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In the new nude

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In the new nude

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IN THE NEW NUDE

Laura Kangasluoma

A Master’s Thesis presented to the
FACULTY OF USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
as a partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
in
SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM
August 2018

Foreword and acknowledgements
In July 2017, I moved to Los Angeles for graduate school from Finland, and within a few months
I knew I wanted to do my thesis on nudity. I’ve always been fascinated with nakedness and its
contradictions. I grew up in a country with a strong sauna culture, and from an early age, I saw women
all sizes and shapes naked. In contrast, the naked women I saw on American TV shows didn’t look like
the women I had seen in real life.
My thesis ended up combining these two interests of mine: nudity and TV. Once I added
feminism and the #metoo movement into the mix, my thesis had the four foundational platforms that
it’s built on. My thesis is a written piece that I spiced up with two audio stories, and it lives on a
website that I coded for it, found at www.laurakangasluoma.com. The thesis itself is in this manuscript,
with the scripts of the audio pieces and the explanation of the code as its appendixes. It is my
playground to what I wanted to learn during this Master’s Program: I got to write a piece longer than
any I’ve ever written, about a topic I was passionate about, and also experiment with two forms of
journalistic storytelling that were unfamiliar to me before this year: radio and coding.
And now it’s time to thank an extraordinary group of people who made this possible. On the top
of my list of people to thank is Professor Sasha Anawalt. As the chair of my thesis panel, Sasha guided
me, consoled me, and encouraged me to keep going. I am truly honored to call her not only a teacher,
but a friend. My gratitude also goes out to Professor Lara Bradshaw from USC’s School of Cinema and
Media Studies. I took Lara’s class in the fall of 2017, and it was by far my favorite class of the year.
The class not only taught me a great deal about feminism, popular culture, and how both affect our
lives, but it also gave me an amazing and insightful panel member. And of course, my panel wouldn’t
be complete without Professor Peggy Bustamante. It was Peggy who sparked my interest in coding at
the beginning of the school year, and she calmly guided me as I insisted on learning horizontal
scrolling. My gratitude also goes out to Professor Henry Fuhrmann who helped me with the grammar
and language and was patient and caring with his edits.
This thesis would not exist had it not been for the kindness of the people who gave me their time
and shared their thoughts: Shannon Bae, Matthew Conaty, Madeline Di Nonno, Kristina Frisch, Nina
Hartley, Melissa Henson, Emily Nussbaum, and Nicholas Weinstock. I am forever grateful that they
helped out a strange Finn who wanted to talk with them about naked women. And of course, the
biggest contributor: Tomi-Ann Roberts. After deciding on my topic, I had the incredible luck of
meeting a woman, who has A) devoted her academic career to studying the sexualization of girls and
women, B) is half Finnish, and C) was harassed by Harvey Weinstein. She was the perfect interviewee
for this thesis, and it was just icing on the cake when I learnt what an amazing and warm person she is.
I am also eternally grateful to the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation for giving me a scholarship and
this amazing opportunity to study at USC Annenberg and to learn not only what kind of journalist I am,
but explore where journalism as a profession is headed to.
I want to thank my group of rugrats, my partners in crime, Bence Mohay, Mara Pometti, Stefani
Urmas, Aliya Jasmine Sovani, Chris Damien, and Jas Kang for their friendship and all the Tuesday
night talks.
I must thank my mom Päivi, and my sisters Kaisa and Maija, for our weekly Sunday Skype
sessions, and for being the most amazing trio of women I could have ever hoped for around me.
And of course, last but definitely not least, I am thanking my husband Tuomas Kallio, who
shared this adventure with me. His last name translates to “rock,” and that is what he has been for me
throughout my year at USC. He pushed me onwards when I needed it, and pulled me in his arms when
I was going too far. Without him, none of this would have happened.

