Stag
From xyclopedia - the history of pornography and sexual expression
As with the development of other forms of communication such as writing, drawing, painting, printing and surfing the Internet, for example, pornographers led the way in the popular application of moving pictures. They made sex flicks known as stag films.
"Stag" as an adjective means for men only. Thus a stag film is a film for men only - meaning a film of graphic sex. Stag films frequently appeared at stag parties - parties for men only. Despite media hype about "couples porn," the genre remains for alone men only.
Almost all pre-World War II pornographic films were shot on 16mm film on single reels that ran 10-12 minutes. Single reels could be hidden more easily than multiple canisters. The forms of the stag genre were fixed by the mid 1920s and endured through the 1950s. "Stag productions generally aimed at an ineptitude that reinforced the genre's illict reputation and served as an index of its "authenticity." Cameras intruded into frames, stagehands visibly adjusted lights, and performers clearly asked for direction or smirked directly into the lens; the glitches were left in the footage, as a way of underscoring that real sex was taking place between real people." (Slade, Journal of Film and Video 45.2-3)
Despite the common language of the silent stag form and the absence of copyrights, early porn films rarely traveled outside the countries that produced them because of legal dangers.
America probably made the most stag films, followed by France, where the genre originated and flourished until Gaullist repression. Becoming so adept at making stags that the term "French film" became synonymous with porn, French pornographers developed many of the genre's basic plots.
America's quick development of a legitimate film industry and censorship made it difficult for professionals to make stags. But this was not true of France where distributors advertised their products in the international editions of magazines like Paris Plaiser and La Vie Parisiene. During the 1920s, the French shot more stags than anyone (Slade, Journal of Film and Video 45:2-3). The two leading porners were Bernard Natan and Dominique.
By 1920, all major brothels in Europe and America stocked stag films.
Latin American stags came largely from the brothels of Tijuana and pre-Castro Havana. Bestiality appears in such films as Rin Tin Tin Mexicano, A Hunter and His Dog, Rascal Rex, and El Perro Masajista (a.k.a. Mexican Dog). Technically abysmal, these humiliating productions focus their hatred on women and the Church. Films such as Mexican Honeymoon show priests exploiting their parishioners. Anti-Catholic porn flourished in countries where the Church dominated. By contrast, American stags skirted religion.
"The American stag film is remarkably free of religious subject matter," write the authors of Dirty Movies. "The one apparent exception, The Nun's Story (1949-50), surfaced under the alternate title College Coed, a transformation which indicates either a naive or conscious confusion of religious habit and academic regalia. Protestantism has never provided the iconography hospitable to erotic transformation."
"I would rather my kid saw a stag film than The Ten Commandments," said comic Lenny Bruce, "because I don't want my kid to kill Christ when he comes back. Pleasure is a dirty word in Christian culture. Pleasure is Satan's word."
Argentina produced the classic El Sartorio (1912?), a send-up of Stravinsky's Afternoon of a Faun at the time of the Ballet Russe's South American tour and Nikinsky's wedding in Buenos Aires. Three women frolic in a river and start fondling one another. A man dressed as a devil with a tail, horns and false whiskers, emerges out of the foliage and captures one woman. She sucks him off, engages in a 69, and finally screws him. Inserts of close-up shots of his penis pushing inside her appear every few seconds. As the woman gets up from the "devil," sperm falls out of her vagina.
Am Abend came out of Germany in 1910. After watching a woman masturbate through a bedroom keyhole, a man enters the room and penetrates her vaginally, orally and anally.
Stag films specialized in "meat shots" - closeups of penetration, rather than "money shots" - men ejaculating on, rather than within, women. Cum shots became so essential to porno that it seemed flicks without them weren't pornographic.
A Free Ride, made around 1915 in America, generally ranks near the top of the earliest efforts. "With its outdoor milieu, its many and varied setups, its heavy use of titles, its concentration on the rhythms of a single incident, its obvious professionalism in technique, and its ordinary plot mechanism (a car ride), it derives from the sources of the open films of the first decade, with one essential difference - the explicitness of its depiction of sexual activity. The plot is simple: a man picks up two girls and takes them for a drive in the country. He stops the car in a wooded area, gets out, and walks behind a bush to relieve himself. The girls, curious, spy on him, become excited, and have to urinate themselves. The tables are truned. The man spies on them and, emboldened by lust, initiates unopposed sexual contact with one of the girls; her friend watches and before long demands her share of his attention.
