Spanking Good Times in Classic TV

One of the obvious sex stand outs in TV for kinky folks, is 'The Addams Family.' In this sit-com, husband & wife chant to one another "To pleasure! To pain!" "Tonight...." leaving all but the most naive to deduce that something was 'up.'

This show & it's rather open 'kink speak' is an anomaly. For in the 50s & early 60s, it was a time when America did everything to keep sex away from the population at large -- especially on television. Don't believe me? Look at 'I Love Lucy,' when being with child was a predicament, even for married folks. It was a quaint time. A simple time. No one was having sex (except for those 'monsters members of the Addams family - no, that's not a sexual size reference). Or so they'd allow us to believe. But now, today, we can find the sex. We feel bereft without it, so we'll find it, somehow. We'll even put it in ourselves, for the hell of it.

Speaking of 'I Love Lucy,' did you know Lucy was often disciplined by Ricky in the form of spankings? This wasn't deemed sexual at all. It was all part of patriarchal males handing out the punishment unruly women-girls needed. The old movies are full of such spanking scenes. If all this spanking wasn't sexual, we sure can't watch it without injecting it ourselves now. Though I have a difficult time believing folks did/can watch Elvis spank & not feel sexual...

Speaking of parenting & discipline, we are rather easily led to thinking of sex. In the boringly dull 'Leave It To Beaver,' we take the simple clean talk of parents discussing the discipline of their child & put connotations into 'Ward, You Were A Little Hard On The Beaver.'

Sure, any sentence with the words 'Beaver' and 'hard' is an easy target, and we can't believe no one thought that was hysterical then. Our own ease of titillation makes it difficult for us to believe that anyone, now or then, could say that line & not be choking on laughter. I suspect many individuals search the archives for lost blooper footage of the mayhem on the set that day.

If we can't find the real sex in the pristine shows themselves -- if all our Freudian attempts to make cigar smoking in Hogan's Heros just the habit of an afficianado, then we'll dig around in the lives of the actors themselves. Take Bob Crane of Hogan's Heros for example, who "has gone down in show-biz history as an epic sexual libertine whose fascination with group sex and pornography led to his brutal (and still officially unsolved) murder" -- all presented in "Auto Focus", as proof that kink was alive & well 'even then.' Never mind that it was a comedy about WWII, we must find deeper perversions.

By the late 60s, we Americans were letting it all hang out. We even let Paul Lynde hang out in the center square. And soon it was followed by even more innuendo & risque humor. Game shows such as Match Game (which had Brett Somers & Charles Nelson Reilly as their 'Paul Lundes') & Tattle Tales (based on B list celebs gossip) were built around America's love of filling in blanks with smutty euphemisms -- the words weren't forbidden (censored), but still got the dirty point across.