Table of Contents

I. First chapter (untitled) ................................................................................................................. 1
II. The heritage of the Puritans revised ............................................................................................ 3
III. Transforming attitudes and bodies .......................................................................................... 11
IV. Diverse creators, diverse content? ........................................................................................... 21
V. Reshaping the landscape of television ....................................................................................... 28
VI. A change is coming .................................................................................................................. 31
VII. Appendixes.............................................................................................................................. 34
i. Transcript of the first audio piece ................................................................................... 34
ii. Transcript of the second audio piece .............................................................................. 37
iii. Explanation of the code................................................................................................. 41
VIII. Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 43

1
In the new nude
More women are naked on American TV than ever before, and they’re naked in new ways. In
addition to model-sized women draped in silk sheets in sex scenes, now women characters with cellulite
are shaving their legs in the bathroom. Why are we seeing this now? The answers have to do with the
tumultuous television industry, shifts in society’s attitudes—and Harvey Weinstein.

This story of female nudity starts with a clothed woman. More specifically, Tomi-Ann Roberts, a
fifty-four-year-old professor of psychology, who on Thursday, October 5, 2017, was wearing a skirt
and a blouse—which ones in particular, she can’t recall, because other details of that day overshadow
that of her clothing. (Roberts 2018)
It was noon, and Roberts had just finished teaching a class of twenty-five students at Colorado
College on personality theories. The class is organized by major personality theorists, and on that day
they were talking about Karen Horney. In the 1930s, Horney was the first psychodynamic theorist to
attempt any kind of theory of feminine psychology. She was a former student of Freud’s and was
insulted by his claim that women were a dark continent that couldn’t be understood. After class,
Roberts walked up a flight of stairs to her office on the third floor of the Russell T. Tutt Science
Building. Her office has a view over the mountainous Colorado Springs skyline. There’s a stacked
shelf of books on different theories and methods of psychology, including a piece called The
Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood that Roberts co-wrote, and a poster on the wall titled “How to be a
fabulous feminist.” Roberts sat down on her black office chair, got on her computer, and saw an email
from a colleague she had met during a conference trip to Japan in 2010. (Roberts 2017; Roberts 2018)
“When we met, it was one of those nights where you ask the question, ‘What would you have
done if you hadn’t become a psychology professor,’ and I told him the story I usually never tell. I think

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maybe it was because he was a stranger, we were in a strange city, jet-lagged, and there must have been
enough sake or something,” Roberts (2018) recalls.
“Now, he had sent me a link to an article in the New York Times. And he said, ‘Oh my God, this
reminds me of the story you told me a long time ago about Harvey Weinstein.’” (Roberts 2017)
The article was written by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (2017), and it revealed decades of
alleged sexual harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Roberts (2017) read
through it, and instead of grading the exams on which she had planned to spend her afternoon, she
searched for Kantor’s and Twohey’s emails, and started typing. In the subject field, she wrote:
“I was a victim of Harvey Weinstein” (Tomi-Ann Roberts, email to Jodi Kantor and Megan
Twohey, October 5, 2017).
As Roberts wrote, the words flowed with ease from her fingers onto the keyboard and the screen.
She went on to describe her encounter with Weinstein thirty-three years earlier. When Roberts was a
junior in college, she dreamt of being an actress. She moved from Northampton, Massachusetts, where
she was attending Smith College, to New York for the summer of 1984, in hopes of going to auditions
and castings. She worked as a waitress at a restaurant called Edie’s, where Weinstein regularly ate. As
Roberts waited on Weinstein, he told her that he and his brother planned on making their first movie,
and urged Roberts to audition for it. And she decided to take him up on his suggestion—after all, acting
was her dream; it was why she was in New York.
A few days before the audition with the casting agent, Roberts got a message from Weinstein to
meet him at his apartment to discuss the movie. (Roberts 2017; Roberts 2018)
“I assumed it would be a gathering of lots of people,” Roberts wrote in her email to Kantor and
Twohey. “When I arrived, it was only me. The apartment was quite dark. I heard Harvey call me to
come down the hall. I found him in the bathtub. I stood there, frozen. It’s hard to know what to do in a
situation like that. He spoke calmly to me, saying he thought that we’d get along a lot better if I was

