, and that has come in really handy on a number of occasions).

But we’ll admit it, we never thought of the history or cultural impact behind softcore porn, and didn’t know we wanted to until we were turned on to Dave Andrews' book Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in its Contexts. Andrews isn’t messing around here, he’s serious and scientific, something we’ve never been able to accomplish when it comes to sex.

We read the introduction and were fascinated with the short history he gives of softcore porn, but with sentences like this, we know this isn’t going to be an easy read: “Because its routinized production and broad, centralized distribution have been facilitated by corporate America, contemporary softcore has in its socioaesthetic temper proved more static and staid then its progenitor.”

Hee hee, he said “progenitor.”

So tonight we’re going to pull out our DVDs of Red Shoe Diaries, grab our lover, and see if we can’t figure out this softcore stuff all on our own.

You can see David Andrews on Wednesday, January 17, at 7:00 p.m. at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th Street.