History Channel's miniseries on 'Sex' looks like an affair to remember
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Like many a first date, History Channel's "Sex in the 20th Century" has a shaky start, replete with overenthusiasm and conversational bumbling.
That's only the first 15 minutes, though. Stick around longer and you'll find this four-part miniseries, airing from 10 to 11 tonight through Thursday, turns into a surprisingly good tryst.
It's true that in our current hormone-soaked culture, some viewers may feel the last thing in the world they want is a show on sex. Give us bass fishing, give us Tech TV, heck, give us a PBS fund-raiser - anything but more doo-wah ditty.
Such apprehensions won't be quelled when History Channel deploys former President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky to introduce its series. This is akin to using Dale Earnhardt's crash to launch a thoughtful discussion on NASCAR racing.But we quickly move on, and History Channel soon has us gripped in a mix of fascinating detail and multilayered context. Class, race, economics, science, the arts - all the external ingredients that framed the nature of intercourse throughout the past century are provided in thought-provoking abundance.
Here's a sample of how adroitly the show blends fact and insight: The word "date," with its respectable connotation of getting-to-know-you, came into being only around 1896. Before that, it was working-class slang for an appointment with a prostitute.
Hence the long, unpleasant subtext of "date" as a situation where the female might be expected to pay for her dinner and movie by putting out.
As always, History's approach is accessible and smart, with commentary from interesting observers. A sense of humor doesn't hurt, either. How else can one treat such items as The Chattanooga, a machine early-20th-century doctors used to treat female patients seeking "hysterical catharsis" - i.e., orgasm?
Historical watersheds divide the series into its four installments. Part 1 covers the period when Victorian sensibilities began to dissipate, a process culminating in the carpe diem attitude brought on by World War I.
Part 2 brings us from the Jazz Age to the decade immediately after World War II, perhaps the series' most fascinating span.
In the '20s and '30s, influences like Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, music and movies signaled a growing shift toward sexual openness. Despite opposition, such as film censorship and the formation of conservative decency groups, the process was accelerated by a global war in which 85 percent of America's fighting men had sex while overseas and women at home became much more sexually active, too.
Yet it all went underground in the 1950s. History Channel offers some persuasive links between the Cold War and bedroom conservatism, highlighted by the behavior of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and his gay-hunting "lavender boys."The least interesting installment of "Sex" is Part 3, centering on the swingin' '60s. Maybe that's because the territory's so well-trod or because History Channel deflates the era's self-congratulatory "we-invented-it-all" attitude.
Thursday's final episode is more surprising than one might expect.
Setting decades of misperception aright, "Sex" makes it clear that the '70s - not the '60s - were America's apex of sexual loosening, with women's liberation, gay liberation, Roe vs. Wade, pornography's rise and vast casual experimentation all summarized in the memorably tacky bumper sticker, "Honk if You're Horny."
Such extremity was matched only by what followed in the 1980s and 1990s: AIDs, the Moral Majority and a sort of massive carnal hangover.
Are we liberated yet?
The answer may lie in the one realm History's "Sex" fails to address - human psychology. Liberation often needs the threat of restraint to thrive, perhaps never more so than in sexual matters.
Instead, the series closes on the pat rather than the profound. "It's one of the best things on the planet," says none other than Hugh Hefner. Profitable, too, he and the folks at History Channel might have added.
Kay McFadden may be reached at 206-382-8888 or at kmcfadden@seattletimes.com.