Primetime TV’s Misrepresentation of Female Sexuality: Exploiting Femininity
By Jessica Dorian, 11.11.04

It would take a book to document the many misconceptions television portrays about love and sexuality—but this is only an editorial column.

For years TV shows have used sex to pump ratings and build their viewing population. But the recent trend to distort feminine sexuality is infuriating and must be addressed.

Of course stereotypes about men’s sexuality have been exploited as well, but as a woman I am deeply concerned about the affect that recent subtleties in the medium will have on the perception of women.

“Sex and the City,” with reruns currently on TBS, was very successful on HBO. People found it provocative, funny and perhaps a welcome escape for some women with monotonous or nonexistent sex lives—red flag alert.

It is a potential hazard to viewers when a show makes people want to live vicariously through the actors. Of course HBO was completely conscious of the show’s appeal to viewers, but I’ll wager that the litmus test for airing it was not the behavioral influence it would have on viewers. Rather, it was because of the influence it would have on HBO’s gross profit.

A profit it was, but not to society or women.

The show’s popularity prompted the “Sex and the City” Tour, which has been created for fans to be taken on a guided bus route to all the places in the show—stores and building restaurants, etc. Gene Sloan of USA Today wrote an article highlighting stops on the tours.

“So what if the show isn’t entirely realistic...Rabid fans, (Georgette) Blau says, want to experience that world, if only for a moment. Already, they’re signing up in droves,” Sloan said. “For (Kelly) Richards, a stay-at-home mom who left her husband and two children in Idaho to join her gal pals for a Carrie and Co.-weekend romp through New York, the show-and-tour is an ‘escape.’”

An escape it is. TV exploits women’s view of their sex appeal. Provocative shows persuade women to live vicariously through characters that embody the opposite of everything that is authentically female.

Ratings-chasing business executives are marketing to women as if they are secretly a sex-obsessed, materialistic, superficial gender. Ladies, doesn’t that bother you?

It is also extremely annoying because this trend is only beginning. The distortion of female sexuality is now marketed directly to stay-at-home mothers, not just outside-of-the-home career women.

ABC recently premiered the Sunday Primetime show “Desperate Housewives”. The show trivializes adultery, deceit and depicts such negative qualities as entertainment. The show’s not-so-subtle message claims: “women your secret weapon is to use your sexuality for manipulation – manipulation at your job, with your husband and in your community.”

The show blatantly communicates that there is nothing authentic and unselfish about females. The women who don’t employ deceitful tactics and are not manipulative are portrayed as unenlightened and in the end it is implied that they give in to the negative draw.

The authentic beauty of the female is being trampled on by Primetime television. ”Sex and the City,” “Desperate Housewives” and shows that will follow suit do not exhibit women’s greatest assets: honor, integrity, strength and love-motivated sexuality.

Go ahead ABC, HBO and whoever else dare—keep on exploiting female sexuality with cheap renditions of women’s character. But I warn you, you will lose your largest demographic—bona fide females.