Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (review)

In the context of today's television, we are all too familiar with the notion that "sex sells," but what we are less familiar with is the history of this in terms of television history. In Wallowing in Sex, Elana Levine offers a focused examination of popular 1970s television programming that most obviously tapped into the lingering remnants of the 1960s sexual revolution—a revolution that most readers have some sense of in terms of its profound impact upon American culture. What Levine offers that is fresh and new is how this revolution (like many of those that flowered in the 1960s) was adopted and marketed by the television industry in the United States; Levine traces in particular how movies of the week, commercial advertisements, female action dramas, comedies, and daytime soap operas negotiated the turbulent aftershocks of the many new meanings of sexuality that emerged in the sixties and continued to dominate public consciousness in the seventies.

Each chapter of Levine's book is a detailed discussion of how particular, mainstream elements of the television industry in the 1970s made the sexual revolution familiar and safe for viewers, while also continuing provocative debates about what was appropriate not only on television in the wider American culture as well. In short, Levine traces how television helped to create a "post-sexual revolution common sense" that at times guided viewers into distinct understandings of acceptable sexual content and at other times clashed with American societal norms (6). She does this best in the middle chapters of the book, especially Chapter Four's examination of series such as Charlie's Angels and Wonder Woman. Here Levine's model of scholarship is exemplary; she moves beyond a surface discussion of such program's content and even style to situate these series within the context of varied feminist debates of the time, as well as the context of how networks and agents sought to promote their shows and their stars.

The strongest achievement of this book is its focused scope, which allows each chapter to stand on its own while still building off the others in the book. While this is not a definitive statement on all aspects of sexuality in 1970s TV (Levine leaves aside for the most part a discussion of socially relevant sitcoms and the backdrop of policies that ushered in those programs), Wallowing in Sex will prompt readers to rethink the way in which they remember this decade of TV and the ways in which they assess current trends of sexual depictions in TV also. Levine clearly and adroitly lays out the impact of something as "simple" as the highly rated daytime soap wedding between Luke and Laura on General Hospital or the sexual innuendoes of Three's Company, asking readers to take television seriously as a voice in how our country develops understandings of something as fundamental as sexuality. This move alone should lead many to read this book and consider how popular culture today is continuing to negotiate this very personal aspect of our lives.