Television is the closest thing we have to mass communicated cultural values. If we can shift it toward a depiction of sexuality that places equal value on female pleasure and female desire, that’s a win.
The Scene: Young country pop star Juliette Barnes, blonde and beautiful, lounges in bed. She wriggles, sighs, and frustratedly pulls the head of a young man, a candidate for a job as her assistant, out from under the covers:
Juliette: OK, stop.
Man: Does this mean I don’t get the job?
Juliette: I’ll let you know.
Man: Because I could try again….
People, we have spotted a unicorn. On last week’s Nashville, between shots of Connie Britton’s lustrous hair and Charles Eston’s perfectly stubbled jaw, we saw a true television miracle: implications of cunnilingus on basic cable.
I posted the clip, and my amazement, to Facebook and asked friends to name other unicorns. While the cutting edge of the small screen landscape is full of vagina love (see: Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, Girls) references to the other oral sex on mainstream shows are few and far between. Exceptions include Shonda Rimes’ Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, the latter of which rarely lets a love scene pass without a shot of Fitz coming up from Olivia’s nether regions, and Michelle and Robert King’s The Good Wife.
So what? You say, what’s it to me if the soap-operatic bedroom action on shows I don’t watch features this sex act or that sex act? And what about the bigger picture? Some of you are reading this essay wondering why there’s so much sex on TV in the first place, never mind what kind. When did the world get so raunchtastic that we’re even having this conversation?
Alas, that’s the wrong question. Friends, that ship has sailed; sex is on TV and it’s not going anywhere. Although I will join you, heartily, in bemoaning the hypersexualization of the universe, I will not waste my breath trying to roll back the tide. Instead, I will ask, what now? If this flesh-obsessed, increasingly graphic version of public sexuality persists, how do we combat it? How do we contextualize it and give teens and kids (and adults, while we’re at it) tools to navigate our sex-soaked culture and come out happy and healthy and sane?
Variety.
They say it’s the spice of life, but spicy or not, I think it’s the key to saving our sexual souls. Am I being dramatic? Yes, but I don’t know any other way out of the funhouse of warped and sexist imagery that we call mainstream TV. Cunnilingus on television is, in the scheme of things, a tiny step toward acknowledging that women are sexual actors, not sexual objects. Television, for better or for worse, is the closest thing we have to mass communicated cultural values. If we can shift it, however slowly, toward a depiction of sexuality that places equal value on female pleasure and female desire, that’s a win.
This obviously isn’t brand new: Sex and the City brought female sexuality to the forefront of the television conversation years ago, but it was created for a small segment of adult viewers who tuned in to HBO. Teens watch Nashville, Grey’s, and Scandal. Because of their network affiliations and mass appeal, these shows are accessible in a way that Girls is not. The rote inclusion of cunnilingus in “normal” adult sexuality is an unobtrusive way to validate a female-oriented sex act for an audience that may get little exposure to it. Many women are self-conscious about receiving oral sex, wouldn’t it be cool if Olivia letting the President go down encouraged more women to feel comfortable with their partners?
Variety means more than just bi-directional oral sex. It means normalizing a wider range of sexual styles, orientations, and preferences while emphasizing consent and pleasure over conequest and shame. CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother recently featured a bondage joke between engaged couple Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin (Cobie Smulders). The joke concluded with the couple high-fiving. Get it? Sex-positivity is cool!
It’s no surprise that the shows most enthusiastic about female pleasure are ones created by women: Nashville’s Callie Khouri, Girls’ Lena Dunham, The Good Wife’s Michelle King (with co-creater and husband Robert), Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rimes, and Orange is the New Black’s Jenji Kohan.
There was a time when saying “penis” was permitted on TV, but “vagina” was considered vulgar (some politicians still think the word “vagina” is vulgar). While one can argue (futilely, I would suggest) for a return to programming that is less sexual altogether, that doesn’t seem to be where we’re headed. Instead, let’s focus on leveling the hypersexual playing field and promoting content that values female sexuality for its own sake, instead of using it as a backboard for male desire.
Role/Reboot regular contributor Emily Heist Moss is a New Englander in love with Chicago, where she works in a tech start-up. She blogs every day about gender, media, politics and sex at Rosie Says, and has written for Jezebel, The Frisky, The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.
Related Links: