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The boob tube
From the Dick Van Dyke Show to the dicks and dykes of cable: When it comes to sex on television, we’ve come a long way, baby
BY CHRIS WRIGHT


When you think of The L Word, you think Sex! — at least if you’re anything like me you do. You may even rub your hands together and pad from foot to foot. But it’s not just a matter of having a prurient mind. Or, rather, it may be more a matter of our society’s collective prurient mind. Since it first aired in January, Showtime’s soapy drama has garnered reams of press, much of it fussing over the amount of graphic slap-and-tickle on offer: "L Word turns on the lust appeal," stuff like that. As one entertainment reporter put it, with remarkable clarity, "Ooh-la-lalalalala."

Like HBO’s Sex and the City — whose soon-to-be-discarded Manolo Blahniks this show is clearly intended to fill — The L Word centers on a klatch of utterly gorgeous, utterly charming women. Like its precursor, this one features lots of lunchtime chats about such topics as "nipple confidence" and "vaginal rejuvenation." But if Sex and the City ratcheted up television’s raunch quotient a notch or two, this one cranks it considerably higher. Unlike the characters on SATC, see, these ladies get it on with one another. On screen. To hell with lalalalala — ooh!

But let’s not get carried away. Sex — like food, work, and sexually explicit soaps — is a part of everyday life. You’d expect any show with a shred of realism to depict people talking about sex, having sex, trying to have sex, or talking about trying to have sex. Yet there’s something oddly self-conscious about the way The L Word weaves the subject into its plotlines. Rose Troche, the show’s co-writer and director, has remarked that each episode features "a random act of sex." Sure enough, in the pilot episode the opening credits have barely had time to roll before we’re treated to the spectacle of two very hot, very naked women doing the, um, front stroke in a swimming pool, all the while being spied on by another, equally hot woman. Again, ooh.

Phoenix contributor Steve Almond, in a recent article for the online magazine Nerve, expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of sex on The L Word. "Brace yourself for disappointment, boyos," he wrote. "If you were hoping to catch prime-time poon porn, the L stands for Look Elsewhere." Almond went on to quote a friend of his with whom he watched the show: "Where all the titties at?" Odd, I seem to remember tons of titties.

Almond goes on to complain about an instance of female ejaculation that is alluded to on The L Word. He calls the decision not to air the actual squirt "unnervingly prim, cowardly even." Maybe if the show had given us a bearded lady getting it on with a bull elephant, Almond’s eyebrows would have winched a little. Perhaps an orgy involving former First Ladies. Or maybe just a few more titties, a smidgen more pubic hair.

The fact is, Americans have become inured to sex on TV, to the extent that even a relatively racy show like The L Word is greeted with shrugs. A tousle-haired woman emerges from beneath her lover’s sheet wiping her mouth — yawn. Two women rub each other’s genitals in a toilet cubicle — ho-hum. How did we get to this point? How did we get from the bromides of Father Knows Best to the bawd of The L Word? From "A fellow just hates to admit he’s wrong" to "What do you guys think about butt waxing?"

There was, of course, very little in the way of butt waxing in the early days of television. Back in the 1950s, when Americans bathed in the pale-blue glow of shows like The Honeymooners and Leave It to Beaver, sex was not an option. The Kramdens yelled at each other, the Cleavers cooed to each other, but these characters never actually touched each other, not in that way. According to some, The Dick Van Dyke Show represented the pinnacle of saucy romance back then. As I remember it, the only dick in that show was the title character. The same goes for dykes. These were different times.

In One Foot on the Floor: The Curious Evolution of Sex on Television from I Love Lucy to South Park (TV Books Inc, 2000), TV historian Louis Chunovic documents the arm-flailing indignation aroused by the sight of so much as a bared knee in TV’s early days. "As the honorable congressman from Arkansas, Ezekiel Candler Gathers, explained, complaining publicly about one offensive program, ‘It had a grass-skirted young lady and a thinly clad gentleman dancing the hootchy-kootchy. They danced to a very lively tune and shook the shimmy, both of them.’ " The title of Chunovic’s book refers to a rule, imposed by the likes of Gathers, stating that if members of the opposite sex were in bed together on-air, one of them had to have a foot planted on the floor. Clearly, these people weren’t having very good sex themselves.

Watching TV in the ’50s, you could have been forgiven for thinking that humans were a race of hermaphrodites, perpetuating the species in pristine isolation. Sure, we’d see Lucille Ball blunder into some mild sexual innuendo and then turn to the camera, her mouth forming itself into a scarlet O, but that was as far as it went. Yet the complicated dance between TV programmer and TV censor was already under way. Even today, the back-and-forth between these two eternal rivals continues. In essence, the hootchy-kootchying lambasted above is not so very far removed from the hootchy-kootchying between Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson during this year’s Super Bowl. And neither, for that matter, was the establishment’s reaction to it.

By now, we’re all familiar with Janet Jackson’s halftime revelation. Even if we missed the moment itself, we couldn’t possibly have ignored the media flap it spawned. Nipplegate. The schwip heard around the world. "Has shock value gotten out of control?" asked an alarmed-sounding voiceover on MSNBC’s Deborah Norville Tonight. "Or is this show business as usual?" Over on Fox, Bill O’Reilly’s chin wattle quivered with such passionate disapproval that he seemed likely at any moment to slap himself upside the head. Various spokespeople for the Federal Communications Commission, meanwhile, stopped just short of marching to Jackson’s door with pitchforks and flaming torches.

So why the fuss? As Chunovic’s One Foot on the Floor points out, women have been popping out of their gowns on live television since the days when Americans could actually keep a straight face while saying, "Did you see the Beaver yesterday?" Oddly, the national hand-wringing over Jackson’s exposed boob rivals that which greeted similar incidents back in TV’s sexual Bronze Age. A further irony is that those of us who may have missed the halftime moment in question have since had plenty of opportunity to scrutinize the offending tit at our convenience. One news photo in particular appears to have been enhanced by the people at NASA — every topographical feature, every crease and bloom of Jackson’s nipple, is brought into sharp, clear focus.

Even today, there are rules. In 2001, the FCC imposed new guidelines for what constituted on-air indecency: "The intent is very important. A news report including anatomical references is okay, but a graphic joke using the same reference is not. Context is also important. Frontal nudity in concentration camps in Schindler’s List is not considered to be offensive material." In the days after the Super Bowl, Jackson’s boob became news, so it was fair game. And when Jayne Mansfield’s nipples felt the glare of the klieg lights at the 1957 Academy Awards, her handlers could chalk it up to an "accident" and leave it at that. Timberlake’s talk about "wardrobe malfunction," however, was a little harder to swallow. Context and intent.

The "new" FCC guidelines are, in fact, not that new; some of us have been circumventing them for years. Connoisseurs of TV nudity — a demographic most ably represented by 14-year-old boys — have long sought out the African travelogue, the documentary about naturism, and, best of all, the BBC drama. I vividly remember, back in my early teens, being a huge fan of the high-brow period drama I, Claudius. I had no idea what any of these people were actually saying, but I did know that they tended to slip out of their togas from time to time. They were allowed, you see. This was art.

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Issue Date: February 20 - 26, 2004
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