Page 320 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

12. EFFECTS OF SEX IN THE MEDIA 309

Sex in Literature. Sexual themes in fiction have been around as long as
fiction itself. Ancient Greek comedies were often highly sexual in content,
such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, an antiwar comedy about women who
withhold sex from their husbands to coerce them to stop fighting. Literary
classics like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the
Shrew are filled with sexual double entendres and overtly sexual themes,
some of which may be missed today due to the archaic language and the
“classic” aura around such works. In contrast to what is normally thought
of as pornography, sex in literature usually has some accepted literary pur-
pose or merit, which makes it much more socially acceptable.

Electronic Media. Since the advent of broadcast media, standards
have usually been more conservative for radio and television than for
print media, because it is easier to shield children from sexually oriented
print media than from X-rated radio or TV. With the advent of widespread
cable and video technology, a sort of double standard has arisen, with
greater acceptance of more sexual materials in video and premium cable
channels than for network television. The logic appears to be that pre-
mium cable and rented movies are “invited” into the home, whereas net-
work programming is there uninvited and accessible wherever a TV set is
present. Even more controversial is the problem of availability of sexual
materials on the Internet, which has virtually no restrictions. Although
there is much interest in legally restricting children’s access to sexually
explicit sites, there is considerable disagreement about both how much
sex is actually on the Internet (Elmer-Dewitt, 1995; Glassner, 1999;
Wilkins, 1997) and what kinds of restrictions or blocking software would
be both legal and effective, without blocking useful nonsexual sites like
breast cancer information or art sites.
Turning to television specifically, content analyses have shown that the
sex on network television is not explicit, but innuendoes are rampant,
often occurring in a humorous context (Greenberg et al., 1993; Greenberg
& Hofschire, 2000; Kunkel et al., 1999; Lowry & Towles, 1989). An exten-
sive content analysis study found that 56% of TV shows on network and
cable in 1997–98 contained sexual content, whereas 23% presented physi-
cal sexual behaviors (Kunkel et al., 1999). References to premarital and
extramarital sexual encounters outnumbered references to sex between
spouses by at least 6:1 (Greenberg & Hofschire, 2000) and were as high as
24:1 for unmarried versus married partners in soap operas (Lowry &
Towles, 1989) or 32:1 in R-rated movies with teens (Greenberg et al., 1993)!
The latter study also found that nudity occurred in all R-rated films in its
sample, with female exceeding male nudity by a 4:1 margin.
Although content analyses of soap operas showed considerable sexual
content in 1985, there was a 35% increase by 1994 (Greenberg & D’Alessio,