The Joy of Sex Scribbling
Heaven for Hacks.

February 12, 2001 9:15 a.m.

any Americans are no doubt disturbed by the new Kaiser study showing that three-quarters of prime-time television shows include some type of sexual content, with 84 percent of sitcoms taking up diddling and similar pursuits. The alarm is understandable, especially among parents. Their sons watch sex on television, go to school and make eyes at the girls, and get sent up on harassment charges. The girls see flat-bellied guys on television, go to school and notice there are far more chunks than hunks, and also suffer profound disillusionment.

In the long run, however, this is a positive development. The sooner The Children figure out that the television is one big box of lies, the better off they'll be. The only real danger is that television will eventually make sex boring, which is a subject for another day. For now, there is cause for celebration, at least for those of us who write for a living, and by extension those who benefit from our good fortune, including families, mechanics, bartenders, and various other patrons.

The reason is quite simple: The fact that sex dominates prime time means that any dope with a keyboard has a chance of harvesting some major Hollywood greenbacks. Even the lowest hack writer can crank out sex scripts. This is hooch-show material directed at audiences with a starting age of 12 years old. Viewers don't much care about dialogue or plotting. They don't want no stinking insights into the problems of existence. All they want is to see the drawers drop and the bonking to commence.

To be sure, the people involved in this end of the T&A industry don't admit that they're performing a job every bit as difficult as ladling whisky to drunks. Instead, they want to be considered artists, and perhaps great artists at that. Consider the words of Roland Joffe, who directed The Killing Fields and is now the mastermind behind an MTV ass-flasher called Undressed, which is described by a Washington Post writer as "disgusting, shocking, mesmerizing — may be the closest thing to soft-core porn this side of an X rating."

"I wanted to create a forum where people had a sort of unrestricted access to the politics of desire." Joffe created a world where "no aspect of sexuality would be approached as either immoral or frightening" and where sex would be held up as "a little bit like the Rosetta Stone."

Some might accuse Joffe of taking himself far too seriously. Indeed, there is very little that can be said to be creative about Undressed, aside from the fact that it's creating a bunch of loot for Joffe. But most of us tend to inflate our personal value, and the value of our work. If self-flattery is required, that can be arranged. Any dope can ramble on about pushing the envelope, etc., when all that's involved is some variation of peeking up the knickers.

The empowering effect of this study cannot be underestimated. Prior to its release, many hacks had written off Hollywood as beyond our grasp. Part of this was due to a residual respect for the town's better days, but more recently there have been stories of how Ivy Leaguers have moved to California en masse to take up television and movie writing. Many of us assumed that these graduates of the nation's premier humanities programs probably snored in iambic pentameter. We had to content ourselves with books and magazines.

This isn't to complain. The opportunities for typing junk stories are almost unlimited. I recall sitting in a "family friendly" hair salon one day, leafing through a magazine and coming upon a story about sex etiquette. Among the subjects was how to properly react when a lovemaking partner breaks wind ("Guess someone better put out the cat," seems to work well). This magazine, as it happens, is called Glamour. Glamour indeed! Yet the problem with print is that a writer generally has to attach his name to his work, and that can cause some embarrassment, at least among those with a residual sense of shame. Worse yet, you write a few of these things and you end up on cable television as some type of expert.

Television writing offers anonymity — and lots more money. And so there is joy in Hackville these days. One envelope-pushing idea comes to mind: A script on the delicate yet powerfully universal subject of erotic flatulence. I'm thinking of calling it The Roar of Love. With the right casting and a supreme effort from the Special Effects department, this could go places.