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comfortable with his nakedness, and—here was the kicker—that I would give a much better audition if
I was comfortable getting naked in front of him. After all, he said, the character in the movie for whom
I was auditioning, would likely have a topless scene in the movie.”
Roberts wrote in her email that at this point she bolted. She asked Weinstein’s housekeeper to let
her out, and ran to the subway as fast as she could. After that summer, she returned to college, majored
in psychology, earned a PhD from Stanford, and devoted her scholarly career to studying the sexual
objectification and sexualization of girls and women.
As Roberts clicked the “send” button and her email traveled through the universe of binary digits
to Kantor and Twohey, she also forwarded what she had written to her mom, her two daughters, and
the friend who had originally sent her the New York Times article. (Roberts 2017; Roberts 2018)
“I wrote them that Jodi Kantor is never going to read this. This was more about me finally telling
my story in a way that felt like it was connected to my life now. I wanted them to see what I wrote just
because I was pretty sure it was going to fall into the netherworld of space and no one was ever going
to see it. And that was it, I just thought I was done,” Roberts (2017) says.
As it turns out, she wasn’t.

II. The heritage of the Puritans revised
What happened to Tomi-Ann Roberts over three decades ago reveals gruesome details of a power
structure that determines how women in Hollywood end up on our screens. This encounter, with all the
additional stories about the behavior of Weinstein and other Hollywood power players, tells of a culture
in which white middle-aged men decide who gets to star in movies and TV shows, and how the women
they choose in many cases end up being seen through their gaze—and in nude scenes, women’s naked
bodies portrayed as objects of male desire. The cultural machinery behind these sexualizing portrayals
is what Roberts has studied for decades.

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But in recent years, female nudity, especially on TV, has been changing. What started with the
HBO show Girls in 2012, and has continued with shows like Transparent, Broad City, and You’re the
Worst, is a new way of approaching female nudity in non-sexualized ways. In these shows, female
characters walk around their homes naked, they pee, they shave, and their bodies have lumps, bumps,
and cellulite. These representations show that something has shifted. They are of women who are
unruly and exhibit excess—something that has previously been shoved outside the feminine realm. As
University of Oregon Professor Emerita Kathleen K. Rowe (1997, 76) writes: “Through body and
speech, the unruly woman violates the unspoken feminine sanction of ‘making a spectacle’ of herself.”
Seeing these representations matter because studies have shown that the sexualized media images
we have become so familiar with, produced by the TV and film industries, pigeonhole women as
objects of desire. Altogether these images continue to affect our perception of conventional gender
roles. In order to step into an age of more gender equality, our brains have to be retrained, and thus
provided with new images of women. (Chamberlain 2016, 41)
The non-sexualized nudity of women in shows like the above-mentioned has more to do with real
life than with the naked female bodies of porn or Hollywood movies, in which nakedness is connected
to sexual pleasure. Even though the new kinds of nudity are thus far mostly seen on cable and
subscription services and not by mainstream audiences, the cultural shift they’ve started challenges the
way the Harvey Weinsteins of the world have portrayed the female body.
In the current climate, the change is about a lot more than just female nudity in television. It’s
about the people writing female roles, directing, and producing the TV shows, about the world these
media products are made in. It’s connected to the thousands of #metoo stories about sexual assault and
harassment circulating on the internet, and to blaming rape victims for wearing certain clothes,
behaving in a certain way, being intoxicated. It’s about a society undercutting women’s reproductive
rights, and about women saying Time’s Up.

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Madeline Di Nonno (2017), the CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, says that
compared with real life, changing women’s life on our screens is a piece of cake.
“Onscreen portrayals can be fixed overnight very easily because they’re fiction,” Di Nonno
(2017) says. “It really comes down to unconscious bias and to the content creators taking a very active
and aggressive role in analyzing the content from script all the way through the production cycle and
checking themselves.”
The frustrating part is that even though changing female onscreen portrayals is easy, it’s time
consuming.
“It takes three to five years for an animated movie to come out, it could take twenty-four months
for a feature film to come out, and TV shows are always in production. But if we’re not able to impact
at the beginning, we’ve missed an opportunity,” Di Nonno (2017) says. “What’s frustrating is, how do
we not miss any more opportunities to impact these onscreen portrayals?”
One of the reasons change is slow is that nudity onscreen has strong roots going back centuries: It
has to do with America’s Puritan heritage. Scholars have argued that the seeds of current American
culture were planted by a zealous group of Puritan-Protestants, who fled religious persecution in
England and arrived at what they named New England during the Great Migration of 1630. They
dreamt of a land of spirituality, full of righteous people like them. “Female piety” was revered among
Puritans, and this ideal included a cultivation of female submissiveness and self-effacement. (Robinson
1994, 747; Uhlmann et al. 2011, 312)
Even though America’s various faiths have evolved since, especially in the 19th century,
Americans’ religious and traditional values regarding work and sexuality, as shown in many surveys,
seem to have traces of the nation’s history in them. Researchers Eric Luis Uhlmann of HEC Paris, T.
Andrew Poehlman of Southern Methodist University, David Tannenbaum of the University of
California, Irvine, and John A. Bargh of Yale University have argued that Roman Catholics, other non-

