| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. By Elana Levine. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. viii, 320 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3902-1. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3919-9.)

In Wallowing in Sex, Elana Levine offers a meticulous account of how, "Television's handling of sex in the 1970s presented a negotiation between long-standing values, mores and norms and the challenges posed to them by the sexual revolution" (p. 15). The volume is in the series Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power edited by Lynn Spigel, which has a long-time commitment to television scholarship. Levine's project is a welcome addition to the series, providing thoughtful analysis of how 1970s television, across a number of different genres, participated in the transformation of American sexual mores. She argues that "the new sexual culture of 1970s television left a legacy for the way American culture would discuss, depict, and define sex for years to come" (p. 3). The book includes material on female sex symbols, comedy- variety shows, and rape plots on soap operas, while exploring the industry politics and regulations that produced this programming. The chapters are readable and, to a degree, self-contained, each offering insight into how television reacted to the waning of American Protestant traditions and the increasing sexual permissiveness of the period.

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