Sex in the Media
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
Sex and erotica have been part of the arts and media from their earliest beginnings, and many examples exist of ice age pornography and of nude and erotic paintings and objects from ancient Greece and Rome. Erotic art is found across the globe, from pre-Columbian artifacts to statues and paintings decorating temples in India (see also Erotica).
However, it was only with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century that sexual depictions of the human body spread through Western societies. The potential grew for widespread access to subjects with a sexual core in the first years of this century with the development of motion pictures. As erotic as a statue, a painting, or even a photograph may be, they cannot compare with what became possible with the birth of motion pictures. Sexual intercourse is not a sedentary act, but full of movement; from a first caress to the throes of passion, sex is the union of two moving bodies. The motion picture camera was quickly put to use to demonstrate the possibilities.
Just as the world of painting has long been divided into legitimate and underground markets, this has been the case with films. As quickly as cinematographers developed new techniques for films intended to be shown to wide audiences, those whose business it was to sell sexually explicit material followed suit. The very first movies were very short affairs and were available only in the nickelodeons, where they were hand cranked by individual viewers. These private viewing machines cost only a nickel, but one coin allowed the viewer to see only part of the reel. A viewer who wished to see the climactic scenes at his local peep show had to keep feeding nickels into the slot.
As films got longer and the projector was invented, sexually explicit films moved into the smoke-filled back rooms of bars and private clubs. Called “stag” films, they were shot in a hurried style, with the men often wearing masks and usually keeping their socks on. Viewers often felt that the police were going to break in at any second.
As the years went by, pornographic films improved in quality but the genre remained short on plot, dialogue, and decent acting. The industry did have a sort of Renaissance period in 1973. In that year three pivotal films were released: Behind The Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones, starring Marilyn Chambers; and Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace. (In later years, Linda Lovelace recanted her enthusiasm for Deep Throat and claimed that she had been forced to make it.) These films did not take themselves as seriously as was the norm and it suddenly became popular for couples to go to see them. This was the first time that women were seen in pornographic film audiences in any numbers. But because of a 1973 United States Supreme Court ruling, such films were shown only in communities with liberal standards, like New York City, and were banned in more conservative areas. What really brought erotica to the masses was the invention of the VCR.
With VCRs anyone can watch sexually explicit films in the privacy of their living rooms. In addition to making masturbation easier to integrate into the viewing process, it also vastly increased the number of women who watched these films. Despite the small statistical blip that occurred when Deep Throat was released, most women would not be seen going into a movie theater that showed X-rated films. But watching in the privacy of their own home is another matter; video store owners report that women are not shy about renting such films. Indeed, some have probably discovered that watching these films together with spouses may bring a night of intense love-making. While most pornographic films being made have stayed with the old formulas, new producers, including some women, have tried to broaden the plots of their films to bring more romance, a change most women find to be more appealing than straight sex.
As popular as watching pornographic movies has become, it is still something done by only a minority of the population. What has changed significantly is the integration of sex into mainstream movies and television programs, leading many people to wonder whether there will come a day when the distinction will blur altogether.
The world of silent films may look prim and proper to today’s audiences, but because movies were also new once, even the commonplace was daring. One of the earliest shorts (1896) was entitled The Kiss, and that is all it was: a kiss between two fully dressed, ordinary-looking people. It started rather tentatively and lasted only a few minutes, but to audiences then it was quite daring. Here was a private act being shown to anyone with a nickel for the nickelodeon.
Actors and actresses in silent films communicated with exaggerated facial expressions and body language. Despite the need to abide by community standards that demanded that in a bedroom scene one of the partners keep at least one foot on the floor, vamps like Mae West and Theda Bara, male lotharios led by Rudolph Valentino, and even their more “innocent” compatriots like the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties conveyed a sensuousness that drew wide audiences. As with Renaissance painters, one excuse for showing a sexual scene was to portray an event from the past. D.W. Griffith did this in Intolerance (1916), featuring an orgy scene from the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The late 1920s and the 1930s brought in a new era, and as the flappers changed society at large, the “talkies” brought a real blast of sexuality to the motion picture industry. In the early 1930s many films had overtly sexual themes: if there was no actual nudity, there was plenty of skin. Directors used any ploy they could to get such stars as Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck out of their clothes. The themes of these films included child prostitution, sexual bondage, and women sleeping their way to the top, along with murder, mayhem, drinking, smoking and skullduggery of all kinds.
This alarming trend led to the Hollywood Production Code, or Hayes Code, an industry-wide self-censorship plan, that was the forerunner of today’s MPAA codes. The code warned against showing too much skin and especially suggestive acts such as “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures.” Not only did everyone have to stay properly dressed, but when the plot caused the characters to engage in forbidden activities such as premarital sex or adultery, the last reel had to show that in the end the just are rewarded and the wicked are punished.
Because Europe did not have the same restrictions, the first nude scenes in a commercial film were shot on the other side of the Atlantic. The most famous of these is probably the 1933 Czechoslovakian film, Ecstasy, which featured a nude Hedy Lamarr. While filmmakers in the United States were not allowed the same freedoms for some time, there was one exception—the breasts of black women portraying native Africans. Just as National Geographic published photographs showing nudity long before any other magazine, movie “documentaries” that showed bare-breasted native women were never censored, although both sexes were always shown wearing loin cloths.
