What is surprising, listening now to many hit records of the 1950s, is that most teenagers remained innocent of the full implications of the words of the songs, even as they danced to them. It is rather startling that a song by Otis Blackwell entitled “Great Balls of Fire” not only received mainstream airplay in 1957, but became the Number Two hit in the country for Jerry Lee Lewis. (It wasn’t about meteors.) Lewis, who hailed from a Pentecostal background, wrestled with his conscience,4 and many older people were aghast, but there was a willful ignorance at work at the time among radio and television programmers; if a song could plausibly be about something other than sex (“great balls of fire” was a common exclamation in the rural vernacular), it was generally assumed to be so.
A deep strain of Puritanism, implanted in the American psyche in the Colonial Era, periodically expressed itself in waves of rigid moralism, recrimination, and retribution. After World War II, this righteous distrust reached a peak of paranoia directed at communism, in general, and the Soviet Union, in particular. But even more than the Red Menace, it was the thought that the freedom symbolized by rock would inevitably find a non-symbolic, physical expression that struck fear into the hearts of parents. Ground zero for the so-called sexual revolution is most commonly situated in 1960, when the birth control pill became widely available, but the public fixation on sex, and the sexualization of the culture, became a preoccupation of the media in the 1950s. Playboy magazine, which published its premiere issue in 1953, was one of the prominent signs of a new value system, and although Seventeen was hardly the female equivalent of Playboy, it also extolled new ideas about female sexuality.←30 | 31→
One of the myths of the 1950s is that American teenagers were not engaging in sex. Alfred Kinsey’s first scientific study of sexuality, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” issued in 1948, shattered this illusion. But it was Kinsey’s second report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” released in 1953, which set off a firestorm. Due to a strict double standard, Kinsey’s frank discussion of male sexuality barely made a ripple beyond academia, but the revelation of the quantity and variety of female sexual activity came as a shock. Startled by Kinsey’s data, parents not only demonized the messenger but found evidence of permissiveness in every aspect of the culture to blame for the wanton ways of their children. Rock ‘n’ roll, with its inescapable sexual component, was a convenient target.
Public alarm over the sexual activity of teens has fluctuated, even though many studies indicate that actual sexual activity among U.S. youngsters changed little in the 1950s and 60s. (A decrease in such activity began in the 1990s.) If the concern was muted in the 1940s and early 1950s, it may be attributable to the so-called “shotgun wedding.” In comparison to subsequent decades, societal pressure was such that many young people opted for the sanction of marriage rather than seek abortions or risk exclusion from family and community networks. In the 1950s, America had the highest rate of teen marriage in the Western world. Judith Levine redirects our attention away from sex toward the assumptions and attitudes that surround it. It is the counterproductive suppression and censorship of sex that resulted in what she calls the sexual politics of fear. “America’s drive to protect kids from sex protects them from nothing,” she says, concluding, “instead, often it is harming them” (introduction np). The tendency to simultaneously hide, sensationalize, criminalize, and condemn sexual activity served to prevent a constructive response to the problems that accompanied adolescent sexual activity in the 1950s and beyond.
Regardless of the realities, adult sexual paranoia was sufficient to create a cottage industry in the 1950s. Sid Davis became renowned for the production of didactic, cautionary “social guidance” films with titles such as The Terrible Truth, Girls Beware, and Seduction of the Innocent,5 all of which attempted to inculcate captive students with parental values regarding hygiene, health, and dating. But while the preaching and posturing had a predictably counter-productive effect on young people, the scare tactics worked only too well on adults, who were convinced that their teenage offspring were one kiss or toke away from becoming sex and dope fiends. In their hysteria, they unwittingly contributed to a cultural obsession with youth and their mating rituals. The more parents and educators roiled the more attractive rock ‘n’ roll became, simultaneously offering the means of throwing off authoritarian strictures and expressing a nascent sexuality that generally stayed within the parameters of social acceptability.←31 | 32→
Although expurgated, American Bandstand and similar teen dance programs of the 1950s gathered young people in living rooms across the land, unified in a powerful tribal experience that encompassed music, fashion, politics, and a trove of cultural information. The dancing featured on these afternoon shows served as an especially strong catalyst, joining groups of teenagers in a physical activity that was fun to do, entertaining to watch, and sexually suggestive. Throughout history, of course, one of the functions of dance has always been seduction, a form of ritual mating and sanctioned foreplay. Simon Frith recalls that the Great Depression had helped to spread dancing beyond ethnic enclaves to the White working class, when it became “an escape, a suspension of real time, a way in which even the unemployed could enjoy their bodies, their physical skills, the sense of human power their lives otherwise denied” (Sound Effects 245). Learning dances made every 1950s teenager a participant in the rock ‘n’ roll adventure, part of the zeitgeist, and the energy was unleashed whenever and wherever teens congregated.
However tame the dancing on TV tended to be, it still carried sexual implications for parents and television producers, who shied away from anything suggestive, closely adhering to a National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters6 code, modeled after the strict Motion Picture Production Code that was a response to the realism and film noir of the 1940s. There was virtually no enforcement of the television code, but vigorous self-censorship made it unnecessary. The rules dictated, among other things, that couples could not co-occupy a double bed and that in scenes with couples in a bedroom at least one foot had to remain on the floor at all times.7 Books, movies, and magazines of this period evolved from the raciness of the 1940s to far more graphic fare, but television depicted a world largely devoid of sex. The televised presentation of rock ‘n’ roll, with sexuality in its very fiber, had to be carefully screened. Dancing, of course, was a key element on American Bandstand and other teen TV shows, but the producers and hosts of these programs were diligent gatekeepers and overt sexualizing was strictly forbidden.8 In this way, these shows maintained a strong voyeuristic element but reflected the priorities of the television industry.
Gender, of course, is a very different subject than sex, but it is clear that the networks’ phobia regarding sex had a negative impact on female musicians and fans. Although women in rock have always been a minority, one might think that the televisual arena might be one in which they might have an advantage. “Bring on the girls” has always been a fallback position in the theater, and television, partly due to its place in the home, has invariably included women in its shows, regardless of genre, if only as window-dressing. But parents did not want to associate rock ‘n’ roll with women in any fashion; rock ‘n’ roll was something that young girls needed to be protected from, not participate in. The young women who were fea←32 | 33→tured dancers on the teen dance shows were invariably prim, proper, and palatable. Even as late as the 1990s, an artist as successful as Alanis Morissette complained about sexism in the music industry, saying that “rock ‘n’ roll is not even a men’s club…it’s a boy’s club” (White 37).
But rock ‘n’ roll never occupied a large portion of the television schedule, and its impact on sexual mores and behaviors pales in comparison with that of advertising. As Neil Postman observed, television might have refrained from explicit displays (compared to movies and magazines), but trafficked shamelessly in titillation. “Television,” he says, “stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfillment; sex is transformed from a dark and profound adult mystery to a product that is available to everyone…like mouthwash or underarm deodorant” (Disappearance 137). Although rock ‘n’ roll was condemned for fanning the sexual fires, and certainly contributed to perception that sex was prevalent and accessible in the 1950s, there is little evidence to support the suggestion that music contributed to increased sexual activity. If anything, the repression of the libidinous aspects of R&B and rock music in the 1950s led to