Speaker 1:	Thank you, [Leah 00:00:05], for that very, very generous and sort of terrifying introduction. Living up to the reputation as one of the most interesting people on the internet is a high bar for the evening. I will do my best to fulfill that.
	Thank you, all, for having me here tonight. I've been spending the day on campus and it's been such a pleasure to talk to so many of you. I'm particularly excited to be here to talk about sex on television. America has a strange dichotomy when it comes to sex and violence. We say that we're extremely worried about violent media's impact on children, on society at large, and yet we do very little to regulate it or to keep it out of our media. In fact, television is much more developed in its ideas about violence than it is about sexuality. That's because we're fairly prudish. 
	Network Standards and Practices departments have largely kept any sort of explicit depictions of sex, whether it's physically or emotionally, off networks and cable television, which has much greater leeway in terms of what it can depict, has refined its depiction of violence much more than it's refined its depiction of sex. Despite these broader trends and hesitancy, we're at a moment when the development of our depictions of sex on television have gotten much more nuanced and rich, but not necessarily more conclusive. I'm excited to have a chance to walk you through the big themes that are happening in televised sexuality today.
	I wanted to start by talking about who has sex, because we all know that straight, white, young, attractive characters have a lot of sex in popular culture. But, we are at a time when the number and kinds of people who are considered sexual and are sort of allowed to have sex lives and romantic lives is really booming. One area where we're seeing a lot of development is that middle age people are suddenly allowed to have sex and romantic lives as well. How many of you watch 'The Good Wife?' Excellent. We've got some fans of 'The Good Wife' here. 
	I wanted to start out by playing this clip from CBS's Legal Procedural about a woman, Alicia Florrick, whose husband is forced to leave political office because of a sex scandal, begins working as a lawyer again and ultimately falls for Will, one of her colleagues, who is played by Josh Charles. Their relationship has been both strikingly sensual and romantic, as this clip of the first time they sleep together will illustrate.
Video: Will:	No ... Come on.
Background:	(singing)
Video: Alicia:	Well? Maybe ...
Background:	(singing)
Speaker 1:	So, the scene is very funny. In part because we're not used to watching middle aged people act like teenagers. But, it's a genuinely romantic sequence. When they kiss, that's what people actually look like when they're kissing. It's sort of this warm, lovely scene. But, middle age people are allowed to be raunchy in a way that they haven't been on television in a long time. 
	I don't know how many of you watch 'Girls', but in the first season there's a sequence where the main character, Hannah, returns to her hometown and while she's out for the evening, having sex with a very kindly pharmacist ... I don't know where people in television get their jobs from ... her parents have sex in a shower in a scene that's fairly explicit, even by cable standards. It's interesting, in part, because Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker are the actors who play her parents, you see quite a bit of their bodies. They have fairly standard, middle aged bodies. These are not people who are sort of sculpted into perfection by Hollywood, and one of the reasons that 'Girls' has been an interesting show is not just that it's shown a lot of Lena Dunham's body, which is something that has caused considerable comment and debate, but that it's been unafraid to show the bodies of her parents and a whole range of other people.
	That said, even though we have a greater age range of people who are allowed to have sex, old people are still sort of taboo. Betty White, who stars in 'Hot in Cleveland' and has done a prank show that is called 'Off Their Rockers', is sort of considered funny and interesting precisely because she's interested in sex, even though she's 90. She's an interesting illustration of the outer limits of where we're willing to watch people be sexual and where we assume people continue to have sexual interest. 
	On the lower age of the spectrum, we're actually in a sort of golden era for depictions of teenagers having sex or going through the process of deciding whether or not they want to have sex. 'Bunheads', the follow up to Gilmore Girls, featured an amazing sequence this season where the four main characters did an enormous amount of research about whether or not they wanted to have sex for the first time. Watching the four of them read 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' and sort of pass out when they got to the illustrations. Or, find themselves sort of dumbfounded by the condom isle at the drugstore, was a sort of remarkably honest depiction of the amount of information that is both available and necessary to teenagers if they're making decisions today.
	'Parenthood', the NBC drama that's a movie adaptation, features two main teenage characters who started having sex for the first time in the third season. The show was unusual for a network drama in that it actually showed the two of them in bed, it actually showed the two of them in mid-coitus. NBC is somewhat more liberal than other Standards and Practices departments in allowing you to show 'thrusting.' That's the technical term for Standards and Practices, that's what a number of [inaudible 00:07:22] I've talked to have said that's sort of the hard-line for their networks, ABC in particular is very particular.
