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[BOLD {RISKY BUSINESS (1983)}] Rebecca De Mornay and Cruise, shining a light toward manhood for the 14-year-old Nashawaty

Everett Collection

''Joel...get off the babysitter!'' —Risky Business

If 1982 witnessed the opening shots of the teen-sex-comedy boom, 1983 was the shock-and-awe campaign. It didn't take long for those studios caught napping to wake up and get in on the action. Soon a new teen-flesh cavalcade was rolling off the assembly line every few weeks: Spring Break, Losin' It, Private School, Class, Risky Business, My Tutor, Screwballs, Getting It On!, Joysticks, The First Turn-On!, and, of course, the inevitable Porky's II: The Next Day.

I was 14 during this annus mirabilis of sexploitation — an awkward kid with low expectations making the awkward leap from junior high to high school. John Hughes might have been factually correct when he said that everyone at that age was either a jock, a brain, a princess, a criminal, or a basket case, but it sure seemed a lot more complicated than that at my high school. Freshman year was a time of confusion, sexual and otherwise. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I found some degree of comfort in these movies. After all, I may have been a virgin who still collected baseball cards, but at least I wasn't as pathetic as the drooling idiot played by Crispin Glover in My Tutor.

In 1983, I also snuck into my first R-rated movie. My friend Billy Fidurko and I conned a stranger into buying us tickets to Risky Business. And after we were inside, high-fiving each other through the previews, I don't think either of us blinked for the next hour and a half. Our little scheme may not have been very complex when measured against the guys in Private School dressing up in women's clothing to storm the gates of Cherryvale Academy for Girls. But we certainly felt like we understood the point of the movie's tagline better afterward: ''There's a time for playing it safe and a time for...Risky Business.'' In some small way, we had become men.

Over the next couple of years, my friends and I saw all of these teenage T&A flicks. We were like crazed pigs sniffing out truffles. We also, over time, came to realize that there were certain ground rules, motifs, and life lessons that popped up over and over again. For example:

There's nothing hotter than an older French temptress.
I don't know what ever happened to Sylvia Kristel, but I do know that she's probably living high on the hog somewhere. After all, no one benefited more from the '80s soft-core bull market than the Emmanuelle siren. She had a hammerlock on the sexy, older seductress role. In Private Lessons, she played the French maid with a sweet tooth for younger men; in Private School, she turned up as zee sex-ed teacher; and in The Big Bet, she was an alluring, semi-clothed next-door neighbor...from France.

The villains always shop at Ralph Lauren.
The preppy bad guy is as much a staple of these films as the smokin' Gallic seductress. There's the Dentyne smile of Leigh McCloskey in Fraternity Vacation and Just One of the Guys; Michael Bowen as the Lacoste-wearing jackass in Private Resort; and, of course, Ted McGinley as Revenge of the Nerds' Stan Gable, head of the Greek Council, who always seems to have a tennis sweater draped around his neck when he's tormenting the nerds of Lambda Lambda Lambda.

There's no humiliation greater than being caught with your pants down.
I can't tell you how many times this comes up in these movies. The most classic examples are obviously Judge Reinhold's sui coitus interruptus in Fast Times and Anthony Michael Hall, squirming and mortified in Weird Science when it's revealed what he's been doing in the bathroom all these years. But my personal favorite will always be when the nerdy villain Kent in Real Genius (not a full-on sex comedy, I'll grant you) is confronted about being discovered in his dorm room naked with a bowl of Jell-O. His stammering excuse is priceless: ''I was hot, and I was hungry, okay?''

Women can be horndogs too.
At least, that's the lesson taught by Where the Boys Are '84, a randy update of a safe-as-kittens film from the '60s. With a script that uses the word buns about as frequently as it uses commas, this is a film in which a tight-knit group of coeds (including the proto-Locklear, Lisa Hartman) hightail it to spring break and enter a ''Hot Bod'' contest in their quest to find a slice of beefcake for ''one night of unbelievable, raw, primal sex.''

No scenario is too far-fetched if it affords the audience the possibility of nudity.
Take 1984's Hollywood Hot Tubs, a lousy film in which a high school prankster changes the famed Hollywood sign to say ''Hollyweed.'' After getting busted by the cops, he's given two options to atone for his shenanigans: go to jail or work for his uncle's hot-tub company. That happens.

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