Review by Mike Gange

Sex Sells!

The Media’s Journey from Repression to Obsession

By Roger Streitmatter

Westview Press, $26.95, 283 pages

As a teacher, I sometimes try to engage my students in a discussion about the pervasiveness of sexual images in the media they consume. Invariably, I get some students who shrug their shoulders dismissively, and say “Well, sex sells!” Right there, I know those students are buying into the pop culture philosophy and aren’t going to be able to comprehend the issue to be much deeper.

Unfortunately, Rodger Streitmatter could be one of those students. In Sex Sells! The Media’s Journey from Repression to Obsession, he is long on examples, but short on explanations. Streitmatter presents a series of vignettes that are interesting and well documented but not too enlightening as to the reasons why sex sells so well in our society. Throughout the book, the nagging question goes unanswered: “Why is this happening?”

Streitmatter’s numerous examples from the mass media clearly show the changes our society has undergone in the last 50 years. The sexual revolution, he writes, started in the 1950’s with Alfred Kinsey, whose ground-breaking report showed that North Americans were more frisky in the bedroom than previously thought. On TV, only Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to be shown together in their bedroom and it was acceptable because they were married in real life. The Kinsey Report showed that what were society’s norms were far different from society’s practices.

The 1950’s were clearly a time of repression of sexuality. For example, “The Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS TV would not show Elvis swinging hips to the music, and the Motion Picture Production Code allowed “no excessive kissing, no lustful embraces, no exposed navels, thighs or breasts.”

Everything changed in the 1960’s with the introduction of the birth control pill, writes Streitmatter. Almost as soon as “The Pill” was licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in May 1960, it was lauded by some of the most unlikely magazines, many of which had a largely conservative readership: Fortune, Readers Digest, Ebony, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal all ran articles in favour of the oral contraceptive.

Esquire magazine spoke up on the issue several times. A May 1961 article said knowingly “We are living through a sexual revolution.” A year later, an Esquire article by Gloria Steinem said the arrival of the Pill was a wonderful event because of the freedom it gave women. “The development of the autonomous girl is important (now). She has work she wants to do, and with which she feels identified. She can marry later than average and have affairs if she wishes, but she can also marry without giving up her work.”

Personifying the societal changes that were happening in the 1960’s, Streitmatter notes, was the newly elected, boyish looking, 43 year old John F. Kennedy and his glamorous, 31 year old wife, Jackie, who became the first lady. Meanwhile, an entrepreneurial publisher from Chicago was moving society further along in the sexual revolution. Hugh Hefner‘s monthly presentations of the “girl-next-door” as a woman to be admired for both her wholesomeness and her sultry sexiness changed men’s magazines forever, just as it changed society’s ideas about sexuality, and made Hefner a billionaire by the mid-1960’s. Streitmatter cites an unnamed historian who credits Hefner and his Playboy ideals with being singly “responsible for inciting the sexual revolution.” Playboy magazine, Streitmatter writes, “gave pop culture a sex life.”

Also mentioned here are the James Bond movie phenomena that grossed some $2.5 Billion, and the rise (and fall) of the rock band The Doors, whose successes (and subsequent collapse) were all a result of the sexuality oozed by lead singer Jim Morrison. The demise of The Doors, writes Streitmatter, was ultimately brought about because, as Morrison went on trial for lewd behaviour in a public place, venues throughout the U.S. where The Doors might have played cancelled their contracts. Radio stations likewise stopped playing music by The Doors, fearing they too would be tainted with this label of lewdness, and they did not want to risk their licences.

With 18 chapters in all, each about 12 pages in length, Sex Sells! The Media’s Journey from Repression to Obsession is interesting and fun to read. Streitmatter gets us to believe that indeed sex sells, but he does not enlighten us as to why it does. Gloria Steinem is the only feminist voice mentioned here. One of the obvious unanswered questions is “Why is this happening?” At the conclusion of the book, yet another question occurs to the reader. “Have we gone too far?”

You won’t find the answers to these questions in this catalogue of pivotal moments in our sexual revolution. Clearly, there needs to be much more discussion.