"A Free Ride is also particularly American in its early association of the automobile and sex, a theme evident in such later films as The Pick Up (1920s and 1950s versions), A Highway Romance, Pick Ups, and A Modern Hitchhiker (all the latter from the 1930s)." (Dirty Movies, 1976)
"Best known in the 1920s was The Casting Couch," writes Jim Holliday. "The hottest of the 1930s are The Modern Magician and The Aviator, which features an inspired lead female. The best post-World War II stag was also the hottest. Known as The Nun…this classic features an unbelievable portrait of sexual intensity by the unknown female… Best French stags of the post-WWII era are The Woman in the Portrait and Family Spirit. Color came in the early 1960s, but did not get good until the end of the decade."
Most stag films revolved around five common plots. "Plot 1. Reading or handling some phallic-shaped object arouses a woman alone at home. Masturbation follows. A man arrives, is invited inside, sexual play begins; Plot 2. A farm girl gets excited watching animals copulate. She runs into a farmhand, or a traveling salesman, and sexual play begins; Plot 3. A doctor begins examining a woman and sexual play begins; Plot 4. A burglar finds a girl in bed or rapes her or vice versa; Plot 5. A sunbather or skinny dipper gets caught and seduced." (Contemporary Erotic Cinema by William Rotsler)
Most porn commentators, good liberals all, blame socio-economic structures for fixing the form of the stag film at the point achieved in its infancy in A Free Ride. But almost a century later, porn remains a limited genre. Just as adult films began with arty movies like The Devil in Miss Jones and The Opening of Misty Beethoven before dropping such pretensions in the '80s, so too stags "of the teens, twenties, and thirties," write Al Di Lauro, and Gerald Rabkin in their 1976 book Dirty Movies, "displayed narrative and stylistic concerns which almost totally disappeared after the Second World War." From the 1920s through the 1950s, college fraternities and volunteer social groups like Elks and Shriners provided the largest market for stag films in America.
Ugly and old, most of the male performers appeared like pimps and the females' prostitutes. Performers frequently wore masks or otherwise attempted to conceal their identities by the use of bizarre disguises. Many of the men made a habit of removing everything but their black socks for their 'performances', making the masked man in stocking feet a classic symbol of the U.S. stag film. (Playboy)
Stag films patterned themselves after theatrical striptease, writes Linda Williams in her 1989 book Hardcore, while adult films resemble musicals with the characters breaking out into sex rather than song. Stags encouraged male spectators to talk to the projected female image and even to "touch" her spread legs and labia. Unlike pornos, which seek to satisfy the viewer's sex urge, stags aimed to arouse. Brothels used them to encourage potential patrons to buy the sexual favors of their women.
"One of the most admirable factors of the cinema, and one of the reasons for the hatred shown it by imbeciles, is its eroticism," declared surrealist poet Robert Desnos in 1923. "The acts of these men and women luminous in the dark are stirring to the point of sensuality.... It is in this cinematic eroticism that one seeks consolation for everything that is disappointing in artificial, everyday life."
Because of such power, stags developed into a thriving American industry by the 1920s, though a determined attack by law enforcement and U.S. Post Office agents held the business down until the 1960s. After World War II, the greater availability of 16mm equipment enabled the stag to move from the communal smoker to the privacy of the living room.
Smart Aleck (1951?), the most popular stag ever, starred stripper Candy Barr, then a 16-year old named Juanita Slusher.
"I never thought about doing it," Candy Barr told Oui magazine in April, 1976. "But it happened and I've had a lot of flack about it. People say, 'What the hell, it's only a fuck movie.' Well, that was 1951; I do care what the hell. If I had done it by choice, then I would have had some mechanism to adjust it into my lifestyle. But I didn't do it by choice.... I wasn't lured. I was taken, done and that was it."
Distinguished only by the youthful presence of Barr, Smart Aleck, a typical motel film, begins with a traveling salesman inviting Candy into his motel room from the swimming pool. He gets her drunk before making his move. They engage in sex. The only drama occurs when Candy refuses to go down on him. "At the time I wasn't even aware that people engaged in oral sex.... It wasn't something I'd planned to make part of my life." To placate him, Candy calls in a girlfriend who performs the forbidden act.
Barr's notoriety raises the perennial question of whether such Hollywood stars as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, or Marilyn Monroe appeared in stag films? Probably not.
Dr. Joseph Slade says that before 1965, only five stags were shot with sound (one each in 1938, 1942, 1951 and two in 1949); and four in color (1948, 1952, 1956, 1959).
