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Discomfiting Bedfellows |
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By Rodger Streitmatter American University Distinguished Faculty Lecture March 27, 2002
Those censors were less lenient when Lucille Ball had the audacity to become pregnant. Ball's giving birth to "little Ricky" was a major story at the time-mother and son graced the cover of the first issue of TV Guide in 1953. And Lucy's pregnancy also became a continuing story line on the program. Even so, none of the characters was ever allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on the show. The word was considered too risqué. The censors feared that the word "pregnant" might conjure up, in the minds of viewers, images of a man and woman having sexual intercourse. So Lucy was described only as being "in the family way." Images were again a concern in 1957 when Ed Sullivan invited rock and roll artist Elvis Presley onto his show. Sullivan was concerned about one of the signature elements of Presley's persona-his gyrating pelvis. So television's leading impresario of the era refused to expose his audience to such a suggestive image. Sullivan ordered the TV cameramen to show the King of Rock and Roll only from the waist up. Such limitations had faded by the early 1970s. All in the Family, the creation of Norman Lear, was one of the leading forces in this change. The popular program-it was television's number-one-rated show every year from 1971 to 1975-dealt with a variety of sexual topics, including adultery, rape, impotence, and homosexuality.
After Lear attended meetings of the Population Institute, he became so concerned about overpopulation that he put together a two-part storyline in which the title character, played by Bea Arthur, became pregnant. Maude was portrayed as being 47 years old at the time and, largely because of her age, decided to have an abortion. The two segments, which aired in November of 1972, were seen at the time as groundbreaking-by feminists-and as a symbol of Hollywood liberal elitism-by the Catholic Church. It is important to remember that the two segments aired in the midst of the national debate about legalizing abortion. The Supreme Court handed down its Roe V. Wade decision just two months after the "Maude" episodes on abortion. So that was certainly daring television for the time. Television was by no means the only mass medium that both reflected and contributed to the Sexual Revolution that erupted in the 1960s. After Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl hit bookstores in 1962, there was no turning back. For Brown did something that few American women had dared to do: She admitted that she had lost her virginity before marriage. But Brown did much more than merely admit a single indiscretion. For Brown provided vivid detail of her first sexual experience-the boy was 15 and she was 11. She went on to illuminate a long history of casual sexual encounters. In fact, she extolled sex before marriage as a virtue. She wrote: "Not having slept with the man you're going to marry I consider lunacy." The book was a runaway best seller that made Helen Gurley Brown a national celebrity. Her fame increased even more in 1965 when she took over Cosmopolitan magazine and made it the Bible of the liberated woman, encouraging her female readers to be sexual adventurers. And with readers-in the fine tradition of capitalism-came advertising revenue. The financially savvy Helen Gurley Brown realized that the decline of the sexual double standard could translate into dollars. Cosmo became even more popular in 1972 when it featured a nude centerfold of actor Burt Reynolds.
One of my targets was network television news. By the summer of 1981, the American gay press was reporting that the primary way that the disease was being spread was through anal intercourse between gay men. But the television networks refused to broadcast the phrase "anal intercourse," regardless of the number of men who died in ignorance of how they were contracting the disease. The networks considered the phrase too vulgar. That changed in November 1985 when Tom Brokaw of NBC finally broke the barrier-even though doctors had made that information available to the news media a full four years earlier. Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas are part of the history of sex and the media, too. In 1991, Hill's accusations of sexual harassment against the Supreme Court nominee became national news. The hearings were covered live by the television networks. So when Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas had talked with her about a porn star named "Long Dong Silver" and about seeing a pubic hair on a Diet Coke can, new sexual thresholds were crossed.
A cigar placed in an unusual anatomical location, the benefits of using Altoids, a young intern flashing the President of the United States with her thong-I'm guessing that I'm not the only person in this room who didn't even know what a "thong" was until that story erupted. They were all sexual details that no newspaper or broadcast news station in the country could possibly ignore. I cite all of these examples because I am, by education and practice, not only a journalist but also a historian. And all of these examples provide, I believe, part of the history that brings us to where we are today with regard to the topic of sex and the media. And frankly, as a professor-which means someone who is allowed to profess or "declare openly"-I want to say that I think we have gone too far. The abundance of sexual content in the media, I believe, represents a serious concern to the national well-being. Some statistics: Two-thirds of the films that are produced in this country today are R rated.