Europeans kept pressing the limits and one of the films that caused a breakthrough was Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, starring a new ingenue, Brigitte Bardot. European audiences flocked to see Brigitte’s amorous adventures. But even though she bared her body (seen from the front in the French version but not in the version released generally in the United States) and embraced her lovers, Vadim still had to make sure that she kept her legs together.
The courts made sure that all of this European flesh did not show up on American screens, ruling that such films as Max Ophuls’s La Ronde and Louis Malle’s Les Amants were obscene and banning them from being imported into the country. However, while nudity was banned, sex was certainly an important part of the American movie scene, especially in the years of Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery’s James Bond, and the beach blanket movies. Only in 1966, however, when the Hayes Code was finally abolished, did actual nudity return to the American mainstream cinema, copying what had been going on in magazines under the lead of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.
In 1957 the Supreme Court rejected the idea that obscenity should be protected under the First Amendment. According to Justice William Brennan, it was “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Only nine years later the Court reversed its position, stating that unless certain elements were proved, among them that the dominant theme of the material catered to prurient interest and it was utterly without redeeming social value, material could not be judged obscene. In 1973 the Supreme Court added that the determination of obscenity was also provable if “the work, taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” Nevertheless, the barn door had already been pushed wide open. In line with what was going on in the courts and in society, the movie industry made its own changes. The Hayes Code was replaced by the MPAA rating system. Rather than banning nudity and sexual activities, they were merely categorized. The most explicit films were given an X, now replaced by NC–17. Some movie exhibitors quickly converted into specialty houses showing nothing but sexually explicit films. Many actually used the rating system to advertise the erotic content of what they were showing by making up their own label, Triple X.
Movie companies looking to make the most money have always considered an X or NC–17 rating to be the kiss of death, so the R-rating has been the category that really brought sex to mainstream American audiences. Midnight Cowboy was the first major film to be given an X rating, but it was quickly edited so that it could earn the respectability of an R, and it went on to become one of the top films of the year, winning an Academy Award. I am Curious Yellow/Blue (1967) were really the first widely shown films in America to show male and female genitalia. The films’ main message, an attack on the values of the Swedish welfare state, was probably lost on American audiences, who went mostly to see something that they had never seen on screen before. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1973 film, Last Tango In Paris, was the first X-rated film with a major star, Marlon Brando, though in order to reach a wider audience it was later released in a cut, R version. It also had the distinction of being the most explicit film to be released by a major Hollywood studio, United Artists.
Each year a new film would break one more taboo. There was the casual sex romp in Blow Up (1966), Raquel Welch as a transsexual in Myra Breckinridge (1970), the bedroom foursome of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1970), the violent sex of A Clockwork Orange (1971), the gentle sex of The Summer of ’42 (1971), George Segal’s bare bottom in Harold and Maude (1971), the animated sex in Fritz the Cat (1972), the adulterous cousins in Cousin Cousine (1975), Brook Shields as a child prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978), and the outrageous homosexuals in La Cage Aux Folles (1979).
While the barriers tumbled in the field of motion pictures, television remained rather tame. As a medium that was beamed into everyone’s home, it was available to adults and children alike. Even married couples, like Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke in the Dick Van Dyke Show, slept in separate beds. If one genre should be given credit for breaking out of this mind set, it was the soap operas, especially in their nighttime versions like Dallas and Falcon’s Crest. But television would have advanced only so far and no further as long as it remained a broadcast medium. The advent of the VCR and cable were its instruments of change.
As already noted, the VCR allowed even pornography to be viewed on the home screen, as well as the tamer R-rated features that could not be shown by the networks in their uncut versions. Then cable came along, and while the X-rated feature was usually trimmed to an R, adult films were one of the main reasons that people subscribed to movie channels like HBO and Cinemax, even though viewers had to pay additional fees to receive them (some larger American cities have also had to deal with nudity broadcast on public access channels, although it has not been a widespread phenomenon).
With video sex so available in people’s living rooms, it was only natural that broadcasters were going to fight back to reclaim some of their lost viewers. N.Y.P.D. Blue is the first network series to show nude male and female bodies and to use words never heard before on television. It is undoubtedly only the first of many.
Another medium where sex is fast on the rise is computers. As soon as modems enabled people to communicate through their computers and telephone lines, part of the communication was devoted to sex. Some of the sexy communications between people at their keyboards is strictly amateur, but others are professional, with names like EROSLink. People type fantasies into their keyboards that those on the other end want and pay for.
With the advent of color screens, computers have become another way to show sexy pictures. Discs are easily available from smaller firms as well as from long-time players in the field of sex such as Penthouse. With the advent of the CD ROM devices, much more information could be put on one disk, including both still and video pictures: this became one reason some people added CD ROM drives to their personal computers. Those interested in computer sex have their own world, complete with bulletin boards, magazines and even their own lingo, which includes terms like “cybersex.” A few years ago, the idea that so many people would be searching for fantasy sex instead of the real thing would have been unthinkable, but because of AIDS—or for other reasons—many people too frightened to find real partners prefer the safety of electronic companionship.
