CONNECTING MEDIA, SEXUALITY & KEY PRINCIPLES OF MEDIA LITERACY.

* The mass media construct depictions or representations of human sexuality.

* These products & programs have commercial purposes.

* They contain values & ideology.

* The production, distribution and consumption of these media messages about sexuality may have social effects, outcomes or consequences.

* Audience interpretations and responses to these media messages will vary based on factors such as age, race, gender, education, religion and other elements.

TEENS, TV AND SEX.
[Kaiser Family Foundation Report 2005].

* 70% of all TV contains sexual content, an increase from 56% documented in 1998.

* In prime-time network programs 77% of the programs have sexual content, compared to 67% in 1998.

* Among 20 top programs for teen viewers, 70% include some form of sexual behavior.

* The number of sexual scenes in programs samples nearly doubled from 1, 930 in 1999 to 3, 783 in 2005]

* Only 14% of shows with sexual content make reference to sexual risks or responsibilities.

* Among 20 top programs for teen viewers only 10% of those with sexual content include sexual risks or responsibilities.

* Among shows with sexual content involving teen characters, only 23% refer to sexual risks or responsibilities.

* Only 10% of sexually active characters on TV appear to be teens or young adults, a decline from 26% in 1998 and 17% in 2002.

SCREEN MEDIA & NEGATIVE EFFECTS: THEN & NOW.

     In my 1981 doctoral dissertation [The Depiction of Adolescent Sexuality in Motion Pictures] I identified the following possible problems with movie representations. Which ones have changed? Which are still the same? How do these problems show up in other media?

* The depiction of adolescence is male-dominated and unrepresentative.

* The industry images are idealized, emphasizing pleasure over pitfalls and consequences.

* The media seldom allows teens to articulate their feelings about their physical acts. Sex is presented without social or mental context; an act that is seen but not heard.

* Screen representations of sex may place pressure on virgins to become sexually active.

* Screen images rely too heavily on beautiful females and handsome males that could have negative impact on the self-image of average teens.

* Stereotypical sex roles may impair authentic identity formation.

* Within the family context parents are seldom depicted as sexually activie.

* Images of teenage males seduced by older women can be potentially dangerous.

WHY WE NEED TO PAY ATTENTION TO MEDIA MESSAGES.

“ One of the most challenging parts of being an adolescent is developing a healthy approach to making decisions about sex. A host of factors contribute to how young people handle this critical stage of development: their relationship with their parents; the attitudes of their peers; their emotional stability; their ties to community organizations and religious institutions; and what they are or aren’t taught in school, among others. But important research in recent years has indicated that television also plays a role in the sexual socialization of youth, contributing to their knowledge, beliefs, expectations, attitudes and even behavior”.

[Sex On TV 4- Executive Summary, Kaiser Family Foundation 2005]

DR. C’s, MEDIA LITERACY:

TEENS, SEXUALITY & THE MEDIA:
Is Love Really Just a 4 Letter Word?

“….they were the things that haunted us most during puberty. Things like masturbation, getting horny and homosexuality were pretty scary to us . Most of the books about these mysteries were awful. They were either scientific play-by-play descriptions of how pigs reproduce , or church handouts that said what we had done so far was sinful and what we were thinking of doing was even worse . So we had to fake it and believe just about anything we heard until we learned the truth by braille and by hard core experience”.

[Rhythm & Blues, 1977]

     In 1977 a group of teens in Madison, Wisconsin got together to write and publish information about sex that addressed the things they were concerned about and that they found adults unwilling to discuss or explain in a way that had credibility. That book was Rhythm and Blues.

     Despite the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s, formal approaches to sex education did little to help young people come to terms with the physical, emotional and psychological changes taking place in their bodies.

     As they had done for decades, teens turned to music, to TV and movies to fill in the gaps. As far back as 1929 Alice Mitchell [Children and the Movies] quoted teens who found movies to be a source of sexual stimulation & information:

“ Those pictures with hot love-making in them, they make boys and girls sitting together want to get up and walk out , go off somewhere, you know. Once I walked out with a boy before the picture was even over”.

     Half a century later, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, affirmed the important function the mass media played in shaping our sense of gender and sexuality. “Few men reported spending much meaningful time with their father- their male role models came from movies and television”.

