A look at 50 years of female sexuality on the small screen fromI Love Lucy and Bewitched to Game of Thrones and Masters
of Sex
We live in a culture consumed by sex, and yet it is still rare to see realistic portrayals of female sexuality. That’s starting to change, thanks to shows woman-produced shows like Girls, Orange Is the New Black and Masters of Sex (which begins its second season on Ju
ly 13). But the struggle to make women’s desire less taboo on TV has been a long and slow process: Mastersof Sex owes much of its success to groundbreaking shows like Sex and the City, Seinfeld and even I Love Lucy. Here’s a short history of female sexual empowerment onscreen (in reverse chronological order):
Masters of Sex (2013 – )
Despite taking place in the 1950s, Masters of Sex may be the most progressive show on TV when it comes to women and sex. Based on the real sex research of Virginia Johnson and William Masters, the show extensively explores the science of sexuality—and female sexuality especially. In an early episode, Virginia explains to William why a woman might fake an orgasm. The resea
rchers go on to study topics ranging from female masturbation to the merits of the clitoris versus the G-Spot. “The sex is so integral to our story that [the producers] have had to come up with really clever ways to braid it in there,” Lizzy Caplan, who plays Johnson, tells TIME. “I think they’ve managed to do that where it doesn’t feel like it’s being made for 14-year-old boys.” (Read this magazine behind-the-scenes feature on the show’s all-female team of writers and producers.)
Orange Is the New Black (2013 – )
Netflix’s prestige series about a women’s prison is the first show to delve into all types of female sexuality. Too often shows like The O.C.or Weeds create a plot line in which a straight woman “experiments” with being gay. Orange Is the New Black cleverly turns that trope on its head by pursuing a story in which the main character—Piper, a spoiled New Yorker—falls back in love with her ex-girlfriend while in prison (despite having a male fiancé waiting for her on the outside). The other characters on the show range from bisexual to lesbian to straight. It’s also the first mainstream show to feature a transgender female character played by a transgender woman.
The show—which has the most diverse cast on television in terms of race, sexuality and body type—approaches women’s sex realistically and unforgivingly, the way other shows might approach male sexuality. Memorable scenes include a character using a dog to masturbate, a woman who has just had a baby lactating during sex and a competition between two inmates to see who can bed the most women.
Game of Thrones (2011 – )
Game of Thrones has a complicated relationship with women. Many fans were outraged this year when the show’s writers added a rape scene that didn’t exist in the book. And in just about every episode, the HBO show finds a way to flash women’s breasts onscreen. But these degrading sex scenes are balanced by some particularly powerful moments for the female characters: at the end of this season, Daenerys Targaryan, a
queen, ordered one of her followers to strip so that she could have her way with him (consensually) in the same manner that many men have ordered women to sleep with them on the show before; and a rape victim, Cersei, similarly seduced her brother, Jaime in a moment of particular power and passion. Women on the show are beginning to learn to take what they want—just like their male counterparts. Game of Thrones is a cruel world, but it is one where women often have equal opportunity to manipulate and murder their way to the top
Sex and the City (1998 – 2004)
Sex and the City has often been credited with bringing frank discussions about (and depictions of) women’s sexuality to the forefront of popular culture. Carrie and her friends discussed everything from vibrators to circumcision to sex positions over cosmos. Then they went home and practiced what they preached—all had multi-season love arcs but would date and sleep with many different men in between.
Every woman could see something of herself in one or all of the ch
aracters: Samantha, the one who was as sexually liberated as a man; Miranda, the one who prioritized work over men; Charlotte, the one who just wanted a happily ever after; and Carrie, the sex columnist who was a conglomeration of the other three. Their glitzy power was intimidating, and they disposed of men like men disposed of women. They got their hearts broken, but moved on. Their revolutionary dating strategies arguably jumpstarted the infamous “hookup culture” of Millennials. The liberating assertion that men were dispensable was undermined towards the end of the series when each lady traded in Mr. Right Now for Mr. Right. But the sexual liberation of Sex and the City still paved the way for shows like Girls and Orange Is the New Black.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 – 2003)
Buffy Summers is often credited as pop culture’s prototype for great female characters. She was both superhuman and truly human, vulnerable and witty and stubborn. Her strength was the keystone that held the show together. But Buffy didn’t fight bad guys alone, and she wasn’t the one who helped Buffy break boundaries when it came to representing female sexuality on the small screen.
Buffy’s bestie Willow started the show as a quiet school-focused girl struggling for the romantic attention of the boy who was her best friend. By the time the show ended, she was a powerful woman who had been half of one of the earliest positive portrayals of a lesbian relationship on mainstream television. Other characters treated the relationship between Willow and her girlfriend and fellow witch Tara as a big deal not because of their genders but because of their love. Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, made the show a masterpiece of metaphor, and those two were no exception: high school is hell, college roommates are demons, growing up feels like dying — and Willow and Tara worked magic