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Hey Fleshbot fans! I’m back from a little hiatus with some great news on this Throwback Thursday. Remember when I expounded on the Red Shoe Diaries movie and my dorkish younger self’s obsession with David Duchovny a few months ago? I was lamenting that the subsequent series was not available to stream and now, lo and behold, it is. All five seasons, totaling 66 episodes. The dead of winter seems like a great time to binge a spicy series, especially as we kick off the month of love and lust that is February. Let’s check it out!
Red Shoe Diaries is an erotic anthology series that first aired on the premium channel Showtime late at night between 1992 and 1997. In the feature movie, Jake (Duchovny) loses his fiancée to suicide and learns of her promiscuous double life. As a way of coping with this, he places a classified ad under the name “Red Shoes” asking women to send him their salacious stories and diaries to his PO Box. This is the framing device for the series, with each episode featuring one woman’s stories and Jake recounting them all to his dog, Stella. Duchovny does not appear in the main story of most of the episodes (with the notable exception of “Jake’s Story”) as he was doing double duty for much of that time, filming both Red Shoe Diaries and The X-Files.
There were a few series and lots of late-night softcore movies produced for Showtime, HBO, and Cinemax (sometimes nicknamed Skinemax for this reason). This was in the era where there were still porn video stores and movie theaters, but really before Internet porn as we know it today had become ubiquitous. We were in the Usenet period of Internet history, where most people still had dial-up, and most smutty online things offered consisted of text stories and still pictures. So even if the softcore series didn’t really show the most graphic of details, they were light years beyond anything else you could find at home. Some of the cheesy music, the dramatic lighting, the camera angles may seem a bit hackneyed nowadays, but also amusing, and naked people acting out fantasies are timelessly titillating!
Being from the time it was produced, most of the stories are about white cis hetero people with a smattering of lesbian stories for good measure. The themes of female sexual empowerment and agency are quite interesting to me, and they were definitely kind of subversive for the time. Throughout the run of the series, there were a number of interesting guest stars, including Denise Crosby (Star Trek) and Matt LeBlanc (Friends), so check it out and see who you can spot! Make a game out of it with your lover(s) or yourself. Maybe try your hand at writing a diary of your own sexual adventures, too!
The Red Shoe Diaries movie and series are available to stream for free (at press time) on Tubi.
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