Sexploitation

A sexploitation film (or "sex-exploitation film") is a class of independently produced, low-budget feature film that is generally associated with the 1960s, and that serves largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films. Sexploitation films were generally exhibited in urban grindhouse theatres, the precursor to the adult movie theaters of the 1970s and 1980s that featured hardcore pornography content. The term soft-core is often used to designate non-explicit sexploitation films after the general legalization of hardcore content. Nudist films are often considered to be subgenres of the sex-exploitation genre as well. "Nudie" films and "Nudie-cuties" are associated genres.

Following a series of United States Supreme Court rulings in the late 1950s and 1960s, increasingly explicit sex films were distributed. In 1957, Roth v. United States had established that sex and obscenity were not synonymous. The genre first emerged in the U.S. around 1960. There were initially three broad types: "nudie cuties" such as The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), films set in nudist camps like Daughter of the Sun (1962) and somewhat more "artistic" foreign pictures, such as The Twilight Girls (1961). Nudie cuties were popular in the early 1960s, and were a progression from the nudist camp films of the 1950s. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that films set in nudist camps were exempt from the general ban on film nudity, as they were deemed to be educational. In the early 1960s, films that purported to be documentaries and were thus "educational" enabled sexploitation producers to evade the censors. Nudie cuties were soon supplanted by "roughies," which commonly featured male violence against women, including kidnapping, rape and murder.Lorna (1964) by Russ Meyer is widely considered to be the first roughie.Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman's Scum of the Earth! (1963) is another film that is cited as among the first in this genre. Other notable roughie directors include Doris Wishman.

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