Elana Levine looks at how television responded to depicting the 1970s sexual revolution in America. Unlike cinema and theatre, where patrons made the choice and journey to see something, television, like radio, was beamed straight into the home. Public broadcasts literally entered the private sphere and the popularity of cinema porn films such as Deep Throat and I am Curious (Yellow) brought the public a fear that sex was coming into their living rooms whether they liked it or not. While a few community stations dared to broadcast porn, the major networks attempted to balance social realism, traditional values and ratings by suggesting more sex than they showed.

Wallowing in Sex examines the pressures placed on television content by network policy, public debate, special interest groups and advertisers. Feminism, in particular, had a great influence on how women, and issues affecting women, were depicted on the small screen. From cautionary tales of wayward girls, to sex symbol action stars, and self-deprecating female comedians, television women displayed the wider social freedom of women alongside a narrow and rigid concept of beauty framed around thin bodies and fat hair. While much of the fare of this period could be characterised as exploitative, many network shows attempted to engage with education in areas including venereal disease, prostitution, and homosexuality. The topic to attract the most controversy and debate was rape. Nowhere was the concept and meaning of rape debated more hotly than on the humble Soap Opera.

Feminism influenced a shift from seeing rape as an act of passion motivated by lust, to seeing rape as an act of violence motivated for a desire for power. This shift in meaning also shifted the responsibility, and thus blame, for rape onto men, rather than the traditional definition that blamed a woman’s allure. This dramatic shift in responsibility perhaps accounts for numerous rape narratives in soap operas that attempted to offer both definitions, by allowing the characters to experience uncertainty over their experiences and motivations.

The most famous example of a 1970s ambiguous rape narrative was the General Hospital plot, where Luke (Anthony Geary)’s 1979 raped Laura (Genie Francis) then two years later married her. In the time between the rape and the wedding night, the rape is re-interpreted from an act of violence back to the pre-feminist notion of an act of passion, akin to the rape fantasy of romance novels. So strong was the romantic notion of the bad boy who suffers remorse and becomes a good guy (men want to be him – women want to change him) that at a 1980 public appearance of Anthony Geary, “cries of ‘Rape me, Luke! Rape me!’ emanated from the crowd, much as fans might more typically shout, ‘I love you!’ or ‘Marry me!’ to a celebrity sex symbol” (246).

During the 1970s many rape narratives in soap opera defined rape as a criminal act of violence, but soap characters rarely reported the crime to police, although survivors often attended counselling. The greater discussion of rape on television during the 1970s coincided with a dramatic rise in women reporting the crime. Levine cites FBI statistics that saw 27, 100 rapes reported in 1967, then 51, 000 in 1973, and 82, 088 in 1980. Levine sees these statistics indicating not a rise in rapes, but a rise in women seeing forced-sex as rape, and thus as a crime they are willing to report, rather than unwanted sex they blame themselves for accidentally encouraging.

As well as the boom in rape stories in soap operas of the 1970s, rape was frequently featured in the sensationalist movies produced by the major networks. NBC, CBC and ABC all produced their own features about young women in danger. The stories were framed in a moralising tone, as cautionary tales no family should miss, and thus the networks could both capitalise on exploitative topics, and condemn them at the same time. The horrors, dangers, and titillation, of stories about teenage runaways, teenage prostitutes, and teenage girls in jail with violent lesbians, were pitched as educational viewing. This kind of educational, social-awareness, spin-doctoring was learned the hard way by networks after public reaction to early 1970s attempts at realist morality tales for TV.

In one spectacular scheduling disaster, in 1974, NBC advertised Born Free and Born Innocent alongside one another as the 8pm shows on Monday and Tuesday night respectively. Viewers, after enjoying the delightful antics of lions and wildlife conservationists in Born Free on Monday night, tuned in the next night at the same time to Born Innocent, a gritty drama where the cherubic The Exorcist star Linda Blair lands in juvenile detention and experiences a particularly violent gang-rape from a group of women and a broom handle.

Thousands of people contacted their local stations to complain about the graphic nature of the film, gay rights groups found offensive the depiction of lesbians as perverse, and an $11-million negligence lawsuit was filed against NBC after a copy-cat rape. The film was re-edited with suggestions from the National Gay Taskforce, aired at a later time in future screenings, with similar films in the future including a warning of mature content. Thanks to their First Amendment right to free speech, NBC was not seen as negligent in exposing America’s youth to corrupt content and expose them to “sexually explicit culture” (89) in their screening of Born Innocent. However, the public reaction to the film revealed just how far television could go in depicting sexual matters.

Sex was more profitable if suggested rather than graphically depicted. The networks believed that that younger people would hear ‘dating’ as innocent companionship, while adults would hear ‘dating’ as not so innocent sex. Sex was thus something that 1970s television had difficulty depicting honestly. It could be an ambiguous category, tinged with violence, it could be suggested, it could even be represented in a shapely woman, but most of all it had to promise more than it delivered. Sexuality needed a social cause, such as the cautionary tales of the tele-movie, or even the liberation of women into the work force. Alongside the tawdry cautionary tales of wayward girls, and the passionate rapes on soap operas, were the empowered sex symbols – girls who could do anything and always looked good doing it.

Levine examines Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman as the most popular examples of the ‘jiggle-TV’ that attempted to please everyone from women’s libbers to chauvinists. The stars of these shows were sold as both liberated and conservative, offering a display of sexuality but not a sexual life. Like women in comedy, the women in action shows were titillating but chaste. Levine points out that as and Wonder Woman’s costume got smaller from season to season, she also “made fewer explicit references to women’s liberation” (141). Meanwhile, in Charlie’s Angels, the skimpy costumes were “carefully identified as disguises; in other words, they were different from the Angel’s everyday experiences and their ‘true’ selves”(149).

These 1970 action-women sex symbols attempted to blend feminine grooming with feminist autonomy, being the central heroes themselves, rather than the love interest of the male hero. They were still the beautiful, thin, woman sex symbol, but they were, at last, smart, courageous, and athletic, rather than gold digging bimbos. So, while 1970s serials coped with the concept of making men responsible for rape rather than blaming women’s ‘allure’, they filled the screen with as many alluring women as possible.


Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television
February 2007

Author: Elana Levine
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3919-9, $22.95 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3902-1, $79.95 library cloth
336 pp
29 b&w illustrations