The School Girls

After a prologue in which one "schulmadchen" (basically a German high school girl)is caught having sex, concerned parents, teachers, and other students get together for a meeting, and this movie turns into a (mostly fake) documentary with a lot of talking heads and sexual scenes, ranging from innocuous nudity to softcore groping, being acted out as "illustration". Obviously, this movie uses the old exploitation trick of pretending to morally condemn or express liberal social concern over the same lurid subject that the movie itself is cheerfully exploiting. I'm sure when this movie was showing in a German theaters, there were a lot more dirty old men in raincoats than "concerned parents" in the audience(and any concerned parents that WERE there probably would have been well-advised to wear raincoats as well). I'm also sure that the makers of this, if interviewed today, would freely admit that the moralizing was just a lot of phony-baloney to ameliorate the (obviously very stupid) censors.

This movie seems pretty sordid on paper, but I actually found it strangely innocent compared to today. We STILL have this faux moralistic/secretly lecherous mentality today. Much of our current entertainment media, for instance, seems focused on following around under-age or just very immature young girls, morally clucking at their misdeeds while salivating over every sordid detail. And the more "legitimate" the medium and the more serious and shrill the moralizing, the more disgusting the hypocrisy. Moreover, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, etc. are (presumably) real people. The actresses in this movie are obviously not real "schulmadchen" (unless there was something strange in the German water back then, I'd guess most of these actresses had long since put their own school uniforms on mothballs). They not only don't look underage, but they don't act like real women of any age--they're fantasy figures like a twenty-five-year-old stripper with fake breasts dressed in a Catholic school uniform.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying its necessarily healthy for the media to exploit even "fantasy teens" like with this film (or the "Porkies"-style teen sex comedies of my own adolescence), but given how much we let REAL teenagers be exploited today. . . well, I just wouldn't worry about it too much.