     Sexual curiosity among young people is normal and natural. The problem is finding credible balanced sources of information. Our teenagers have been asking us for this, for a very long time.

     Adolescent Sexuality in Contemporary America was a study of ‘ the personal values and sexual behavior of 13-19 year olds”. Published in 1979 by Robert Sorensen it contains many examples of adolescents using their own words to express their frustration, fear and excitement.

     “Why can’t they tell us how you get in these situations and how you get out of them. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll teach us how to seduce somebody. But anyone who wants sex can find someone else who wants sex if that’s all they want. We all want sex in some way or other. But I think fewer people would want it if they weren’t so curious.

     They’ve got to satisfy our curiosity. If they don’t more guys and chicks will go all the way to find out for themselves. And if they all say that it’s bad for us, a lot of kids will do it to find out if it is really as bad as they say.

     Just tell us, that’s all, and let us decide. Maybe more kids will decide like what their parents want. But if they have the facts , maybe kids will more often decide what’s right for them. And maybe that isn’t so bad either”. [17 year-old boy]

     Almost 30 years after that teenage boy told researchers that kids need to be told the facts and despite support from groups like The National Middle School Association for comprehensive sex education, young people still seem to be short-changed by the nation’s education system when it comes to the subject of sex.

     In the last decade a combination of religious pressure, funding priorities and national political power served to silence much honest discussion in our classrooms and replace it with sex education based on a message of sexual abstinence.

     In 2005 a report from Columbia University’s, Institute for Social and Economic Policy Research raised serious questions about the effectiveness of such an approach.
According to the study, teenagers exposed to such classes did delay the onset of sexual behavior. They preserved their “technical virginity” but subsequently engaged in riskier behavior.

     In April 2007 a congressional report stated that the U.S. government spent $176 million annually on such programs. They also reported that students who took abstinence until marriage courses were “just as likely to have sex as those who did not”.
The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. called for the termination of funding for such sex education programs.

     If formal sex education in the nation’s classrooms is not providing kids with credible or comprehensive sex education, then the mass media has become a constant source of sexual information- accurate, inaccurate and increasingly with embarrassing specificity.

     Teens have always been curious about sex and if we wish the species to survive they always need to be- there is of course a difference between normal healthy curiosity and obsessive, compulsion, fed and fueled by mass media, between biology and nature if you will on one hand, and the commercial sexploitation of contemporary media.

     Take the Showtime series, WEEDS for example. It was by no means the first TV program to address masturbation. Roseanne addressed that on prime time in the networks many years earlier. While Dan, Roseanne and other family members sat downstairs discussing what their young son may or may not be doing behind that locked, bathroom door, WEEDS opened the door.

     In this bathroom, young Shane Botwin had taken to masturbating in a sock and flushing the evidence, sock and all down the toilet. Unfortunately for Shane, pipes are meant for paper and human waste not socks.

     Inevitably the pipes block and the services of a plumber are needed. The plumber is quick on the uptake and explains to Shane’s widowed mother what he thinks the origin of the problem is.

     Just in the nick- of- time Shane’s uncle Andy takes him boy aside. In the process and with no hint of embarrassment, he introduces his nephew to every euphemism for masturbation. Then he recommends techniques for self -stimulation including the sensual appeal of banana skin.

     Soon after this, bananas begin to disappear with some frequency from the family fruit bowl.

     Now take the case of 14 year old Byrd in the series Huff. The episode is called, “Lipstick on your Panties”. Sitting quietly at his computer in his bedroom, Bryd is confronted by his father and then his mother. His mother quietly places a pair of lipstick- stained white, male underpants in front of him , along with a tube of lipstick.

Byrd: God.

Father: Buddy I’d like to help you but I just don’t know where to begin [this from a psychiatrist]

Mother: And I don’t know If I should be angry or worried.

Father: We just don’t know why you have lipstick, you know, down there.

Bryd: It’s really no big deal.

Mother: Then it should be easy to tell us about it.

Byrd: I just went to a rainbow party, last night at Tim’s, that’s totally it.

     For a moment the mother assumes that the word rainbow is a reference to gays and in a fully supportive statement tells her son that they will join PFLAG, the support group for parents of gay and lesbian youth.

     Byrd then corrects her interpretation.