	In 'The Mindy Project', Mindy Kaling's FOX sitcom. The main character, Mindy, is counseling a patient, Sophia, as a young teenager who is contemplating having sex with her boyfriend for the first time. It's the rare show that showed a young woman backing off from that decision. Sophia had initially planned to have sex with her boyfriend, and after a day with Mindy embarrassing her by distributing condoms to her volleyball team, questioning whether her boyfriend was really up to snuff. Sophia decided she would wait until she was dating someone who insisted he was going to make an app and not have to go to college, and that maybe she should actually focus on herself for a while. It's very interesting to see those decision making processes on screen. 
	Television is not particularly good at showing us contraception, it's not particularly good at showing people actually deciding whether or not they want to have sex with someone, and so to have that deliberative process for teenagers is unusual and I think, remarkably progressive in certain ways.
	There are also people who are not having sex on television. They remain sort of notable absences. LGBT characters almost never have sex of any kind on television. Unless they're in a show like, the now canceled 'Queer as Folk' and 'The L Word' that are explicitly aimed at gay audiences, because "Ew, Ick, what straight people would possibly want to watch gay people having sex?"
	'Modern Family', the very successful ABC sitcom, that was initially lauded as progressive because it had a married, gay couple who were adopting a young child, had so little sexual chemistry or contact between the two leads that it actually had to do an episode about how uncomfortable one of the characters was with public displays of affection. Sort of as an "in" joke to the audience who was wondering why we hadn't seen them kiss after several seasons. 'The New Normal' Ryan Murphy sitcom about a younger gay couple adopting, has actually become notable, I think, for showing the couple at the heart of the show, in bed at the end of the day in very crisp, pressed pajamas talking about big issues but never touching each other. Because, that would clearly be too much. Gay people are allowed to adopt children, but we're not allowed to think about the ways in which people get pregnant or have sex.
	In 'Girls', we get to see a substantial gay main character, Elijah, have sex with a woman in sort of a moment of sexual experimentation, but never with many of his boyfriends throughout the show. Lesbians are functionally invisible on mainstream television, in any case, unless they are knocked up. They are occasionally allowed to make raunchy jokes, as in 'New Girl', but it's difficult to have characters having sex if you don't have those kinds of characters at all.
	People of color are also, frequently not depicted as sexual on particularly on network television. Again, if you have a show on a network like BET or VH1, that is explicitly aimed at viewers of color, then characters of color get to be sexual. There are a couple of exceptions. If a character of color is in an inter-racial pairing, like in 'Happy Endings', the very funny ABC sitcom, which you should all watch, lest it get canceled. I'm feeling very partisan about 'Happy Endings' right now. 
	Characters of color and their sex lives can also be comic relief. Winston, the African American character on 'New Girl' has a number of sexual relationships, but the joke is often, to a certain extent, contrary to stereotype, that he's so sexually anxious that he frequently gets himself in trouble or ruins a moment. So, he's not hyper-sexualized, but he's not portrayed as having a particularly functional sex life, either.
	In some cases, people of color are allowed to have sex if white characters in the show are also having sex. 'The Wire', in addition to being a sort of remarkable sociological portrait of Baltimore, is a very thoughtful show about sex. But, its gay couples of color have sex less frequently and less explicitly than its white characters. This is a result of larger marginalization of both LGBT characters and characters of color more generally. 
	Frequently, if someone is in a show by virtue of their friendship with the main character. For example, if they're fulfilling the stereotype of the black best friend, that person doesn't need to have a sex life. In fact, that person's primary relationship needs to be with the main character. This was something that, I think, hurt 'Ben and Kate', a now canceled unfortunately, sitcom that aired for a while this fall. It had a character played by Echo Kellum named 'Tommy' who sort of lusted after the main character, but was never allowed to pursue relationships on his own. His sort of unrequited longing was the joke and the shtick. 
	There are some real limitations. We're much better about talking about white people who have sex, but we have yet to acknowledge that many other kinds of people have sex lives at all. This isn't even to mention people with disabilities who are one of the most invisible groups on television.
	Now that we know who's having sex, the interesting question is "What kind of sex is pop culture selling us on?" I think it's important to back up for a minute here and thinking about who's making our television. How many of you know who the show-runner of your favorite show is? Okay, a couple of you. How many of you know who is in the writers room of your favorite television show? Or who wrote your favorite episode of television? Alright, a few more of you there. 
