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Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution

Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution

Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution
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Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution

Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution

Overview

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world.

Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822356424
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 03/04/2014
Pages: 484
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Eric Schaefer is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. He is the author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Sex Seen: 1968 and the Rise of "Public" Sex / Eric Schaefer 1
Part I. Mainstream Media and the Sexual Revolution
1. Rate It X?: Hollywood Cinema and the End of the Production Code / Christie Milliken 25
2. Make Love, Not War: Jane Fonda Comes Home (1968–1978) / Linda Williams 53
3. The New Sexual Culture of American Television in the 1970s / Elana Levine 81
Part II. Sex as Art
4. Prurient (Dis)Interest: The American Release and Reception of I Am Curious (Yellow) / Kevin Heffernan 105
5. Wet Dreams: Erotic Film Festivals of the Early 1970s and the Utopian Sexual Public Sphere / Elena Gorfinkel 126
6. Let the Juices Flow: WR and the Midnight Movie Culture / Joan Hawkins 151
Part III. Media at the Margins
7. 33 1/3 Sexual Revolutions per Minute / Jacob Smith 179
8. "I'll Take Sweden": The Shifting Discourse of the "Sexy Nation" in Sexploitation Films / Eric Schaefer 207
9. Altered Sex: Satan, Acid, and the Erotic Threshold / Jeffrey Sconce 235
Part IV. Going All the Way
10. The "Sexarama"; Or Sex Education as an Environmental Multimedia Experience / Eithne Johnson 265
11. San Francisco and the Politics of Hardcore / Joseph Lam Duong 297
12. Beefcake to Hardcore: Gay Pornography and the Sexual Revolution / Jeffrey Escoffier 319
Part V. Contending with the Sex Scene
13. Publicizing Sex through Consumer and Privacy Rights: How the American Civil Liberties Union Liberated Media in the 1960s / Leigh Ann Wheeler 351
14. Critics and the Sex Scene / Raymond J. Haberski Jr. 383
15. Porn Goes to College: American Universities, Their Students, and Pornography, 1968–1973 / Arthur Knight and Kevin M. Flanagan 407
Bibliography 435
Contributors 451
Index 455

What People are Saying About This

Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry - Jon Lewis

"Focusing on a wide range of topics and media, Eric Schaefer’s anthology Sex Scene offers a complex and comprehensive history of the sexual revolution. The collection is a massive contribution to the study of sexual representation in the 1960s and 1970s."

NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America - Constance Penley

"In 1968 researchers at the National Sex Forum said it was time to say yes to sex. Decades later, researchers in Sex Scene say it is time to say yes to the study of sex media. Finally! The strikingly original essays in this wide-ranging collection boldly argue that the sexual revolution needs to be understood as the mass mediated affair that gave rise to our current debates about privacy, policy, and technology. The books, magazines, newspapers, movies, TV programs, and Broadway shows of 1968, and even Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, took such a prurient interest in sex that they gave prurience a good name, inciting that cultural move—from sex in the bedroom to sex in public—known as the sexual revolution. Sex Scene will make us all a lot smarter on the complex and controversial relation of sex and media as we teach, debate, and legislate it."

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