6
Protestants, and even non-religious people in the United States are implicitly influenced by the Puritan
heritage. As they write, “One does not have to be an American Protestant to exhibit judgments and
behaviors consistent with traditional Puritan-Protestant values—one may only have to be an American”
(Uhlmann et al. 2011, 320).
Puritan attitudes have affected American culture and been prevalent in Hollywood from the
1920s onwards. Back then filmmaking became standardized, the studio system came to be (i.e., the
same people produced, distributed, and screened films), and Hollywood emerged as the center of
American cinema (Doherty 1999, 4). In the roaring ’20s, many movies that came out of Hollywood
fought back against older, Victorian values: they were films “devoted to the sins of wild youth, dancing
daughters, straying wives, and dark seducers,” as Thomas Doherty (1999, 6) writes in his book, Pre-
Code Hollywood Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. A pushback to
these liberal movies came in 1930 with the Production Code, better known as the Hays Code, that was
made for and by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. The idea of the Code was
to “roll back the profligacy of the 1920s and set a reformed America again on the path of righteousness
in the new, harsher decade” and to resist “the pleasures of the flesh in thought, word, and deed,” as
Doherty (1999, 6) writes.
According to Doherty (1999, 2), the four-year period from the time the Code was formally
adopted in 1930 until it began to be enforced in 1934, “Hollywood was free to roam far and wide” and
it really made the most of it, continuing on the frivolous path of the ’20s. During this four-year period,
Hollywood got away with content that became forbidden once the Code began to be enforced, like
“nudity in fact or in silhouette” as mentioned in the Code. After this four-year period, sex and nudity
were seen as forbidden fruits by Hollywood filmmakers: something they had gotten to taste for four
years but were not allowed to show anymore. (Doherty 1999, 2–3; 363) This led to Hollywood’s
obsession with sex and nudity.

7
Television’s early days were affected by film and thus by the restrictions of the Hays Code that
were enforced until 1968. When television emerged in the 1950s as a household fixture and activity, it
was advertised as a medium that would bring families together: TV was a window to the world for
everyday Americans, who could sit around the TV set together while remaining in the comfort of their
newly built suburban homes, living their wholesome and gallant lives (Haralovich 1992; Spigel 2001).
Popular television shows were about the nuclear family, and the homemaker was idolized in shows like
Father Knows Best (1954–60) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66.) The boundaries of
what was acceptable to women were drawn by depicting their appearance, as the housewives were
made to look a certain way: perfectly proportioned, immaculately dressed, hair and makeup always
done. Because television was considered a family medium, it began to be regulated as such. The
Federal Communications Commission was formed in 1934; it oversees interstate and international
communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. One of the things the FCC started
monitoring was nudity—something it still does.
But in the current television landscape, how does the FCC do its’ regulating, specifically? And
why? Well, it’s complicated. First, there is the question of whose content does the FCC have
jurisdiction over. The commission evaluates the entities it licenses, which means broadcast television
and radio companies which were the only ones in existence when the FCC was formed. That exempts
current cable and satellite companies, which aren’t licensed, as well as internet-based services. (Conaty
2017)
Second, regarding nudity on TV and FCC regulations, three terms are key: obscenity, profanity,
and indecency. Every network is forbidden to air obscene programming at any time. Even though cable
and satellite companies aren’t FCC licensees, the limitations on obscenity extend to them as well. The
obscenity of a show or a scene is measured by a three-prong test that was basically designed to cover
hardcore porn. In layman’s terms, something is obscene if it makes an average person feel horny, or if

