NOW, THE SEX FILES

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

George is a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist who has been the victim of an unfortunate divestment, left at the altar by his sassy, tousle-haired fiance. But this isn't an episode of Must See TV, so George doesn't seek solace from close friends and a laugh track. Instead he goes to Paris and befriends a beautiful French zookeeper named Julie whose wardrobe, despite the potential grubbiness of her work, is limited to lace sweaters and snug-fitting leather bell bottoms. "You're so sexy," George tells her, "even the wild animals love you." That line wouldn't get most men very far. But here, in the glamorous, goofily lewd world of Strangers, it proves winning. Before we know it, George is relieving Julie of her bra. On camera.

Strangers cannot be found on the Playboy channel--you will find it instead on HBO, one of more than half a dozen or so "adult" anthology series offering soft-core sexual adventure that have been appearing late at night on the various paycable networks. Of course, the ability to show bare female nipples--and to get endless mileage out of low-budget R-rated movies--has been one of the prime attractions of pay cable ever since its birth in the 1970s. But it wasn't until just a few years ago that programmers began rolling out their own regularly-scheduled erotic dramas; Showtime was first with Red Shoe Diaries. Knock-offs like the network's own lower-rent Love Street have been popping up ever since, and while they vary significantly in terms of production values, most do quite well in the ratings. Showtime's Diaries is one of the network's highest-rated programs; the same is true for the French-produced series Emmanuelle on Cinemax.

All these shows attempt to combine music-video artiness (think jumpy film-to-video cuts) with a veneer of semiupscale erotic swank (think Bob Guccione's bachelor pad). You can tell they offer a somewhat better grade of porn than the local adult video store because they don't star actors named Long or Chesty; instead they feature respectable, if not always heavily-employed, talents like Emily Lloyd and Julian Sands, who played the aforementioned George. Red Shoe Diaries is narrated by X-Files star David Duchovny, who has hosted the series since it first aired, pre-X-Files, four years ago (back when the actor was presumably eager for this sort of work).

Duchovny's role is limited--and, by the way, he never takes his clothes off--but his character Jake is an archetype for the men in all these series. He appears in the beginning of each episode to read letters from women who have written to recount erotic tales; years ago, you see, Jake's fiance killed herself after a torturous affair with another man, leaving Jake with no choice but to spend the rest of his life soliciting dirty letters in an effort to unravel the female mind. The stories contained in his correspondence form the plot of each show. Many of them feature men, like Jake, who are wounded souls, victims of sexually aggressive women.

It doesn't take long to realize that the common thread linking these series is not so much a preponderance of flesh, or even ludicrous dialogue, but the fact that the shows are meant to be expressions, however bizarrely executed, of female fantasy. This stands in sharp contrast to most porn, a genre in which it would usually be difficult to sell a film featuring a demure young woman who manages to unleash a cross-dresser's inner heterosexual (to cite an example from Strangers). While most of these series are produced by men, they aim--and succeed--at attracting a demographically balanced audience of males and females.

In this world, women's sexual escapades, no matter how manipulative, never go punished. Cinemax's Emmanuelle, for instance, is an ageless sorceress who spirits herself into the bodies of men and women all over the world (though mostly places like Cannes and Bali) to help them realize their romantic promise. Like most of the women who populate cable erotica, Emmanuelle limns the fantasies and calls the shots. There we have it: sex goddesses Gloria Steinem can love.