TV and the 70s Sex Revolution 

A new, sexualized popular culture pervaded American life in the 1970s, and 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 seeing The Devil in Miss Jones or visiting Studio 54. Across the 1970s pop culture landscape, from tee-shirts bought at the local mall to disco music blaring out of teenagers’ bedrooms, sexualized popular culture became a taken-for-granted element of everyday life.

Nowhere were these new forms of sexual expression more prominently, or more surprisingly, felt than in commercial network television. Despite its history as a “family” medium, in the 1970s American television was, as one anonymous TV industry executive confessed, “wallowing in sex.” Television of the 1970s contained innumerable references to the new sexual culture: passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge; a young girl walking by a Hollywood Boulevard marquee advertising Deep Throat in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; a frustrated housewife checking out Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

But 1970s television also contributed to the new sexual culture. Television entertainment invited viewers to participate in a world in which “Would you like to come back to my cabin for a nightcap?” was an unambiguous sexual proposition, in which bralessness was an essential component of female sexual attractiveness, in which words such as “rape” and “VD” and “impotence” were part of a common vocabulary. Television made the new sexual culture the new American culture, and it made American culture more openly sexual than it had ever been before.

The new sexual culture of television left a legacy for the way American culture would discuss, depict, and define sex for years to come. Television was arguably the most significant cultural form for the dissemination and acceptance of the monumental changes in sexual identities, practices, mores, and beliefs that developed in the wake of the sexual revolution. Entertainment television told Americans about the impact of the women’s liberation movement, the influence of the gay rights movement, and the outcomes of the sexual revolution through stories and characters, images and sounds, words and silences. It left out as much as it left in, and was vilified as much as it was admired.

Before the birth of Fox and the growth of cable, the three broadcast networks reached up to 90 percent of the viewing audience. As a result, television’s take on the sexual revolution was more widely consumed than any other. The power of television’s tales of individuals facing sexual change in ways innocent and jaded, irreverent and somber, tolerant and bigoted, affected what America’s new, post-sexual revolution culture could become. From stories of teenage runaways turned prostitutes in made for TV movies to the gay character, Jodie Dallas, coming out to his family on the parodic sitcom, Soap, television helped open up discussion about sexual topics but also guided that discussion in particular directions.

As central as it was to America’s new sexual culture, 1970s television stayed far away from the sexual explicitness of pornographic films or sex advice books. Television’s version of the new sexual culture was all about sexual suggestiveness, teasingly offering hints of sex. It did not show explicit sex acts or nudity and did not use graphic language. A medium funded by advertisers and regulated by the government’s Federal Communications Commission, broadcast network television necessarily addressed the sexual revolution in ways that could be considered acceptable to advertisers fearful of controversy, to politicians fearful of public backlash, and to viewers fearful of radical challenges to their way of life. Thus, television’s sexual revolution was in many respects a more restrained version of the changes taking place in the world around it.

By treating the sexual revolution in this way, television’s new sexual culture was particularly compatible with the advertiser-supported, capitalist system on which the medium is based. As numerous scholars have shown, American network television’s commercial foundation shapes the content of its programming, sometimes by implanting blatant endorsements of consumer capitalism in television content and sometimes with more subtle ideological messages. The new sexual culture of 1970s TV was more like the latter. Television’s emphasis on idiosyncratic characters grappling with sexual change could make it seem as if the sexual revolution was not about challenging the heterosexual nuclear family, patriarchy, or the capitalist system, but only about the choices of certain individuals. When All in the Family’s Archie Bunker learned to accept an old friend who comes out as gay, for example, the message seemed to be that homophobia was only a problem for certain bigoted individuals, and one that could be resolved through a well-meaning conversation.

U.S. television rarely offers systemic critiques and typically endorses dominant ideologies of social identity—gender, sexuality, class, and race. In keeping with such leanings, television’s construction of sex and the new sexual culture supported the dominance of heterosexuality over other sexual orientations and the subordination of women as objects of male sexual desire. Thus, television’s sexual revolution shied away from the fully revolutionary. Instead, it made the new more familiar and the potentially radical safe.

While the new sexual culture of American television was highly conservative in many respects, its relationship to the sexual revolution was not straightforward or simple. Television actively participated in the sexual revolution even as it appeared to reinforce the status quo. Certainly, television’s handling of the new sexual culture necessarily went along with many of the accepted norms and values of American culture; after all, even though 1970s television’s sexual culture was “new” in many respects, it could not have achieved the popularity it did without presenting sex in a way that seemed natural and inevitable for much of the TV audience. Thus, while the racy questions posed on a game show such as Match Game might allude to sex, the answers to those questions typically placed the seemingly scandalous sexual reference within the context of conventional relations between husband and wife as opposed to those of unmarried or same sex partners.

