| This dissertation argues that the institutions, programming, advertisements, and audiences of 1970s U.S. commercial television constructed and circulated discourses of sexed bodies, sexual practices, and sexual identity that influenced and were influenced by everyday life. Television in the 1970s, with its sexually suggestive humor, its female sex symbols, its sex-themed advertising, and its controversies over sexual content, participated in defining sex in mainstream culture, ultimately helping to sustain the dominance of heterosexuality over other sexual orientations and keeping intact a sexual politics in which women served as objects of male sexual desire. I analyze television's discourses of sex in light of the period's debates over sexuality and gender as engaged in by feminists, gays rights activists, and the conservative forces who opposed them. These contexts provide insight into how and why television's audiences responded as they did to what they saw on-screen. I draw upon archival materials, popular press discussions, and government documents to tell the stories of television's discourses of sex and their relationship to the television industry and television's audiences.; The five chapters each explore one aspect of 1970s television's sex discourses. The first chapter analyzes some of the many attempts to regulate television's sexual content by governmental, TV industry, and citizens' groups. Chapter Two investigates the controversy over the arrival of television commercials for bras, feminine hygiene products, and contraceptives. Chapter Three focuses on the "sex symbol" women made famous in 1970s action-adventure series such as Charlie's Angels and explores their appeal in light of debates over the fundamental difference (or lack thereof) between men and women in a time of feminist activism. Chapter Four examines the relationship between the sexual revolution and the sexually suggestive comedy found in sitcoms and game shows. Finally, Chapter Five considers a darker piece of television's sex discourses, the multitude of rape narratives in daytime soap operas, and analyzes the relationship between these stories, changing notions of rape's motivations and meanings, and the television industry's adaptation to these and other changes. |
