I Don’t Have Sex But I Watch It On TV

Two recent articles in the New York Times identified opposite trends in the television and film industries. While fewer movies today are being geared toward a female audience, television networks like ABC are newly immersed in “a sea of estrogen,” their most successful shows for and about women.

In “Hollywood’s Shortage of Female Power,” Sharon Waxman reports on the decline of romantic comedies since the 1990s. Romantic comedies fare worse in international markets “than male-led action movies or fantasy adventures heavy with special effects,” and there are few women today with the kind of star power we saw 10 years ago. Back then, Julia Roberts could demand $20 million for a “chick flick,” but studios are now less willing to shell out that kind of cash on an actress. Waxman suggests a link between this trend and the shortage of women executives in the industry. Women have been pushed out of top positions at Hollywood studios and replaced entirely by men (some may have left in the apparently nationwide trend of women “opting out” of their careers—after all, the former chairwoman of Paramount says, “How long am I going to get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed at 11 p.m., six days a week?’ Women also want to be in love…They want friends. They want life.”).

Apparently, women also want sex. In “Having Your Beefcake and Talking About It, Too,” Alessandra Stanley writes that in the last couple years, ABC has built a formidable line-up of shows that are the, admittedly better-written, “television version[s] of chick lit.” Desperate Housewives, Brothers & Sisters, and Grey’s Anatomy are about family, relationships, politics, betrayal, but mostly about sex. “Male viewers click off in droves.”

Why Isn’t My Life Like Girls Gone Wild?

From “Afternoon of the Sex Children” by Mark Greif, in n+1, issue #4:

“The college years—of all times—stand out as the apex of sex childhood. Even if college is routinized and undemanding, it is still inevitably residential, and therefore the place to perfect one’s life as a sex child. You move away from home into a setting where you are with other children—strangers all. you must be patient for four years just to get a degree. So there can be little to do but fornicate.