Books at Duke University Press

Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television
Elana Levine

336 pages (January 2007)
29 b&w photos, 3 tables

Cloth - $84.95	0-8223-3902-1
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3902-1]

Paperback - $23.95	0-8223-3919-6
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3919-9]

Passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge. A young girl walking by a marquee advertising Deep Throat in the made-for-TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. A frustrated housewife borrowing Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Commercial television of the 1970s was awash with references to sex. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, significant changes were rippling through American culture. In representing—or not representing—those changes, broadcast television provided a crucial forum through which Americans alternately accepted and contested momentous shifts in sexual mores, identities, and practices.

Wallowing in Sex is a lively analysis of the key role of commercial television in the new sexual culture of the 1970s. Elana Levine explores sex-themed made-for-TV movies; female sex symbols such as the stars of Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman; the innuendo-driven humor of variety shows (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Laugh-In), sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company), and game shows (Match Game); and the proliferation of rape plots in daytime soap operas. She also uncovers those sexual topics that were barred from the airwaves. Along with program content, Levine examines the economic motivations of the television industry, the television production process, regulation by the government and the tv industry, and audience responses. She demonstrates that the new sexual culture of 1970s television was a product of negotiation between producers, executives, advertisers, censors, audiences, performers, activists, and many others. Ultimately, 1970s television legitimized some of the sexual revolution’s most significant gains while minimizing its more radical impulses.

“Wallowing in Sex is a groundbreaking and important examination of television’s significant role in the increasingly sexualized culture of the 1970s. Painstakingly researched and smartly written, it is a crucial addition to the field of television history and, more generally, to the history of popular culture of the recent past. And if you grew up with 1970s television, Wallowing in Sex will make you look at the programming of the era in a thoroughly new light.”—Aniko Bodroghkozy, author of Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion

“Wallowing in Sex is important work: it pushes us to understand the institutional terrain of 1970s American television in the context of the sexual revolution and emergent feminist and gay liberation movements in a manner that no other scholarly work has done before.”—Tim J. Anderson, author of Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording

Elana Levine is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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Acknowledgments vii
Introdution 1
1. KIDDIE PORN VERSUS ADULT PORN
Inter-Network Competition 17
2. NOT IN MY LIVING ROOM
TV Sex That Wasn’t 46
3. THE SEX THREAT
Regulating and Representing Sexually Endangered Youth 76
4. SYMBOLS OF SEX
Television’s Women and Sexual Difference 123
5. SEX WITH A LAUGH TRACK
Sexuality and Television Humor 169
6. FROM ROMANCE TO RAPE
Sex, Violence, and Soap Operas 208
CONCLUSION 253
NOTES 261
BIBLIOGRAPHY 299
INDEX 309