What's more-and even more alarming to me-is that very, very few of those references include any mention of the potential consequences of sex. Of those 14,000 references, only about 165-so only slightly more than 1 percent-include any mention of the possibility of becoming pregnant or contracting AIDS or contracting any other sexually transmitted disease. This is even more disturbing in the context of how widespread both teenage pregnancy and STD cases among teenagers are. The United States leads all the developed nations in the world in teen pregnancy, with one in every ten American girls between the ages of 15 and 19 becoming pregnant each year. Instances of sexually transmitted disease are rampant in this country as well. One in every seven American teenagers-that's boys and girls combined-will contract an STD such as herpes or the HIV virus by the time he or she turns 20. I think those numbers merit repeating. One in every ten American girls becomes pregnant before she turns 20. One in every seven teenagers contracts a sexually transmitted disease by the age of 20-many of those diseases life-threatening ones or ones that can never be cured. Also of grave concern to me is the fact that young people are increasingly turning to the media for information about sex. I'm teaching an honors colloquium this semester titled Media and Sexuality. One of the studies we looked at in the course identified the sources that adolescents turn to for information about birth control. Of the 7,000 young people surveyed, 53 percent said they received information from their parents. But 52 percent said "magazines" and 51 percent said "television." In other words, young people are turning to television and to magazines for information about sex virtually as often as they are turning to their parents.
For those of you who are not familiar with the kinds of messages that are being communicated on prime-time television aimed at young people, I would like to highlight a brief discussion that aired recently on one of the most popular of those programs, Friends. That program attracts between 25 million and 29 million viewers each week, making it the highest-rated program on TV this season. (For those of you who are familiar with the program, I want to position this particular segment in the plotline on Friends. This segment aired before Ross and Rachel got married-while they were in a drunken stupor-and before Rachel became pregnant with Ross's baby-well, or her assistant's baby, as she was having sex with both of them at the same time so she wasn't sure which man was the father.) The scene featured five of the main characters having a friendly game of one-ups-man-ship over which one of them has had sex in the weirdest place. As the scene begins, three of the most popular twenty-somethings in America are playing a game of one-ups-man-ship.
The scene is funny. I laughed the first time I saw it, and I still laugh every time I see it. Indeed, the fact that it is humorous is a big part of the problem. I would now like to "deconstruct" this scene. OK, we have Monica boasting about having sex on a pool table. And Joey boasting about having sex in a public bathroom-a women's room, no less. And Ross bragging about having sex in Disneyland, an amusement park where thousands of young kids are roaming around and could easily have run into this couple having sex behind one of the rides. And then, at the end of the scene, Ross mocks Rachel for being so boring that she has never had sex in anywhere but-of all mundane places-a bed. Am I a prude to find this scene problematic? Some people will think so. v But I am concerned about the messages that it and other programs send. I am concerned that when you analyze or "deconstruct" the message, it is saying: Here is a group of very attractive, very popular young people who compete to see who can have sex not just frequently but in the most bizarre places possible. Of even more concern to me is that I doubt very much if Joey bothered to take a condom along when he went to the library or that Ross used a condom when he had his sexual encounter at Disneyland. So the message to young viewers is clear: If you want to be like these attractive and popular young people, do what they do-have lots of sex: The more sex you have, the better. And the more bizarre the location, the better.
In other words, the vast majority of young people who watched this segment came away from it convinced that they would be more popular if they frequently engaged in casual sex and were able to boast about having sex in odd places or under odd circumstances. One more thought. I would guess that many of my female colleagues in this room have spent a goodly number of days in libraries doing research. I doubt if any of them would be amused to walk into the women's room of one of those libraries and find a young couple having sex on the bathroom floor or in one of the stalls. As a matter of fact, I think most of us-men and women both-would find such a sight extremely uncomfortable-and threatening. Would any woman in this room find it pleasurable to walk into a women's room and find a strong, muscular, and virile young man like Joey with his pants down and having sex with a woman? It sure sounds like a dangerous situation to me. Likewise, the idea of going to Disneyland and suddenly running into a couple having sex would hardly be a comfortable situation. My children are now 23 and 26, but I can still imagine what it would have been like-say 15 years ago-to have encountered such a scene when Kate was 8 and Matt was 11 and then being in the position of having to explain what we had encountered. It is also very important to me that Friends airs at 8 o'clock at night. And it airs on a major-the most-watched-television network. The network that proclaims itself "must-watch TV." For me, it is very different if a program airs at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night-some time other than prime-time for children.