	Television, particularly, when it comes to gender is a remarkably inequitable place. In the 2011-2012 television season, just 30.5% episodes of television were written by women. That's up only 5% from the 1999-2000 television season. The WRiter's Guild of America noted, when it reported these figures, that at this rate it will take 42 years for women to actually write half of television episodes. It will take 87 years for African American TV writers to achieve representation proportional to that in the actual population. So, television is largely made by white men. Consequently, a lot of the sex on television is white men's ideas of what sex looks like, what's hot and what's interesting. 
	Shonda Rhimes, the creator of 'Grey's Anatomy', 'Private Practice', and 'Scandal', is, and I'm not exaggerating here, is the only woman who can get anything she wants on television. Chuck Lorre, who is the creator of 'Two and a Half Men' and produces 'Two Broke Girls' and a number of other shows, is just one of many men who has remarkable authority to get his ideas and images that he finds interesting on air. But, we're really operating in an environment where there is one woman who has substantial power in the industry. That should be an unnerving thing. I want to talk about Rhimes a little bit more later, because she has some very particular concerns about sex that make for very interesting television viewing.
	Even if women create shows, and only a handful of them create shows every year, it doesn't mean they get to run them. Whitney Cummings, who sold two television shows in the previous season, only got to run one of them, had to hand the other one, 'Two Broke Girls' over to Michael Patrick King, who'd previously run Sex in the City. Mindy Kaling, who is an important female comedy writer and an important show creator, has a show that is run by a man and a writers room that is staffed substantially by women. Lena Dunham's 'Girls' at this point, has a writers room that is majority male. I know I'm harping on these statistics, but they're truly remarkable. There is no other aspect of America's business world that is so distorted. It's particularly notable in an industry that is creating such powerful visual representations.
	It's also worth remembering that these creators, depending on the environments that they're working in, even if you're a woman. Say, you've created your television show, you've got the writer's room of your dream. If you're working on network, you have to deal with Standards and Practices. I mention the thrusting prohibition earlier. Standards and Practices can be remarkably arbitrary. I was talking to the show runner of the quickly canceled 'Love Doctor', who told me that the main problem that they had run into is that they had a vile of urine in one scene and they were told that the color was too yellow and they had to go back and edit it. Imagine shooting your dream television show, presenting it to the censors, and then essentially wanting to go outside and light yourself on fire because you haven't been able to say almost any of what you wanted to say. This is a creative business, but it is business and it faces really difficult restrictions.
	When it comes to sex, there are sort of unwritten norms in place that come into play just as much as Standards and Practices does. No full frontal nudity, it remains a remarkable exception. Mike White, who created 'Enlightened', has talked about getting naked on that show, in part because he saw how harshly Lena Dunham was criticized for her nudity on 'Girls.' So, he wanted the experiment in this act of solidarity of getting naked as well. Men are asked to display their bodies in extremely different ways. 
	There is just much more room to convey the emotions of sex than there is the act itself. But, both things are remarkably hard to do. Part of the challenge of putting good sex on television is that there's very little consensus of what's sexy. Reams of articles have been written about how difficult it is to write sex scenes. It's also difficult to find the balance between a creator's fantasy and what will appeal to a larger audience. I think that's a really interesting conundrum. I think there's a lot of desire to see the genuinely sexy, moving interesting sex on television and almost no consensus on what that looks like. If you come through all of the other creative, freedom hurdles of the business, you run up against this limitation that the scene that's running in your head may be remarkably uninteresting to everyone else. 
	It's interesting talking to female creators, as I've done some over the years, about what they think is sexy. Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote the Twilight movies, and I don't know how people in the room feel about Twilight. She was working under remarkable restrictions and took the money to found a production company that only makes shows about women so, God bless her. So, when I asked her, "To me, what's sexy about sex scenes is connectedness and the intensity of connectedness. It's titillating, in the physical manifestation of it. It's not about posing or this move or that move. It's about two actors and the chemistry that they have. I have to say, as a female viewer, I want to see the men and I'm not above pandering. You will notice in my show that all the male actors are unusually and particularly good looking and built. This is secondary to our talent, but I'm all about letting our female audience enjoy that beauty. You will see some shirts off."
	Shonda Rhimes, the most powerful woman in television right now, is obsessed with adultery. There is an adulterous main character in almost every one of her shows. In 'Scandal', her most recent drama, her character's having an affair with the President of the UnitedStates, which I don't know how you get around the logistics of that, but she is really testing the limits there. 