8
it depicts or describes sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way. The three-prong test includes this
statement: Something is obscene if, taken as a whole, it doesn’t have serious literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value. (FCC 2018)
Unlike obscenity, indecent and profane material is not actionable if it’s distributed on cable,
satellite, or internet-based services. But such material is regulated on broadcast television. FCC
regulation prohibits broadcasters from airing indecent or profane material between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
The FCC’s definition of indecent includes intricate mentions of “depicting or describing sexual or
excretory organs or activities in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community
standards for the broadcast medium,” whereas profanity rules are often applied to language, especially
using the word “fuck.” (Conaty 2017; FCC 2018) This leads to language being regulated by networks
and studios.
Jenni Konner, the showrunner of Girls, gave an example in an interview in the New York Times
in 2012: “When I did a show on ABC, standards and practices would let us say ‘penis’ but not ‘vagina.’
The explanation was that it was too rough of a word” (Itzkoff 2012).
Similarly, at a panel at Sundance in 2015, Mindy Kaling, the creator and star of The Mindy
Project on Fox, discussed depicting sexual practices on her show, saying that she was in “more than
constant interaction” with the Fox lawyer (Dowd 2015).
Matthew Conaty (2017), who works for the Enforcement bureau of the FCC, believes that the
above-mentioned term “contemporary community standards,” which is used to measure the
offensiveness of content, is sometimes misunderstood. These standards aren’t set in stone, and they
can’t be equated with an indefinite concept of “American values” that could somehow be directly
derived of the country’s Puritan heritage.
“You don’t necessarily look at it from the point of view of the hometown of the person who
complained about the broadcast. Contemporary community standards are a tool for measuring whether

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something is patently offensive based on the standard of the average broadcast viewer or listener,” says
Conaty (2017), who is in charge of the media team that evaluates complaints made by Americans about
any perceived wrong they see or hear in the media.
How have these “contemporary community standards” changed, as our society’s values have
become more fragmented? Is the typical American more open to seeing content that was thought of as
explicit during the years of the Hays Code now that they are exposed to more of it?
“I think that does probably affect it in some ways,” Conaty (2017) says. “I think that’s a
consideration when you try to put yourself in the shoes of that individual.”
With nudity on American TV, there is one more thing to consider: Even though basic cable
channels could broadcast the same types of programming as premium cable and subscription
services—because like them, they are not FCC licensees—their content is affected by advertisers.
Many companies won’t advertise on programs that have a lot of explicit content, or content that goes
against the company’s values. In fall 2017, for example, companies including Keurig, Eloquii, and
Nature’s Bounty announced that they will no longer advertise during Fox News’ Hannity. In their view,
the show wasn’t forceful enough in condemning the sexual misconduct allegations against United
States Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, who was accused of sexually touching a fourteen-
year-old girl in 1979 (Whitten 2017).
For nudity, the question is specific to each advertiser: What qualifies as explicit content? The
costumes women wear on So You Think You Can Dance? or a woman like Girls’ creator Lena Dunham
naked in a bathtub?
Conaty (2017) stresses that based on the First Amendment to the Constitution and the
Communications Act of 1934, which contains the laws of the commission, the FCC does not regulate
content. The commission is prohibited from either censoring program material or infringing upon
broadcasters’ free speech rights.

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“We can take enforcement action if particular types of content meet the Commission’s standards
for indecency and obscenity, which are based on standards that have been announced by the courts,
chiefly the Supreme Court,” Conaty (2017) says. “But we can’t tell broadcasters, ‘You can’t air
particular things.’ It’s always a question of looking backwards at something that has been aired.”
The traditional justification that indecency and profanity are regulated for broadcast licensees is
their effect on children. Since the dawn of television, the fear has been that the future generations of
Americans will become morally compromised if they see profanity on TV. That worries many.
“It can be individuals who make these sort of complaints, and there are also various groups who
say that their particular mission is to try to bring to light indecent content,” Conaty (2017) says. “Such
entities—not as much currently but in the past—would, for example, try to coordinate letter writing
campaigns where a number of people would write in about a particular broadcast and would complain
about it.”
One of these private entities is the Parents Television Council, founded in 1995 by L. Brent
Bozell III, a conservative Catholic activist, to “protect children and families from graphic sex, violence
and profanity in the media.” Blogs hosted on its website have raised concerns about mature content in
Stranger Things, an F-bomb on Star Trek: Discovery, and profanity on Dynasty. Its strategy for
combatting obscenity is mainly to report the offenders to the FCC. (Parents Television Council 2018)
The PTC’s mission includes trying to restrict naked bodies on broadcast TV. The group worries
not just about sexualized content but all kinds of nudity. Melissa Henson has been working for the PTC
for twenty years and is now a program director. She says that in recent years, the kind of nudity that
viewers see on cable TV has migrated to broadcast television. (Henson 2017)
“Content on both premium and advertiser-supported basic cable channels does tend to influence
what we see on the broadcast networks in the long term,” Henson (2017) says. “The studios might use