Friends is there whether we want our children to watch it at 8 o'clock at night or not. So what's the answer? There's nothing that gripes me more than a commentator or a pundit or an analyst-or a teacher-who throws out criticism of the media and just sort of stops there. It's so easy for us to criticize the media. It's a lot harder for us to suggest solutions. A couple realities. First, capitalism is alive and well. The media are businesses. They are driven by profits and by the bottom line. And, there is no question that sex sells. Second, the First Amendment also is alive and well-thank God. I certainly have no intention of suggesting that the television networks or other media organizations should be prevented from producing what they choose to produce. With regard to solutions, parental responsibility is one consideration. I can think of two good friends of mine who are committed to monitoring what their children watch on TV. Neither of them allows her children to watch Friends. But I question if this is really the answer. One friend, Connie, is a lawyer; the other, Chris, has her master's degree and is now a stay-at-home mom. Both of them, in other words, have the education to recognize the kinds of dangerous messages that these programs are sending. And they also have the resources to prevent their kids from watching those programs. Not all parents, though, are in those positions. Our country also has a huge number of parents who don't have either the awareness or the ability to monitor what their children are exposed to. And, besides those considerations, even kids who are not allowed to watch commercial television in their own homes are going to hear some of the messages through what we might call "second-hand television." So there are two other solutions I would propose. The first is a concept known as "edutainment." As the word edu-tainment implies, this is the idea of blending an educational function into the entertainment function of such media as television and film. Edutainment involves "imbedding" socially desirable messages within entertainment programming. The episodes of Maude involving abortion could be considered an example of edutainment-although the term itself had not yet been coined in 1972-because Norman Lear specifically designed those segments to combat overpopulation. A more recent example of edutainment involving sexual content occurred in 1997 on the hospital drama ER. NBC aired an episode of ER focusing on morning-after contraception. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on education about health issues, was consulted about the content. And the program clearly had impact. After the episode aired, the number of ER viewers who said they knew about morning-after contraception jumped 17 percent. That means that some six million Americans received an important public health lesson by watching a TV show. Other advocacy groups have, in recent years, successfully lobbied television networks to encourage more use of the edutainment concept. I have recently secured a grant to undertake a research project for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. I'll be looking at how gay characters are portrayed on youth-oriented programs such as Real World and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The end product of my study will be recommendations on how those programs and other entertainment TV programs can reduce homophobia. A second solution related to my concerns about sex and the media begins with a concept that is known as media literacy. This strategy involves helping people first identify and then understand the messages that various media communicate. Media literacy means showing people-especially young people-the kinds of messages that they are hearing and seeing every day. In other words, this process helps media consumers become aware of the messages-many of them very subtle-that are being sent out by the media in its many forms. Not only television, but also such media venues as magazines and film and advertising. If people can identify such messages, they become much less powerful because they become more transparent. Studies have shown that young people who become "media literate" are far less susceptible to the negative effects of the various messages. Young girls who were exposed to the dangerous messages that magazine ads communicate regarding the idealized body type, for example, became much less vulnerable to those ads. Such girls are much less likely to starve themselves in an effort to look like the emaciated models in the ads. I would like to suggest that the media literacy concept can be applied to sexual messages. I would call this process "sexual literacy." By "sexual literacy," I mean that young people can become aware of the potentially dangerous messages that the media communicate vis-à-vis sexual behavior, as well as attitudes toward both sexual behavior and sexual identity. What we just did a few minutes ago when we looked at the clip from Friends could be considered a lesson in "sexual literacy." We examined what messages that scene with Monica, Joey, and the rest of them was sending. We looked below the surface of a humorous scene to find underlying messages. Early this semester, I went through that same process in my Media and Sexuality class. When I showed the clip, the students laughed. But then when we "deconstructed" the clip, the students-with some strategic guidance from me-identified some of the potentially harmful messages the clip was communicating. I am confident that my students went away from that session with a heightened awareness of the kinds of sexual messages that the media send. They took a step toward becoming what I would like to call "sexually literate." In summary, both the media and the sexual revolution have traveled a huge distance in the 50 years since the characters on I Love Lucy were not allowed to utter the word "pregnancy." Those changes have, I believe, created new and very serious problems regarding sexual content in the media. The various forms of media that are a pervasive force and a powerful force in our lives today, I believe, are sending highly problematic messages regarding sexual activity. I also believe that those problems must be confronted. The most promising solution to those problems, I contend, lies with our students. I, like the rest of us who spend time in the classroom here at AU, I am sure, have a great deal of respect for our students. They are highly intelligent, and their cognitive abilities are very, very strong. I believe it is part of our responsibility-as educators, as parents, and as stewards of future generations-to help our young people develop the skills and the intellectual insight that will allow them to navigate through today's media world . . . as well as through the sexually liberated world that we live in today. There is no question that our students have the ability to become aware of the sexual messages that the media communicate to them. Nor is there any question that our students have the ability to combat the ill effects of those messages-if they are provided with the necessary tools. If, in other words, they become "sexually" literate. Thank you. 
Rodger Streitmatter, Ph.D. is a member of the School of Communication faculty at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book, Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America has just been published by Columbia University Press. He is also the author of Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay & Lesbian Press in America (Faber & Faber, 1995) and Raising Her Voice: African American Women Journalists Who Changed History (The University Press of Kentucky, 1994)
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I Love Lucy broke several barriers during its run, including suggesting Lucy and Ricky actually slept together, and Lucy's pregnancy 
"Meathead" and Archie on All in the Family
Then there was Maude to shake up TV 
John Wayne Bobbitt turned his highly-publicized misfortune into a career in pornography 
Dawson's Creek and Real World have brought teenage sexuality to the tube 
Friend's Joey 
Adding to my concern is that scholars who study television have found that teenagers accept the messages that situation comedies such as Friends send. One recent study found that between 85 and 95 percent of teenage viewers rated scenes such as the one I just showed as either "realistic" or "very realistic."
Premium cable shows like Showtime's Queer as Folk have pushed TV's sexuality envelope even further 
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