	Lena Dunham told Playboy that she finds sex on her show less artificially sexual and more educational. She said, "My goal is to have a sexual verisimilitude that is heretofore not seen on television. I did it because I felt that the depictions of sex I had seen on television weren't totally fair to young women trying to wrap their brains around this stuff. I didn't do it to be provocative, I did it to be educational. Fortunately, I've been lucky enough not to date the porn guy. There have been weirdos, but not him. I think you can identify the porn-y guys early on based on their behavior. They try to force you into unnatural sexual, cinematic sexual positions or they just seem to have learned a lot of their moves from people who do sex acts for a living." 
	Filmmaker Sarah Gerturde Shapiro has suggested that we don't actually want to see naturalistic sex at all. She has come to believe that seeing realistic people do realistic things ... how many of you have seen 'Zach and Mary Make a Porno'? It's a great underrated Kevin Smith movie, but there's a very funny scene in the movie where the two main characters, who have been long term friends and roommates who have crushes on each other finally shoot a porn scene for an armature movie that they're making. The camera starts out very close up on their faces, and the two of them are in absolutely enraptured with each other. This is a long term dream they've had, they're tremendously excited, and then the camera pulls back and it's sort of two people lying on the floor and it doesn't look like very much is going on and all the people around them ... the camera crew, the actual porn stars who are working on the shoot are just incredibly confused. 
	I think Rosenberg said, so much of this is in our heads and getting in our heads is difficult, but shows try to give us plenty of sex acts anyway. I mentioned Shonda Rhimes' obsession with adultery. I've got ... this is an interesting thing, because it both sort of adheres by network Standards and Practices and it's very emotional, it shows you very little of what's happening, physically. But, this is a scene in which Olivia Pope, the presidential fixer, and the President of the United States in a computer room at a Christening. Which, again, the logistics of all of this stuff are a mystery to me.
Background:	The following clip is brought to you by bill.com
	(singing)
Speaker 1:	Sorry.
Background:	(singing)
Speaker 1:	It's one of those scenes that actually make me wish that people actually used contraception on television, because it makes me so anxious. I'm sorry, getting knocked up by the President would make me extremely nervous. That was a plot point in the first season of 'Scandal', my understanding is that if people believed the President has knocked you up, you end up in the Potamic River. Which has lots of mutant fish, for those of you who have ever spent time in D.C.
	What's interesting about the scene is ... what's hot about it, is the emotions. The primary emotion is guilt and anxiety. Olivia, the look that she gives the President, who goes by Fitz, he's a WASP ... is one of sort of shame and confusion and it irresistible. This is actually a theme for a lot of network television. What makes sex hot is that it's forbidden.
	'The Good Wife', as much as Alicia and Will are incredibly romantic and smoochy in the elevator, she's cheating on her husband. Homeland, the showtime drama about the covert operative for Al-Qaeda and the CIA agent who is tracking him down, relies substantially for the emotional connection for the two main characters on the idea that the agent who is tracking down the terrorist has better sexual chemistry with him than his wife does. It's sort of doubly forbidden because he is her quarry as well as someone who is forbidden to her by the bonds of marriage.
	One thing that has been interesting particularly in comedy is the rise of role play and kink on television. This is and area that's walking an extremely fine line. I think it's very easy to make fun of BDSM or role play, but a number of sitcoms have managed to make kink funny but also not visible, if that makes sense as a distinction. 'Happy Endings' the sitcom I mentioned before, has a terrific interracial couple, Brad and Jane Kerkovich, played by Damon Wayans Jr. and Eliza Coupe, who clearly have a pretty spicy sex life and are by far the happiest people in the show. There's a very deep connection between the fact that they are sexually experimental and that they are emotionally open to each other. They know each other extremely well.
	Parks and Recreation, most of what we know about civil servant, Ben and Lesley's sex life is that they sometimes pretend to be Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher or characters in The Game of Thrones and that Ben has a Batman suit. These aren't presented as ... they are Midwestern, they are normal, they work for the government, they're a little corny in their ideals and yet their sex life is sort of spicy and fun and it's treated as something that is particular to them and quirky in a way, but not unpleasant or weird. It doesn't make them freaks.
	Television has a much more complicated relationship to oral sex. I don't know how many of you have watched 'House of Cards' yet, but there is a scene in which Congressman Frank Underwood, played with a lot of bacon grease Kevin Spacey, goes down on Zoe Barnes, the ambitious hustling young Washington reporter who he's been feeding gossip to. It doesn't really make sense to me that he needs to give her his penis as well as information, but that being one of the conventions of the show, it is what it is. There's this scene where she's on the phone with her father on Father's Day and he starts going down on her and it's deliberately unsexy. It's almost coercive. He is doing this to see how long she can stay in control. It's a surprisingly negative portrayal of something that's a fairly routine part of modern American sexuality.