Byrd: It’s a rainbow party. It’s when girls wear lipstick and give guys blowjobs. That’s it. A blowjob party!

     The teenager continues to explain the process to his incredulous parents including the announcement that the boy with the most lipstick rings at the end of the party wins. The record stands at 6.

     As their consternation increases he asks calmly: “Why are you guys freaking out? It’s not like I’m having sex or something”

     At this point his mother storms out. Soon after she bursts back into the room and in a mixture of rage and disappointment, ‘I love you but I just can’t look at you right now”.

     Later that night in bed she tells her husband, “your’ argument that all men are the victims of chronic testosterone poisoning is not going to fly tonight”.

     This and scenes like it have become increasingly evident in television, particularly on cable and in movies like American Pie. Of course not all approaches to sex in the media are explicit, graphic or overly dramatic or comedic.

     The Mediascope report, Prime-Time Teens: Perspectives on the New Youth Media Environment acknowledged some positive or more balanced representations of sexuality, while recognizing their limitations.

     “Some programs such as 7th Heaven, tend to reflect a strong version of the sexual health approach, one that focuses on abstinence. Such programs reflect the values of the many adults for whom there is no such thing as ‘ healthy sex’ between teenagers. Although such programs offer valuable lessons about romance and interpersonal relations between the sexes, they do little to bolster the health of sexually active teens”.

     A time line that traces these changing media representations of sexuality can be accessed in this section of the website.

	Pdf Media and Sexuality Timeline. [2005]

	PDf: Get Real: Representations of Adolescent Sexuality in the Media. [2006]

     One can certainly make the case that the franker depiction of sexuality in the media merely reflects [others would argue reinforces] changing social, norms, attitudes and behavior. The Clinton / Lewinsky affair was followed soon afterwards by surveys of college students who similarly argued that oral sex was in fact not sex at all.

     More disturbingly perhaps were reports of sexual behavior among middle grade students taking place in public places including school buses and schools themselves. There were also reports of increases in sexually transmitted diseases among young people including early adolescents.

     Perhaps one of the most dramatic stories to emerge about teens, sex and the new media was the case of Justin Berry. Justin testified before Congress in 2006. The story began in 2002 when Justin, then 13, connected a Webcam to his computer. On December 19th, 2005 New York Time reporter, Kurt Eichenwald had published his account of the boy’s experience [“Through His Webcam a Boy Joins a Sordid World”].

     It is the story of how “a soccer- playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam- undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex – for an audience of more than 1, 500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars”.

     At the start the boy’s male client’s simply asked him to sit bare –chested in front pf the Webcam. The reward? $50. Listen to the thinking of a 13- year-old: “I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing … so I was kind of like, what’s the difference?”

     He soon found out. Justin’s story reinforces the need for parental monitoring, supervision and observation of our children’s media environment. Sure, some of the kids will resent it and call it snooping, an invasion of their privacy; in the end however many of them will thank us for it.

     Social networking technology that includes sites such as Facebook and others tap into teens natural search for self, role –play, experimentation, risk- taking and identity formation. Those are all natural and necessary elements of the odyssey to adulthood; the journey from dependence to independence and self-reliance. But the new technologies that teens adore, and that constantly flatter them and feed their ego, present potential dangers to young people that require adult vigilance and cognizance.

     In Generation MySpace, [2007] Candice Kelsey describes the case of 14 year old Jennifer. At school this polite girl is described as a “quiet, demure, intelligent young woman who dresses conservatively and speaks softly”. However her profile at MySpace “contradicted this image 180 degrees”. Highly sexual in content, the headline the girl had selected for her site was “Suck it so slo Ho”.

     Her teacher was left wondering just which identity was the real Jennifer. It is an issue raised by Ron Taffel, in his outstanding book, The Second Family [2001], the child and family therapist documents the growing gap between adolescents and their parents, the role the media plays in the process and ways of bridging the problem by honest communication with our children.

     Among other things Taffel notes that, “the face teenagers show their parents is quite different from the face they show their friends”. One of the most common things Taffel hears teens say about their parents and other adults are, “you adults don’t have a clue”.

