How Much LOVING in the Afternoon – The Quantity of Sex on Soaps
Soap operas are purported to be littered with "steamy" sex scenes featuring muscular, bare-chested men and seductive, voluptuous women. True? Yes, but the somewhat surprising and full answer is more complicated than that. Starting with THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS in the mid 1970's, soaps began to focus much more on teenagers and younger twenty-something characters exploring their sexuality. The trend continues today and is not likely to be reversed.
Does the audience actually see what it thinks it sees? As noted in the introduction to this article, there certainly are a few explicit sex scenes in daytime drama. In reference to some kinky content on ONE LIFE TO LIVE, then headwriter Michael Malone said, "We wanted to see just how far we could push it on daytime. Frankly, I'm surprised by what they let us do." (Logan 12) It is unlikely that this attitude would prevail in any modern soap opera production offices due to the FCC's recent crackdown on decency in broadcast television.
Agnes Nixon, famed creator of LOVING, ONE LIFE TO LIVE, and ALL MY CHILDREN said, "The audience doesn’t want to see bodies writhing – it wants to see good old fashioned three dimensional romance." (Logan 14) That's what they got on ALL MY CHILDREN because Agnes Nixon remained headwriter for most of the time the show has been on the air and then switched to a consulting capacity with the program.
The writers of THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS think that the audience wants lots of sex and the writers of ALL MY CHILDREN don't. Who is right? Apparently, both of them are as the most sexy soap has ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings since 1990 and the least sexy soap enjoyed a very long haul as the number two ranked show.
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