	'Girls' has had sort of two oral sex, or oral sex referential scenes this season. One in which Hannah, the main character, is spending her weekend at the house of a wealthy doctor who initially asks her to get him off first. She actually refuses and asks him to take care of her before she takes care of him. Then, has sort of very chatty kind of status oriented oral sex scene in the finale in which Marnie, a sort of wealthy girl who has gone into a tail spin, has reunited with her boyfriend and while he is going down on her insists on talking about how much his skills have improved in the time they were apart.
	It's funny how oral sex has become this sort of, particularly when performed on women by men on television, has become this sort of anxious ... not particularly fun activity. I think that it may be that way because it's one for logistical reasons, it's one of the sex acts that you can have characters perform where one person's mouth is unengaged and so they can keep talking. You can insert dialogue in there. It's created a kind of lack of spontaneity. 
	Then there's something that 'Girls' does that I think makes it fairly unusual. Elaine Blair has written about this in the New York Review of Books, but it's a show where a woman's sexual adventurousness is treated as a serious subject. It's not something she does on the side, it's something that she does as a means of garnering experience. There's a sex scene in the first season where Adam, Hannah's sort of boyfriend, is sort of fully immersed in a fantasy and Hannah isn't really playing along with it particularly well. Blair wrote, "Adam had been blissfully lost to himself while they were doing it, while Hannah was taking mental notes. It is, among other things, an amusing metaphor for Hannah's chosen profession. The writer is the one busily jotting in her notebook, while other people are having orgasms."
	So, sex on television, as we've gone through some of the main things that people do, doesn't actually sound particularly pleasant. It's kind of guilt-ridden and anxious. It's a real conundrum. No one has really cracked the code of making sex that's universally sexy for everyone. Where television is further along, and I think this is because television is better with violence than with sex, is in its depiction of sexual violence. It's been very interesting to watch rape get treated, in television, as if it's like a punch in the face. It's like a shooting, it's a means of causing trauma. For that reason, I think comedy has actually done much better at dealing with sexual assault than drama has in certain ways. 
	I want to play a clip from the T.V. show, 'Louie', which is a comedy. I want to place a pretty substantial trigger warning on this. The video is about five and a half minutes, so if anyone wants to take a break, I totally understand, but it's of a fairly explicit sexual assault sequence. [inaudible 00:30:07] time to make decisions.
	'Louie' is a half hour comedy that airs on FX. It doesn't have a particularly strong plot or continuity and in this episode, Louie has been set up on this miserable date with a woman played by Melissa Leo. They've both had a bad time. This is them, coming home from a bar at the end of it.
Video: Melissa:	... that I've had in a long time.
Video: Louie:	I know, me too.
Video: Melissa:	The best part of it is that I never have to see your [inaudible 00:30:39] face again.
Video: Louie:	I know! What are you?... Hey, what are you doing?
Video: Melissa:	I'm going to put out. Let me go on you.
Video: Louie:	Seriously?
Video: Melissa:	This is a hidden camera show. Come on. Get that thing out.
Video: Louie:	Okay. Alright.
Video: Melissa:	Good?
Video: Louie:	Yeah, that was very good.
Video: Melissa:	Nice. Okay. Let's get some payback. 
Video: Louie:	What? 
Video: Melissa:	Strap on the feedbag.
Video: Louie:	Oh.
Video: Melissa:	Yeah.
Video: Louie:	Well, I don't really want to do that.
Video: Melissa:	What?
Video: Louie:	I just don't want to do it.
Video: Melissa:	Well ... Jesus. Don't tell me you're one of those guys that doesn't eat pussy.
Video: Louie:	No, I do. I just -
Video: Melissa:	Just not with me?
Video: Louie:	Yeah, no. Not now.
Video: Melissa:	What do you mean, not now?
Video: Louie:	Well, that's very intimate. I don't really know you.
Video: Melissa:	Intimate? Me sucking your dick's not intimate?
Video: Louie:	No, apparently not. It just didn't seem like a big deal for you. But, for me, it would be ... to do that to you.
Video: Melissa:	You've gotta be shittin' me. I did you, you're not doing me? That's not fair.
Video: Louie:	Well, no, we just have different values about that.
Video: Melissa:	This isn't about values. I just sucked your dick, you're going to eat my pussy.
Video: Louie:	I'm not going to do it. I'm sorry. It's just too soon.