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cable as a testing ground for certain kinds of content. And if they can get advertisers comfortable with
paying for it, then it makes it easier to start migrating that content onto prime-time broadcast TV.”
In Henson’s (2017) opinion, the same kind of desensitizing has happened with viewers as well.
“Once people become inured to it, they’re no longer shocked by it,” she says of content that
includes nudity. “And then the studios start to introduce a little bit more and a little bit more, and it
happens so gradually over a period of years that most people don’t notice it happening.” (Henson 2017)

III. Transforming attitudes and bodies
Many see the fight to keep television appropriate for children futile—and even question the
concept of appropriate. Nowadays, kids have access to all sorts of content on their mobile devices and
computers, and at the same time, values are changing and diversifying. The TV shows with new kinds
of female nudity are a part of that change. They’re taking steps toward lifting the Puritan-age veil of
shame surrounding nudity in the United States by promoting non-sexualized, everyday nudity and not
automatically labeling a naked person indecent. They are showing ordinary life, realness, grossness—
giving women the right to be ugly.
One of the first people to show this new kind of nudity was Lena Dunham, the creator of the
HBO show Girls (2012–17.) The show focuses on four twenty-something-year-old women who have
recently graduated from college and are searching for careers and relationships in New York. The show
has been dubbed a dramatic comedy that touches on themes of privilege, feminism, and millennial
angst. The female nudity on Girls is nothing like the glossy nudity of other cable shows that started
around the same time, such as Game of Thrones (2011–present.) On Girls, the characters are naked
both in non-sexualized settings and in situations involving sex, which are often awkward and dubious
scenes—such scenes since then have become more varied in tone on other HBO shows like High

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Maintenance (2016–present.) In its second season, High Maintenance had a sex scene in which a
middle-aged woman with a relatively regular body had a vivid threesome with two men.
“They’re having fun, and the scene goes on long enough that you literally wonder, ‘Why am I
being shown so much of this?’” says Emily Nussbaum (2018), TV critic for the New Yorker. “It’s an
example of that kind of body being used in a scene where you’re supposed to be like, ‘Wait, regular-
looking women have really hot sex.’ That’s not the case on Girls, which is almost universally about the
humor, alienation, and adventure of sex that consists of weird misunderstandings.”
Dunham (2015, 102) wrote in her book Not That Kind of Girl about her interest in showing naked
bodies.
“I’d always had an interest in nudity, one I would describe as more sociological than sexual. Who
got to be naked, and why?”
In an interview with the New York Times in 2012, Dunham spoke of the nudity on Girls:
“The stuff that I’m naturally drawn to writing is stuff I’ve felt but haven’t seen,” she said (Itzkoff
2012).
The bodies that we have become accustomed to seeing are toned and fit, and their nakedness on
TV has centered on sex. All in all, when it comes to nudity in the media, much of the academic
research focuses on portrayals of sex. The underlying thought pattern in many studies seems to be as
follows: People are naked on TV because they are having sex, and because sex on TV is most of the
time portrayed unrealistically (women having satisfying sex while clad in lace underwear and
climaxing within minutes) and is unsuitable for young people (occurring between unmarried people,
and not showing abstinence among teenagers in a positive light), it is harmful, especially to young girls
(Fisher et al. 2004, 531). A lot of the research has examined the link between teens watching sexual
content in the media and their attitudes toward sex, but there’s no consensus on the nature and strength
of those effects (Taylor 2005, 130).

