The Innocence of Youth 3

There are hundreds of porn videos featuring young female performers on the market, but this 3rd edition of THE INNOCENCE OF YOUTH series raises interesting issues regarding both the video-makers and the prospective audience.

Format is simple: teens (aged 19 or so per the helpful Behind the Scenes interview short subject on the DVD) dressed in authentic Japanese Lolita doll costumes have submissive sex with burly studs. Director Eddie Powell has many of these features to his credit, including more conventional efforts like the PRETTY.DIRTY series.

What makes #3 unusual is its combination of odd ingredients that taken together could be construed as disturbing. Traditional soft porn in the '60s was frequently sold (as any fan of the vintage trailers can attest) not on the basis of being the "sexiest" or "hottest" but rather promising something "unusual" or never seen before. The pandering was to freak-show or kinkiness, usually not delivered in the actual film but promising the viewer a diversion from the ordinary.

The first two of the requisite four sex segments deliver what I'm alluding to. The girls are Mae Olsen and Tracey Sweet, both popular XXX performers, but both quite short and looking underage. In a real, mainstream movie (with no sex or innuendo), Mae could easily pass for a child, say the Patty McCormack role in THE BAD SEED.

They are outfitted in elaborate dresses which in the case of Mae never come off, focusing almost entirely on their primary sexual characteristics (as opposed to boob-centric mainstream porn). Mae's partner Eric Swiiss literally towers over her, perhaps a foot and a half taller. He is stoic and even a bit mean looking throughout the half hour of sex and while this is not a rape scene it is played similarly to one. The big difference being that Mae is a submissive, as director Powell visually indicates by a closeup of her placing her own arms behind her back for a blow job.

The rough treatment of the female performers does not rise to the level of s&m, but is rather in keeping with the current domination/submission craze fostered by 50 SHADES OF GREY. It's all perfectly legal because the performers are old enough to do porn (and willing enough) but what disturbed me is the pretense (shared by video-makers & viewers alike) that this is okay because the role-playing does not involve underage CHARACTERS but simply 19-year- old teens dressing up in little girl doll-like outfits. And the marketing perhaps accurately emphasizes the fact that these girls (the performers) may look innocent but really like going down & dirty - which may very well be true considering why they were attracted to the porn industry in the first place.

The other questionable segment has Tracey Sweet eventually removing most of her hard-to- unfasten doll dress to reveal her breasts, but partner Bruce Venture mistreats her in a fashion I did not associate with eroticism. He frequently spits in her mouth (perhaps aimed at a section of the Japanese market?) and physically manhandles her. (Swiss in his segment spanks Mae but that is obviously part of the s&m fetish and is so common in porn as to be almost ubiquitous.) The coldness and clinical nature of these sex acts is something I'm not used to even watching a cross-section of contemporary gonzo videos, bringing back bad memories of the videos of the guy who started the lamentable gonzo craze decades ago, Max Hardcore.

The other editions in this series are more conventional, featuring big-name stars like Riley Reid and Jenna J. Ross going through their paces in the odd dresses. Hope Howell's segment was intriguing in a referential way because she looks so much like the gorgeous actress Alessandra Torresani who was so sexy (without sex scenes) as the human/robot iconic star of Sci-Fi Channel's series CAPRICA.

And in other videos the pint-sized girls like Mae Olsen are nude and basically interchangeable with their more voluptuous sisters in porn. It's the sum total of fetishes & kinkiness in Volume 3 that I think merits further discussion.