Video: Melissa:	What, are you saying I'm a whore? 
Video: Louie:	No. Not by how you feel. That's what you did. I'm just saying that if I had done what you did, I would feel like a whore.
Video: Melissa:	You shouldn't have said that.
Video: Louie:	Would you really want me to do that to you if I didn't want to do it?
Video: Melissa:	I don't give a shit. I just want to get off. Do you know how many dicks I've sucked that I didn't want to suck? 'Cause I'm a good kid, 'cause I do what's right? I never left anyone hanging. How dare you.
Video: Louie:	Listen, if you blowing me hinged on my doing that to you than you should have said something first.
Video: Melissa:	Your sperms are dying inside my mouth right now, goddamn it. Who are the gentlemen? What is wrong with this country?
Video: Louie:	That's just how I feel.
Video: Melissa:	Obama. I gotta say, this is balls. I'm going to say it, this is freaking balls on you. I'll tell you what, though. You want to make a bet? I'll bet you 200 bucks in about three minutes you're going to be licking my asshole and my pussy.
Video: Louie:	What?
Video: Melissa:	I'm serious. You're gonna be. You're going to be licking my asshole and behind my pussy all back and forth. You're going to be doing that.
Video: Louie:	No, I think you're mistaken. That's not going to happen.
Video: Melissa:	200 bucks.
Video: Louie:	Make it a thousand.
Video: Melissa:	You want to know why you won't do it?
Video: Louie:	I told you why.
Video: Melissa:	Oh yeah. You're real smart, you make good points. But I think we both know what's going on here.
Video: Louie:	What?
Video: Melissa:	Faggot.
Video: Louie:	Are you serious? I'm not gay.
Video: Melissa:	Yep, you're gay.
Video: Louie:	That's not going to work. I'm not gay, you know I'm not gay.
Video: Melissa:	You're gay. Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think you get girls to blow you and you shut your eyes and think about men. Then when it's your turn, low and behold you're disgusted by the female vagina because you're gay.
Video: Louie:	That's so stupid, I'm not gay.
Video: Melissa:	Yeah, some tough girl who chain smokes to blow you in her truck, then you go home and jerk yourself off thinking about dick.
Video: Louie:	Oh, Jesus.
Video: Melissa:	Come on. Lick it. Lick it. Not with your finger.
Video: Louie:	Okay. Okay.
	Goddammit. You are crazy.
Video: Melissa:	You owe me 1000 bucks.
Video: Louie:	Well, I don't have it on me.
Video: Melissa:	That's okay. You can pay me next time. You want to go out again, right?
Video: Louie:	Yeah, sure.
Video: Melissa:	Okay.
Speaker 1:	It's a totally sick sequence, but it's incredibly funny and it's effective because it gets a lot of ideas across. Part of what's interesting ... and I wanted this three or four times because I couldn't believe that it was happening the first time I saw it ... and apparently, I've driven a lot of the people out of the room ... is that everything that Melissa Leo's character says up to the point that she punches Louie, is functionally correct.
	There is a sexual double standard, he has slut shamed her. He's tried to make her embarrassed. He doesn't want to reciprocate. She's absolutely correct and then you see the gender role reversal and the gender role reversal makes the kind of pressure that men can put on women extremely effective. I don't know how many date rapes involve getting punched in the head in the front of Melissa Leo's truck, but it makes the kind of coercion that does happen in date rape extremely visible and effective. It's a scene that is funny until it's really, really not. Then it returns to being funny. It's a scene that refuses to allow you to be comfortable. That's not something that I think most dramas could pull off. The switches in tone. That's an interesting thing for comedy to be doing.
	'Girls' did a similar episode this season where Adam, Hanna's now ex boyfriend, had been dating a new woman and she had been very sexually clear with him. She didn't like to be touched certain ways because it reminded her of being tickled. She didn't want him to ejaculate inside her, and he had said to her, "I like how clear you are with me." 
	Then, after several times having sex at her place he took her back to his apartment, which made her uncomfortable. It's dirty, it's sort of cluttered. She is already uncomfortable, and this show is a comedy. 'Girls' doesn't often go this dark, but it's interesting that a comedy was able to make this kind of tone switch. He asked her to crawl to her hands and knees to his bedroom. He commences oral sex with her, even though she expresses some level of discomfort, she says "I haven't taken a shower today." He keeps going. Ultimately, he ejaculates on her chest without giving a clear "Yes" from her. He had thought that he was being clear with her in the same ways that she was being clear with him. But, it was an illustration of how sloppy concent seeking in the middle of a sexual encounter can make both people involved miserable. Natalia was extraordinarily upset, she was frightened, she was disgusted, and Adam was deeply embarrassed. These are the kinds of emotions that, if they were in a drama, might have to come with an explicit moral or lesson attached. 
