Spain's desarrollismo years will be the focus of this chapter's probing into the historicity of the erotic in Spanish cinematography. It would seem fitting to link the writing of the erotic body (or its absence) on the screen in 1960s Spain to, of course, the Franco dictatorship and its special revision of desire through the ideology of National Catholicism. While the ideological fabric of the regime is, unquestionably, one of the foundational pieces of this cinematography in both regime-friendly films or the more evaluative Spanish New Wave in all of its diversity, this chapter places special attention on the culture of crisis that comes into being as Spanish society turns from an isolationist economy of autarchy to one of capitalist consumption.

Segments of Spanish society of the 1960s were invited to join Europe's consumer society and did so with a vengeance. The accumulation of goods, the habitus of the ‘new’ bourgeoisie, and the depoliticisation of the working classes through consumption (goods and tourism) was not ‘Spanish’ in intent but rather the necessary outcome of a model of early neoliberal modernisation grounded on the widespread decoupling of the economic sphere from all others in developed Western societies. The Franco regime might have been anachronistic in the limitations it secured in most political, social and cultural manifestations but it was, on the other hand, a model student in its installation of a societal state of affairs that placed capitalist market structures, the development of a new service sector centred on tourism, and the consumption of consumer goods at its core. In this new state of socio-economic affairs Spain proved itself a worthy European neighbour, given how the lack of political freedom or the repressive State discourses on cultural mores were overshadowed by rapid, market-driven and speculative economic development.