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Duke University Press - Levine Elana Levine

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331 pages

English

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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.

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USA

Television

États-Unis

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	09 janvier 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822389774
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1448€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

WALLOWING

SEX

CONSOLE-ING PASSIONS TELEVISION AND CULTURAL POWER EDITED BY LYNN SPIGEL

WALLOWING

INSEX The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

E L A N A L E V I N E

Duke University Press Durham and London 2007

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

INTRODUCTION 

1. KIDDIE PORN VERSUS ADULT PORN Inter-Network Competition 

2. NOT IN MY LIVING ROOM TV Sex That Wasn’t 

3. THE SEX THREAT Regulating and Representing Sexually Endangered Youth 

4. SYMBOLS OF SEX Television’s Women and Sexual Difference 

5. SEX WITH A LAUGH TRACK Sexuality and Television Humor 

6. FROM ROMANCE TO RAPE Sex, Violence, and Soap Operas 

CONCLUSION 

NOTES 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

INDEX 

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Writing the acknowledgments for a project such as this book is an overwhelm-ing endeavor, yet it is also a pleasure for it allows me to recognize the many inﬂuences that have contributed to its creation. The project began during my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I am indebted to the University Dissertator Fellowship, Vilas Travel Grant, and McCarty Disserta-tion Scholarship I received there, all of which supported my initial research. I am also grateful for the travel grant provided by the American Heritage Cen-ter () at the University of Wyoming, an invaluable archive. The work of the archivists and librarians at the American Heritage Center, the Library of Congress, the Cornell University Human Sexuality Collection, the Wisconsin State Historical Society (), the University of Wisconsin libraries, and the Madison and Milwaukee Public Libraries has been instrumental to this book’s existence. Their eﬀorts to preserve and catalog myriad materials pertaining to s television made this project possible. Certain individuals also provided important materials. I thank Barbara Corday for sharing her memories and insights; Steven Tropiano for supplying me with a complete copy ofAlexan-der: The Other Side of Dawn; R. Franklin Brown for granting me permission to reproduce the work of his father, the cartoonist Bo Brown; and Stacy for helping me ﬁnd tapes ofGeneral Hospitalfrom the late s. Although my material debts are major, my intellectual debts are even more

signiﬁcant. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Julie D’Acci, Michele Hilmes, Michael Curtin, and John Fiske were models of scholarly passion and rigor. Their guidance shows itself throughout this work. Just as vital were the insights and challenges posed by my graduate school colleagues. Jason Mittell was instrumental to the project’s beginnings, Kelly Cole oﬀered just the ad-vice I needed for the book’s completion, and Ron Becker was my unﬂagging sounding board from start to ﬁnish. Any clarity or insight this book oﬀers is a product of his inﬂuence. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, David Pritchard, David Allen, and Jeﬀ Smith have all provided consistent encour-agement. Barbara Ley, Paul Brewer, and Melody Hoﬀman oﬀered excellent suggestions in the ﬁnal stages of my writing. Milo Miller was a tremendous help with the illustrations. I also thank the editorial and production staﬀ of Duke University Press, whose expertise and professionalism have done much to strengthen this proj-ect. My editor, Ken Wissoker, provided steady encouragement and advice and Anitra Grisales answered my many questions with patience and kindness. The suggestions of the press’s three anonymous readers were crucial to this project’s transition from dissertation to book. I owe more personal thanks to the friends and family who have supported me over the course of this project, many of whom I have already mentioned. My parents, Dodie Levine and the late Elliott B. Levine, always championed my eﬀorts, and my father in particular did much to mold a future television scholar through the models of his intellectual curiosity and his willingness to take television seriously. My sister, Alyssa Osterman, and lifelong friend Andi Simon played swith me during many a childhood afternoon. Marla Davishoﬀ both suggested to me the subject of chapter  and provided en-couragement throughout. Ruby and Al Newman, Kurt Newman and Michelle Detorie, and Amy Newman have enthusiastically awaited this book’s arrival for as long as I’ve known them. Leo Elliott Levine Newman has helped put this book’s gestation and birth into perspective via his own arrival and vitality. My largest and most personal debt is to Michael Z. Newman, a stellar writer and astute scholar whose faith and commitment to my work and to me have made the biggest diﬀerence of all.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I N T R O D U C T I O N

new sexualized popular culture pervaded American life in the s, and A it seemed that everyone wanted to be part of it. Watching a porn ﬁlm at the local theater, ﬂipping through a sex advice manual in line at the grocery store, dancing the hustle at a glittery discotheque—all were markers of sexual sophistication. But participating in the racy new culture did not require see-ingThe Devil in Miss Jonesor visiting Studio . If those symbols of the sexy society were inaccessible to you, you could also join in by what you wore. Silky short-shorts, feathered hair, and tight-ﬁtting bell-bottom jeans helped, as did slogan t-shirts with iron-on transfers, the most popular of which were sexually provocative. From the vague (‘‘Tonight’s the Night’’) to the raunchy 1 (‘‘The Word of the Day Is Legs—Spread the Word’’), these shirts winked sala-ciously at the world, heralding their wearers’ embrace of a new kind of sexual expression. The shirts’ double entendres were meant to be bold sexual state-ments, yet the slyly suggestive nature of the wordplay, as well as the placement of these sexual signiﬁers on commercially marketed t-shirts, also made them decidedly mainstream. American popular culture of the s was rife with just this sort of com-modiﬁed sexual expression. Indeed, during the s sex was for sale and