	When you have a full hour of television, often you have to have someone make a mistake, be judged for it and then be redeemed. Comedy doesn't necessarily have to redeem its characters, and because it's funny it often earns itself the right to go to much darker places when it comes to sexuality. That said, despite the rise of sexual assault on television drama, and the fact that so many sexual assaults are done in a purely cheap way to generate drama, I think there are a number of shows that have recognized that sexual assault falls into a separate category of violence. As a result, if you are going to show someone be sexually assaulted, you need to have something to say about the nature of gender and power in sexual assault. I think three shows that have done a particularly good job of this are first, 'Game of Thrones.' 
	Do we have Game of Thrones watchers in the audience? Alright, great. 'Game of Thrones' has a level of sexual violence that I think has made some people uncomfortable. I don't know if anyone ... have people felt that way? It can be a scary, upsetting show. But what I think it's done with sexual assault, that is very interesting is illustrated the ways that, because sexual assault permeates the medieval fantasy society it depicts. Whether you are a prostitute or a noble woman, you are vulnerable to sexual assault by family members, by someone you are betrothed to, it's possible that you will be effectively sold into chattel slavery when you're married. 
	Sexual assault becomes a way of demonstrating, quite quickly, that the society is rotten. Even before it entirely falls apart, even before it falls into war. We know that the queen of the country has been raped by her husband, that her son has ordered his fiance beaten and stripped in public, that he has sexually assaulted prostitutes. We know that the other claimants to the throne, when it comes to sexual assault, are no more moral than the people they're challenging. Daenerys Targaryen is both sexually assaulted by her brother and sold into a relationship with a man she can't even speak to, who assaults her on their wedding night. It's a way of demonstrating that the society as a whole is flawed and that fights over power and over the ability to rule the country are meaningless because everyone is the same in this sort of fundamental, really flawed way.'Sons of Anarchy' and 'The Americans' are also both dramas that air on FX, are very different shows that have done similarly strong sexual assault story lines. 
	In 'Sons of Anarchy', which is about a motorcycle gang based in California, much of the second season is devoted to a plot line, in which the main character, Gemma Teller Morrow, who's the wife of the president of the motorcycle club, is raped by white supremacists who are trying to challenge the motorcycle gang's dominance in town. They want to take over some of their businesses. The assault on Gemma is meant to shake her family. It's meant to demonstrate the weakness of the club as a whole. 
	So, Gemma, understanding this fully doesn't tell her husband or her son what has happened to her. Much of the season proceeds on two tracks, with her trying to recover from an assault, and with her husband and son completely in the dark about why she has been injured. They accept that it was some sort of car accident. The show reaches a very interesting turning point when she finally explains to them what's happened to her. They are much more devastated than she is, even though she was the one who was sexually assaulted. There is a real sense that men, because they don't have to live with the present threat of sexual assault are, in some ways, more vulnerable to injury because of it.
	'The Americans', which is currently airing on FX right now, is about KGB spies who are underground in Northern Virginia during the Cold War. One of the revelations of the first season is that the two characters who have been set up as a married couple, have been instructed to never tell each other about their pasts. It emerges in the pilot that before they met, the woman, Elizabeth Jennings who is played by Keri Russell, was sexually assaulted by her training officer. Her husband, Phillip, who is played by Matthew Rice, has to reevaluate their entire relationship. He also has to reevaluate almost everything he does to her. He has the habit of coming up behind her while she's cooking and putting his arms around her. He's never understood why she gets uncomfortable. It's a very interesting show about how a sexual assault survivor has adapted and how the people around her have to learn to adapt as well.
	Both of these are sort of extended meditations on living in the aftermath of a sexual assault. The assault itself, in both cases, is portrayed as ugly is relatively brief, but the emotional consequences are much more important. I think more shows are learning that that is important. 
	Finally, I want to talk for a couple of minutes about the after effects of sex because that's an area that T.V. is fairly vexed on. One of the most common means about generating drama on television is an unexpected pregnancy, but television characters don't behave like many of the rest of us when they're unexpectedly pregnant. I've mentioned that we don't see a lot of contraception usage, so no woman on television seems to have an IUD or [Deptherpormera 00:44:39] or to take birth control pills and no men seem to own condoms. Maybe television rules are different, I have no idea, but the fictional drug stores are apparently stocked differently.