At the same time, however, to achieve popularity with an audience experiencing changes in sexual mores, practices, and identities in their day-to-day lives, television also necessarily accommodated and incorporated some of the emergent challenges to dominant norms and values. Television of the 1970s excelled in bringing together aspects of the “new” sexuality—premarital sex, out gays and lesbians, women with sexual desires—with such long-standing, seemingly natural ideologies as heterosexual monogamy and fundamental sexual difference. For example, the newly empowered female action heroines in Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman seemed liberated in their crime-fighting careers, but they also remained objects of sexual desire, frequently donning revealing outfits and taking on sexy undercover roles. These representations reminded viewers that women, no matter how strong or independent, were still expected to look and act a certain way, even amidst all the social change.

Understanding television’s cultural impact within a context such as the sexual revolution requires understanding the medium as the product of a chain of events: the multitude of choices made by television’s creators, which result in a complex combination of images, sounds, and meanings in television programs, which are then interpreted, discussed, and sometimes challenged by viewers. For example, the ways that the hit ABC series The Love Boat represented sex were shaped by ABC’s desire to draw a broad audience to the commercials aired during the show, as well as by American culture’s dominant ideas about sexuality and heterosexual monogamy. However, the stories this series told, and the way it told them, were also products of the program’s structure (of three non-overlapping plots, at least one of which was comedic), of the experiences of its producers (executive producer Aaron Spelling deemed what was and was not the right kind of TV sexiness), of responses to content regulations (such as a family viewing policy instituted by the National Association of Broadcasters), of interactions with viewers (such as one father who wrote that he was embarrassed to watch the show with his daughters), and of myriad other forces that molded The Love Boat’s tales.

Television’s take on the sexual revolution was far from univocal; television told a multitude of different stories about sex in the 1970s. It was this diversity of representation that gave the medium much of its power. Clearly, most television programming avoided the more radical facets of the sexual revolution, the facets that most often signify the sexual revolution in the historical record. Characters on daytime soap operas were not visiting bathhouses and participating in orgies, sitcoms were not set in lesbian separatist communities, and made-for-TV movies did not feature swingers’ parties. Yet 1970s television still managed to represent sex and the new sexual culture in diverse ways, and even to address some of the issues at the core of the sexual revolution.

Take the matter of women’s sexuality. The women’s liberation and anti-rape movements, the popularization of sex advice literature, and the widespread adoption of the birth control pill had made women’s sexuality a subject of public discussion. Questions of women’s sexual satisfaction, of reproductive rights, of sexual violence were all up for debate. While television did not typically address different forms of orgasm or the politics of abortion (with some important exceptions, such as the two-episode abortion plot on Maude in 1972), it made women’s sexuality a ubiquitous theme, and offered a range of variations on it. On the daytime soap opera Guiding Light, Roger Thorpe raped his wife, Holly, who then faced a criminal justice system that treated rape victims abusively and charges of marital rape incredulously. On the hit sitcom Three’s Company, middle-aged Helen Roper constantly griped about her husband Stanley’s lackluster sexual performance, lobbing sarcastic insults at him and bemoaning her dissatisfaction in bed. And in commercials for the vaginal deodorant spray FDS, a woman confided to the camera that FDS made her feel “grown up” and “more feminine” before she excitedly whispered, “He’s home.” Across the television schedule, at all times of day and night and in all kinds of genres, women’s sexuality was displayed, defended, and discussed. Not only was it the subject of numerous TV narratives, but women’s sexuality was also addressed differently in each of these representations. This was a limited diversity, to be sure, but one that spoke to many of the TV audience’s hopes, fears, and uncertainties about the changes brought by the sexual revolution.

Television’s handling of sex in the 1970s presented a negotiation between long-standing values, mores, and norms and the challenges to them posed by the sexual revolution. The participants in these negotiations—the broadcast networks, television producers, writers, and performers, government and intra-industrial regulators, advertisers, organized audience groups and individual viewers, along with the television programming itself—determined how the sexual revolution would pervade the American mainstream. Through this confluence of forces, America’s new sexual culture would take root, blooming into a new understanding of sex in the post-sexual revolution world. Television of the 1970s shaped the way that American culture would think and talk about sex for years to come.

Elana Levine is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her book, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television, was published by Duke University Press in 2007. She is also the co-editor of Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (forthcoming from Duke, 2007) and a number of articles in scholarly journals such as Television and New Media and Critical Studies in Media Communication.