     And where does he see the media and its influence in all of this? This is the way he puts it: “Nature abhors a vacuum, and over the last decade, the great roaring hurricane of the kid-centered mass media has rushed in to fill the psychic void that beleaguered, bewildered parents have unwittingly created”.

     From Taffel’s perspective, we have turned our children’s bedrooms into “media central”, celebrities have become the “priests” of kid culture and in a new anything-goes era with “rubbery rules or relativism”, … “we have brought out into the open what was once only whispered behind closed doors”.

     We do not need to look far in our society for examples of precocious sexuality

Image at lower left, from 2006 Oscar controversy, Brokeback Mountain.

     The February 12th, 2007 cover story on Newsweek featured Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and the cover story, “The Girls Gone Wild Effect: Out-of-Control Celebs and Online Sleaze Fuel a New Debate Over Kids and Values”.

     Inside, the magazine discussed the growing notoriety of Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Kate Moss and others. A Newsweek Poll reported that 77% of Americans believe that these and celebrities like them “have too much influence on young girls”. 84% of adults in the poll agreed that “sex plays a bigger role in the culture than it did 20 or 30 years ago” and 70% said ‘ that was a bad influence on young people”.

     If we have concerns about the type of messages young people receive about sexuality and other topics we need to recognize those texts as well as the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.

     One way guaranteed not to achieve that is to use media and technology to fragment our families so that we all retreat to our own screen space to watch our own program preferences.

     In this day and age responsible parenting requires a little more visual vigilance, a little more willingness to question, and challenge what our kids watch and listen to rather than simply turning it off or changing the channel?

     Easy? Of course not! Speaking to a group of largely Hispanic parents in Salinas, California [a presentation available from Court TV] I encountered many parents who told me they agreed with the message but needed to have heard it much earlier. The idea of removing TV or a computer from an adolescent’s bedroom, is for many parents, too much trouble; too likely to provoke conflict and misunderstanding within families.

     Let’s be clear here. Many parents absolutely agree that the media has the potential to have a negative impact on their children and teens.

     In 2005 The Kaiser Family Foundation published the 4th in their series of reports about Sex On TV. The study began by noting that both teens and parents believed that TV shaped attitudes and behavior. 83% of parents believed it contributed to “children becoming involved in sexual situations before they are ready”. Nearly 3 out of 4 15-17 year-olds said, “sex on TV influences the sexual behavior of kids their age”.

     The Kaiser Report also acknowledged empirical evidence from the RAND Corporation and other groups which concluded that, “heavy viewers of sexual content were twice as likely to initiate sexual intercourse …as those who saw the least amount of sexual content…. even controlling for factors such as socio-economic status, parental oversight and the child’s mental health, self-esteem and religiosity”. In other words, exposure to sexual content in the media was a predictor of the onset of sexual activity.

WHAT I SAID THEN:

     “Perhaps in no other area is the potential impact of the cinema on the young as great as it is in the matter of sex…. whether in the specific mechanics of copulation or in the more subtle but complex relationships between sexes, screen characters serve as readily observable behavior models for the young…

     There is little doubt that motion pictures have the ability to influence adolescent audiences. The ability of a medium of communication to influence its audience depends upon a complex set of factors, including the nature of the medium itself, the strength and pervasiveness of the message transmitted and the nature and needs of the audience receiving the message. The adolescent as has been stated is neither child nor adult. Caught in transition the young person is in the stage of formulating a new identity. In this process film and the mass media in general have the opportunity to function as a valuable source of information ….it is necessary to consider not only what we see and are told, but what we do not see and are not told. The adolescent still in the process of establishing his or her own self-image may well fall prey to mistaking the screen image for the self he or she is to become”. [David Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence, 1985]

Image above from Kubrick's 1962 controversy- Lolita.

AURAL SEX: MUSIC TO MY EARS

     Long before Madonna’s highly - sexualized persona, long before MTV or Janet Jackson’ s, Superbowl, “wardrobe malfunction”, or her brother’s on- stage, on –screen crotch- grabbing episodes; well before The Stone sang “Satisfaction”, or “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and before Hendrix humped his guitar on stage, music was a source of information perhaps even motivation for young people regarding sexuality.