	So, characters tend to have one of three options when they're dealing with an unintended televised pregnancy. They can have an abortion, which almost never happens on television. They can keep the baby and choose to raise it, or give it up for adoption, or they can have a spontaneous miscarriage. Women on television miscarry at astonishingly high rates. The miscarriage rate is about 15% in the real world, it's much higher than that on television. 
	Abortion plots happen fairly rarely because they tend to be socially charged. Although, television shows that do them, often do them quite well. 'Sons of Anarchy' had an abortion sub plot where one of the characters who was married to a member of the motorcycle gang decided to have an abortion because she thought it would make her marriage stronger. She was worried about the stress of raising another child. In 'Parenthood', Drew and Amy, the teenage couple who started having sex in the previous season, Amy got pregnant and the show was very clear about siding with her decision. Having a baby would have meant derailing her college plans, her social world, and her boyfriend was insistent that the two of them could raise the baby together. The show refused to take that seriously. 
	That said, television does have a tendency to emotionally punish women for having abortions. Christina, on Grey's Anatomy, recently had an abortion because she doesn't want children, which proved to be the source of enormous strain on her marriage. In 'Sons of Anarchy', Lyla's marriage to Opie, her husband, split up in the wake of the revelation that she'd had her abortion. Women in television have the right to choose, but they have to feel bad about it afterwards, frequently.
	Pregnancy sub-plots don't necessarily fare better. 'The Secret Life of the American Teenager', on ABC Family, has presented a fairly rosy view of what it's like to raise a child as a teen aged mother. Glee's adoption storyline has fared no better. After giving up her baby, Quinn, the head cheerleader ultimately got to go to Yale, after having a car wreck and spontaneous and miraculous recovery from paralysis, but again it's television land. But, the show spent a really weird subplot making her into a crazy stalker for the woman who had adopted her baby. It was a really unfortunate portrayal about women who give up children for adoption actually behave. About how adoptive parents would behave. It was a very strange sideline for a character. Again, this was a woman who was pursuing her choices, and her very real goals for education but who couldn't be allowed to do that without suffering a little bit emotionally first.
	If women aren't getting pregnant on television, they are having fertility panics. This is a relatively new subset of television drama. How many people watched '30 Rock' before it went off the air? So, for much of the shows run, Liz Lemon, the show runner on the fictional comedy show, TGF that she ran, wanted to have a baby. Initially she planned to adopt and become a single mother and those plans were derailed after a disastrous meeting with an adoption agent played by Megan Mullally, in a very memorable episode. When she finally found a partner, the [inaudible 00:48:18] named 'Chris Cross' played by James Marsden. They tried to conceive, but ran into trouble because she was older and also because one of Liz's long term characteristics has been that she's never been particularly interested in sex. The two of them ended up adopting mixed race, mixed gender twins who allowed her to replicate at home the chaos that she found on the set. But, there was a real sense that she was running out of time. There was a real sense of panic. This is something that has seeped into other sitcoms too.
	Notably on 'New Girl', in which, after getting fertility testing, the two main female characters, Jess and Cece, kind of freak out.
Video: Cece:	Jess, they literally eat your body.
Video: Jess:	I'm thirty, I'm single and I just started a new job. Tonight, I used a bread roll to wipe butter off my face, and then I ate the bread roll. So, I essentially used my face as a butter knife. I don't think I'm ready to bring new life into the world, but what if all that's left are the weird eggs? The evil eggs?
Video: Cece:	You have no evil eggs.
Video: Jess:	I can feel them, they're turning. They watch their brothers and sisters die and now they want to be birthed. I need to be fertilized.
Speaker 1:	Part of what's interesting about fertility panics is that yes, ladies, it's true. It's harder to get pregnant as you get older, although the fertility rates for American women ages 20-24 has fallen in the last 20 years, and the rates for women 40-44 have increased. The real risk factor is actually for men. Sorry, guys, didn't mean to scare you in the audience but the number of genetic mutations that men pass on to their children, increases by a rate of two a year, where it stays constant for women. So, the interesting question is, where is male fertility panic on television? The answer is, like so many other things, it is absent. 
	So, we're in an environment where there are many more ideas and many more real reflections of anxieties about sex on screen. But, television is unresolved about sex, because the rest of us are. It's a fascinating landscape, but it is far from providing answers or portraits about what happy or healthy sex looks like.
	Thank you. I'm happy to take questions or talk about any of this stuff or any shows that I haven't mentioned that people want to discuss.