How We Got Here: The 70s the Decade That Brought You Modern Life -- For Better or Worse by David Frum

Author:David Frum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Publishing
Published: 2010-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC MOI CE SOIR?

AL JOLSON’S JAZZ SINGER IT WAS NOT, BUT IN 1978 THE OTHERWISE OBSCURE production company Satori Films achieved a motion-picture breakthrough all the same. It released a movie titled Secrets, in which Jacqueline Bissett enacted a graphic five-minute sex scene entirely nude. Before Secrets, name actresses in American feature films did not strip for the camera. (Virna Lisi tore up a contract with United Artists in 1968 rather than appear in the skimpy costumes designed for Barbarella-and risque as that movie was, in its big sex scene Jane Fonda was exposed only from the neck up.) So strong was the taboo, in fact, that Satori hesitated for seven years after the 1971 shooting of Secrets before letting it out the door.

By then, the producers must have had difficulty remembering what they’d been afraid of. On-screen grappling and grasping had become as familiar a theatrical convention as the tenor aria was 150 years ago. Suddenly the pop stations on the radio pulsed to the copulatory rhythms of disco: “Push, push in the bush”; “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir”; “That’s the way, uh-hunnh uh-hunnh, I like it, uh-hunnh uh-hunnh.” On middle-of-the-road stations, Tenille crooned “Do that to me one more time” to her piano-playing Captain. Respectable bookstores stocked items that would have been hauled off by the vice squad half a dozen years earlier. Dell’s paperback edition of The Happy Hooker sold 6.6 million copies by mid-1973, one hundred thousand copies more than the year’s best-selling non-smut paperback, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Bob Guccione’s Penthouse eclipsed the sales of Playboy by publishing graphic pictures of female genitalia and lesbian sex; Larry Flynt’s Hustler carved out a niche for more obscene stuff still. Manhattan office workers could stroll over on their lunch hour to the theaters where Noel Coward’s tinkling comedies used to play and watch live sex shows. Soft-core films like Flesh Gordon were screening on Main Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Topeka, Kansas. A central figure in the Watergate scandal was given the title of a triple-x movie about fellatio as a nickname, and the ambitious production values and sustained story line of 1973’s The Devil in Miss Jones prompted Variety to comment that hardcore pornography was becoming an art form that critics “may have a hard time ignoring.”19

By century’s end, more than 20 million U.S. households were connected to cable or dish television systems that offer the soft-core Playboy Channel.20 Hard-core pornographic movies were available at the flick of a switch in almost 1 million of the nation’s hotel rooms.21 Daytime soaps have sex scenes that once would have earned movies an “R” rating while evening situation comedies string one salacious remark af ter another. The Internet puts high-quality photographs of sex with children, animals, and people in wheelchairs in easy reach of anyone with a credit card. In the 1970s, Donna Summer became nationally notorious for simulating orgasm in her disco hits; many stations simply banned her music outright, for fear of what their listeners and the Federal Communications Commission might say.

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