America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

4. Sin, Sex, and TV Censorship

73 4. Sin, Sex, and TV Censorship Television’s arrival was part of a mutable cultural landscape after World War II, and many of the nation’s anxieties about sex and deviance—especially what was considered “sexually normal”—were played out on the home screen. Many older Americans living in smaller cities and towns, as well as conservative rural Protestants and urban Catholics, hearkened to past notions of gender, class, and religion to guide them through these new and uncertain times. They were shocked by the looser moral codes exhibited in some early television shows, as were some newlyweds starting families. These young marrieds were stunned by television’s frequent examples of less than virtuous behavior and fretted over how such representations would affect their baby-boom children. During the postwar era, foundational notions of what was proper and tasteful were continually being negotiated. An important area of those negotiations was the public space created by television. Sex in the Decade following World War II At the threshold of the 1950s, nearly every state in the nation lived under strict laws making it criminal to participate in unconventional sex and acts of homosexuality. An Indiana statute named masturbation a heinous offense punishable by fine and up to fourteen years in jail. Kansas convicted anyone practicing bestiality, calling it a “detestable and abominable crime against nature.” Some states outlawed cuckoldry between consenting (but unmarried) heterosexual adults.1 Historian J. Ronald Oakley argues that such postwar amatory codes “existed in the midst of a society permeated with sexual hypocrisy and titillation.” Ubiquitous advertising sold a dizzying array of products, while movies, magazines, and television featured a procession of seductive male and female stars equipped to titillate. The dominant discourse concurrently promoted sex as attractive yet repulsive, at once permissible but unac3RQGLOOR &KLQGG $0 74 S I N , S E X , A N D T V C E N S O R S H I P ceptable. Across the nation, citizens paid lip service to what Oakley calls “an unofficial Puritanical code . . . that [even] frowned upon . . . talk about sex (especially in mixed company or before the children).”2 It is not surprising that Helffrich and his NBC-TV Continuity Acceptance (CA) Department worked determinedly—albeit capriciously—to enforce most of these questionable, amorphous social codes. When commercial network television began its rise, few people would talk openly about sex. In polite conversation, even uttering “leg” or “breast” would be unacceptable. These and other words associated with the body bordered on the pornographic because of the mental associations they evoked. Clearly, such social prohibitions conflicted with natural urges, but mainstream 1950s society regarded sex as sinful, so following normal human desires would inevitably result in feelings of guilt and social opprobrium. To elude the unpleasant sense of shame and confusion, mannerly gentlefolk often simply avoided the dangerous subject of sex altogether. For the post-Victorian generation, a sense of cultural dislocation settled in after the World War II. Mothers and fathers of returning GIs found themselves challenged by a confusing combination of social and market pressures. Historian Beth Bailey located a reason for this bewilderment in the remnants of past sexual convention: “What changed were not sexual acts so much as what those acts meant—how they were perceived, what symbolic freight they carried. . . . Individual sexual expression changed less [in the 1950s] than the context of that expression.”3 Moreover, Bailey explains, the war forced recognition of “different mores and customs, different definitions of respectability, and sexualized images of popular culture and advertising, produced on a national scale for a national audience.”4 With the postwar explosion of consumer goods and for most American’s startling personal economic growth, many older citizens worried such affluence would engender moral flabbiness and sexual deviance. Cold War political tensions at home and abroad, the threat of nuclear annihilation, changing gender roles, a “baby boom,” deep-rooted fear of “sexual deviants” and Communists , emerging civil-rights activism, and a general upheaval created by retooling for a peacetime economy each in its own way contributed to the climate of American apprehension. Within this period of profound social and economic metamorphosis, an undefined, free-floating anxiety 3RQGLOOR&KLQGG $0 75 S I N , S E X , A N D T V C E N S O R S H I P coalesced around certain objects of concern, among...