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Let's Talk About Sex

© Sarah Lee

You know that old joke, "Sex! ... Now that I have your attention"? Well it seems like soaps have been applying it more and more as of late. It's been quite interesting to see the trend evolve. Once upon a time censors were so sensitive, that the "scandalous" subjects like pregnancies and affairs were very hard to navigate on soaps. In the beginning you couldn't even say pregnant or show a couple in a bed. Everyone was "with child" and buttoning up the last two buttons as they came out of an unseen room. This began to change slowly and surely. Hot button topics and important issues like rape and abortion began to be incorporated into soaps as the late sixties and early seventies came around. Everything about television was much more open and confrontational and not just about sex, but also about race, poverty, and illness. In the eighties, primetime television went back to the safer route sans primetime soaps, but daytime continued on, introducing gay characters, dealing with incest, and interracial romances.

But as censors became more and more relaxed about sexual subjects, something else developed the need to constantly push the envelope. Primetime and now cable television has far less boundaries than a soap that airs at eleven in the morning ever will have. While other shows have shown nudity for almost ten years now, daytime is just now managing showing naked backsides. Daytime is stuck with actors leaving most of their clothes on, and never having the love scenes that border on soft core. But is this a bad thing? Granted, I'm probably by many people's standards a prude, but the increased show of skin, attempts to create a "hot" love scene, and engaging viewers on a very basic, shallow, and lustful level has been bothering me for awhile now.

I get the feeling that producers feel if they set up some sort of sexy scenario, viewers will flock in like obedient little sheep, watching for the sexual thrill and then stick around just to see who jumps in the sack next. I know where they got that impression, from the primetime soaps. With all of the nighttime soaps came the perceived necessity to have a lot more skin shown in daytime. By the end of the eighties, we saw an increasing number of guys who were stripping their shirts off willy-nilly. More often than not, primetime soaps relied on only the "who's sleeping with whom?" twists to keep their ratings afloat. But primetime soaps are not only new, they are a lot less successful a venture. There have been great hits and fabulous flops. There is no formula; there is no promise of sustained audiences with a little bit of skin. Some are cult favorites; some don't even get thirteen episodes. It is a very seasonal thing to see these opulent characters put so many notches on their bedposts, they should whittled down to nothing by season three. It also, believe it or not, takes a lot more than the sex to keep them engaged, the characters and the environment has to grab people. Sure, viewers and critics would talk mainly about the bed hopping, no question, but it is clear the mold can't rely on just that or they would all be major successes, still on the air. Dallas wouldn't have needed Bobby to return because all the show needed was hot action between the sheets. And if love scenes were all that was needed to keep a primetime soap on the air, than I would think Carrie Anne-Moss' airplane bathroom scene in the first season of Models Inc., should have done the trick. So needless to say, while I get producers thinking, I think they haven't thought it through.