     Well before Elvis ever swiveled his hips or P. J. Proby split his velvet pants, even before the birth of rock, music and sex were synonymous. In her 1998, TIME/CNN article about blues music, [Back to the Roots] Angela Davis said:

     “the blues was the first musical genre to reflect black people’s experience of freedom in the U.S. … Formerly enslaved blacks enjoyed a new latitude in travel and sexuality …for the first time they could make their own decisions about sexual relationships. Consequently themes of travel and sexuality permeate the blues. Sexuality, in particular, came to symbolize freedom, and a preoccupation with personal relationships bespoke aspirations for a larger freedom”.

     The comment addresses both the sexual nature of the texts evident in so much of the genre known as the blues as well as the personal, social, historical and psychological contexts in which the blues was created and consumed.

     As history now records, blues artists from the south would move north to Chicago and other cities. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and others would spread the appeal of the blues in clubs and in recordings for Chess Records and other labels.

     In time those records would be shipped from American ports like Chicago and New York and arrive in European destinations like Hamburg and Liverpool. There they would be heard, emulated, copied, modified and shipped back in to the U.S. in the so called “British Invasion” by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Animals, Cream and others.

     In their 1979 article for Screen Education, [“Rock and Sexuality”] Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie used the term “cock rock” to describe much of the on stage performance of male singers as they interacted with microphone stands and their guitars.

“Of all the mass media, rock is the most explicitly concerned with sexual expression. This reflects its function as a youth cultural form: rock treats the problems of puberty , it draws on and articulates the psychological and physical tensions of adolescence; it accompanies the movement when boys and girls learn their repertoire of public sexual behavior”.

     Interestingly enough they also suggested the rocks lyrics, “mostly follow the rules of romance”.

     A content analysis of different music genres over a period of time, say from the 1950s through to the 1990s, would certainly reveal shifting attitudes about sex and romance including shifting broadcast standards about what could or could not be said in song, whether broadcast, recorded or performed.

     In addition Billboard charts from various eras could certainly serve as some barometer of popularity indicating what songs, what sexual and romantic narratives were popular and which ones were not. That of course assumes that listeners are familiar with the lyrics and earlier research with protest songs and other styles suggest that young listeners did not always know the words.

     The omnipresence of an iPod plugged into youthful ears may affect that awareness. But decades ago, we could find evidence that audiences did interpret some songs as having sexual content.

     In Melbourne, Australia in 1977 one radio station invited listeners to call in and vote for “the dirty 30”. Among records chosen were, “She Said No”, “Roll Over, Lay Down and Let Me in”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “Come Together”, “Don’t Touch Me There” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You”.

     Of course not all messages about sexuality address intercourse. Many song lyrics are about the nature of human relations, about sexual politics if you will. The notorious so-called double standard was well evident in songs by Dion and the Belmonts.

     ‘The Wanderer”, for example seemed to be about the male need for multiple relationships while “Run Around Sue” sang disapprovingly about similar behavior by females.

     Young adolescent females growing up in the early 1960s could listen to girl groups like The Shirelles, The Exciters, The Supremes, as well as to solo singers like Cilla Black, Sandy Shaw, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clarke. These songs often provided scripts and narratives about the dynamics of relationships.

     At times they seemed to position young girls and women as helpless victims of male philandering. This typically occurred in a single song but the cumulative impact of this ideology is worth considering and is certainly evident in one album by Lesley Gore.

     These days Lesley Gore probably has 2 claims to fame. The first is her hit song, “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To”. But the hit movie, The First Wife’s Club contained an early anthem of female liberation, “You Don’t Own Me”.

     For the most part however, acceptance and resignation were much more typical of her message. Take the album titled, “I’ll Cry If I Want To”. Song on it include, “Cry Me a River”, “No More Tears Left to Cry”, “Cry and You Cry Alone”, “Cry” and “Just Let Me Cry”.

     On the male side, one 60's group seemed to specialize in songs about seduction and loss of virginity. Pick up a copy of The Best of Gary Pucket and the Union Gap and you will have access to songs such as “Young Girl”, “Lady Willpower”, “Don’t Give In to Him”, “This Girl is a Woman Now” and of course, “The Pleasure of You”.

     The emergence of the female singer-songwriter in the 1960s and 70s would begin to reveal a more independent identity for girls and women. While there was still obviously concern about the old question [“Will You Still Love me Tomorrow?”] It was also possible now to skewer male self-importance and get a hit out of it. Carly Simon’s, “Your So Vain” is a classic putdown.

