On DVD: Big Bad Mama and 5 Other Movies That Introduced Gen-Xers to Sex

From sneaking a peek at naughty postcards from behind the barn to entering "hot three-ways" into Google, youngsters always manage to summon forth the forbidden pleasures of adolescence by gaping at forbidden images of human sexuality. Somewhere between the Depression and the Internet generation, there was HBO, providing a steady stream of soft-core salaciousness (before they pushed that sort of thing onto their less-reputable cousin, Cinemax). One film that impacted me during my tween years was Big Bad Mama (out this week from Shout! Factory as part of its series of Roger Corman classics) -- not only was there fairly explicit (albeit non-graphic) humping, but it was being performed by recognizable TV stars Angie Dickinson and William Shatner!

Here are some other sexy faves that will be fondly remembered by people who were already in their mid-20s by the time AOL came around:

Pretty Maids All in a Row: Angie Dickinson strikes again, alongside Rock Hudson as a high school coach who's catnip to all the cheerleaders. This Roger Vadim comedy-mystery wasn't a big hit in theaters, but its ubiquity on cable TV in the late '70s and early '80s earned it enough of a cult following from Reagan-era adolescents that Warner Archive recently released it on DVD.

The Sensuous Nurse: Ursula Andress plays the titular (in more ways than one) angel of mercy, hired by a scheming family in the hopes that her va-va-voomery will kill off the ailing patriarch so his heirs can collect his fortune. But Andress has more in her bag of tricks than a stethoscope and a G-string.

Porky's: This bawdy Canadian teen comedy about horny high-schoolers in the "innocent" 1950s was a box-office smash, spawning a rash of way sleazier copycats and ripoffs. But this one does feature a few iconic sequences, from the shower-peeping-gone-wrong to Kim Cattrall's lustily canine approach to sex. Interesting sidenote: This film's success allowed director Bob Clark to have carte blanche on A Christmas Story, which came out the following year.

Private Lessons: This story about a high-school nerd who gets schooled in the ways of love by cougar sexpot Sylvia Kristel (best known as the star of the original Emmanuelle movies) pushed a lot of teen-boy buttons, even though it goes to some weird and unpleasant places. The all-Rod Stewart soundtrack underlines the fact that pretty much every hit the British rocker ever had was about boning.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High: While director Amy Heckerling wisely got the audience's attention with the famous shot of Phoebe Cates emerging from a pool and popping her top, she pulls a brilliant switcheroo by also including two of the cinema's most dispiriting sex scenes: First, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character loses her virginity to a skeevy stereo salesman in a grimy baseball dugout, then she has an unfulfilling encounter with a premature ejaculator. (That latter coupling leads to an abortion, no less.)