Soap Operas, Sexuality in

Television soap operas have been a broadcast entertainment staple for 50 years, and radio soaps began two decades earlier. At least 23 million adult Americans are daily viewers of one or more TV soaps, and as many as 30 million claim to be regular viewers. Add to those figures a few million teen and preteen viewers and the massive reach of soaps is evident. The general trend from a variety of research perspectives has identified an increase in overall sexual content, particularly sexual intercourse, an increase in visual depictions of sex, and a strong emphasis on sexual activities among unmarried partners.

Across different analyses of sexual content in television soap operas, there is considerable symmetry in what has been called sex. Typically, sex includes depicted behaviors or verbal references to intercourse, some form of foreplay, erotic kissing, and more recently, incidents of homosexuality, in addition to such criminal sexual activities as prostitution and rape.

Sexual behavior, so defined, was first reported for the 1976, 1979, and 1980 seasons by Greenberg, Abelman, and Neuendorf. They found about two sexual activities per hour in their samples. What was then called petting, including long and passionate kisses, was most prominent, accounting for half of all incidents. The second most frequent activity was implied intercourse between individuals not married to each other. By the third study, implied intercourse was the most frequent activity.

Lowry and Towles (1989) compared the 1979 and 1987 seasons and found a radical change in the distribution of implied intercourse between married and unmarried partners. In the 1979 study, 31% of such acts were between married partners; that dropped to 3% in their follow-up study.

A 1985 study by Greenberg and D'Alessio analyzed 10 episodes of the three top-rated soaps. There were 3.7 coded sex incidents/references per hour, a sharp increase from the earlier study reports of 2 per hour. Intercourse (2.3 per hour) and long kisses (1 per hour) accounted for 9 of every 10 references. Intercourse was twice as likely among unmarried couples as among marriage partners, and one in five of the former was married to someone else. The coded sex acts were mostly verbal (70%), and all but a handful of the visual ones were long kisses.

By 1994, using the same coding scheme, sexual activity increased from 3.7 per hour to 5 per hour in the same three soaps and to 6.6 per hour across all five soaps analyzed in a study by Greenberg and Busselle. For the two soaps added to the sample because of their high ratings that season, the levels of sexual activity were extreme—11 per hour (Days of our Lives) and 7 per hour (The Young and the Restless). References to unmarried intercourse alone (2.4 per hour) now exceeded all sex acts found in the pre-1985 studies. In this study, rape acts were frequent, 1.4 per hour, based on then new concerns with date rape. In 50 episodes, there were five discussions of safe sex. A notable difference in the decade between the studies was the increase in visual depictions of sexual intercourse. In the 1985 study, there was one such visual incident; in the later study, one in four of all sex incidents visually simulated intercourse.

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