     In “The Carter Family”, Carly Simon also acknowledged the limitations of male sexual prowess.

“You used to make me moan in bed, but that can’t be enough
My friends complained your jokes were crude,
Your manners were too rough
Don’t know what I wanted, but I know I wanted more
Someone smooth, presentable to lend with my décor”.

     A few years later, the soundtrack for the teen movie The Last American Virgin contained the Waitresses song, “I Know What Boys Want”. Not much evidence of female submissiveness in its lyrics:

“I got my cat moves
That so upsets them
Zippers and buttons
Fun to frustrate them
They get so angry
Like pouty children
Denied their candy
I laugh right at them”.

     The pill and other developments had contributed to sexual if not economic liberation for many women. While rock narratives sometimes suggested combative relationships, at times they acknowledged sexual equality and an absence of romance.

     In Bob Seger’s, ‘”Nightmoves”, we hear of early adolescent sexual experimentation.

“We weren’t in love, oh no far from it
We weren’t searchin for some pie in the sky summit
We were just young and restless and bored
Livin by the sword…
I used her, she used me
But neither one cared;
We were getting our share”.

     Rock and pop were also able to chronicle the unwanted consequences of sex evident in “Love Child”, a 1960s hit for The Supremes as well as in Madonna’s, ‘Papa Don’t Preach” and in “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson.

     And the physical acts of sex had simply become explicit. I was a young teacher in my early 20s when a group of 8th graders introduced me to the Lou Reed album, “Walk on the Wild Side”. I liked the album then and I still do. I also had questions about some of the lyrics.

     I had never heard or read the phrase, “giving head” before, so I asked a colleague from England what it meant. He quickly translated it into the slang expression that Australians used for the act.

     Decades later Lil’ Kim released an album which of course carried a Parental Advisory Explicit Content Warning Label. The track “How Many Licks” showed the direction contemporary music had taken since ‘Walk on the Wild Side”.

     Lou Reed was of course not the first to reference that sex act. Oddly enough that transpired when rock music met the Broadway musical in the late 1960s. The show was HAIR. The song title was “Sodomy”.

     The lyrics were short and simple.

“Sodomy
Fellatio
Cunnilingus
Pederasty

Father why do these words sound so nasty?

Masturbation
Can be fun
Join the holy orgy
Kama Sutra
Everyone”.

     If it was OK for Broadway apparently it was OK for the radio airwaves. I was sure I must have been mistaken while driving in my car when I first heard The Knack singing, “Good Girls Don’t”.

     Surely I thought you can’t say that on the radio. I was wrong. The group’s big hit was “My Sharona” but “Good Girls Don’t” got plenty of airplay and contained the following verse.

“And it’s a teenage sadness everyone has got to taste
An in-between-age madness
That you know you can’t erase
Till she’s sitting on your face”.

     We have moved a long way from the simple sexual innuendo of the 50s or the time when The Beatle’s most ardent desire was, “I want to Hold Your Hand”. Any kid today who has questions about the words in favorite songs can simply go to the Internet and get a printout so its right there in black and white.

     If today’s lyrics lack subtlety they also lack the packaging previously known as album art. Like lyrics and the onstage performance of rock and pop stars, album art can also document shifting attitudes about sexuality in society- at least in that segment of society that consumed popular music.

     The 1970s witnessed a marked departure from graphic art that depicted the group, the recording artist or a visual interpretation of the album title. Sticky Fingers with Andy Warhol depicted a close up of a male in a pair of jeans. The shot is from the waist down. The package [excuse the pun] included a zipper and a prominent bulge.

     Fumble’s cover depicted 2 teens on a couch. Jump On It by Montrose was little more than a crotch shot and the 1972 cover for Flash simply seemed to reverse the shot. Boxer’s, Below the Belt, Sunburst by Be- Bop Deluxe, Juicy Lucy’s self-titled album and The Wetter, The Better by Wet Willie continued the trend.

     Anyone looking for a good source of album art could do worse than to locate a copy of Album Cover Art edited by Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean. Like changes in lyrics and musical genres, these artifacts serve as historical documents that comment on sexuality and commercialism in the 20th century.