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It’s clear, however, that TV is a source of knowledge about sex for many young people. As many
as one in five teens has named entertainment as their most important source of sexual information, and
a substantial number of teens believe that sex on TV accurately reflects real life (Fisher et al. 2004,
530). Television is a strong influencer, because not all American parents talk comprehensively with
their children about sex, and federal funding for sex education is a political issue, with conservatives
advocating abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, and liberals supporting more encompassing
approaches to sex education (Carroll 2017).
What is interesting with regard to studies done on nudity (i.e., sex) on TV is that many times the
suggested solution is to limit sexual content on television. The other option—changing American
culture around nudity, having more realistic portrayals of both nudity and sex, and trying to encourage
young people to get their information on these topics from more reliable sources than fictional TV—
seems somewhat absent.
But might the cultural shift we are now seeing in things like the #metoo movement be the final
push to making Americans ready to see more variations of nudity and sex? That’s what Nina Hartley, a
veteran porn star, believes. Hartley began her career in porn in 1984 and has since starred in hundreds
of films. Hartley often gets referred to as legendary and is revered as one of America’s best-known
porn actresses. In her view, as porn has become more commonplace, the female bodies in it have
changed, and seeing different types of female bodies in porn is a part of a larger cultural shift. (Hartley
2017)
“When movies were the only way to get pornography, people tried to cast the widest net: ‘How
close to the ideal of Barbie can we make each woman look because we’re selling an idea.’ And so, each
woman, to make herself look as pretty as possible, would groom herself in the classic, dominant-culture
way.” (Hartley 2017)

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This has changed with the internet and the advent of amateur porn, and Hartley (2017) says the
changes in porn have influenced mainstream media.
“If you look at the bodies we have, tall and short, thin and full, boxy hips, small waist, thick
waist, flat butt, big butt—there’s just a wide variety of body styles because the bar to entering
pornography is lower than mainstream media or modeling.” (Hartley 2017)
Hartley (2017) says the larger variety of female bodies in porn is reflected in the female bodies in
popular culture. Prominent examples are movie stars Melissa McCarthy, Rebel Wilson, and Gabourey
Sidibe, musician Adele, and TV actresses Retta (Parks and Recreation), Chrissie Metz (This Is Us),
Katy Mixon (American Housewife), and Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project).The long absence of
women their size in popular culture is proof that no matter how the ideal female body has been defined
in the last few decades—whether Pamela Anderson or Kate Moss or women embodying the fitness
boom—a woman’s body has been expected to be just a certain way, and larger bodies have always
been excluded. That has changed with social media. What started with the Fat Underground movement
of American feminist lesbian groups in the 1970s, who wanted to raise awareness about the injustices
stemming from weight discrimination, has thus evolved to a hashtag-appropriate movement of the
2000s: body positive (Friman 2017).
The body positive movement has been described as more like a loose set of philosophies than a
movement in any political sense. The goal of the movement is to counter our culture’s unrealistic
beauty norms and promote self-acceptance. It has done so with a heightened presence on Instagram
since around 2012 with hashtags like #plussize, #riotsnotdiets, and #losehatenotweight helping to
showcase bodies of all shapes and sizes. (Cwynar-Horta 2016; Webb et al. 2017) The heralds of the
body positive movement have been models like Ashley Graham, who in March 2017 became the first
plus-size model to appear on the cover of American Vogue, and Tess Holliday, who in 2012 founded
the @effyourbeautystandards Instagram account and launched a campaign called

15
#effyourbeautystandards, with which almost three million posts have been tagged to date. The photos
show women with flabby bellies and ample thighs in bikinis and tight-fitting jeans. The movement has
gone on to challenge assumptions about fat bodies not being strong and active, and showing them as
athletic (Cwynar-Horta 2016).
With its growth, the body positive movement has been criticized for the bodies it celebrates and
accused of a lack of inclusiveness, mostly leaving women above size 14 out of the picture. The
majority of celebrated body positive women are what Alexandra Sastre (2014, 930), Graduate
Associate for the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of
Pennsylvania, describes as being in the realm of “not-quite”: “Not-quite thin enough to stand in as an
ideal, not-quite large enough to incite panic, and not-quite visible enough to merit attention.”
But even with the small advances made by the body positive movement in increasing the variety
of female shapes in the public eye, seeing women of any size naked on television can still create shock
waves. In an American context, it’s hard to separate being naked as simply not having clothes on from
being nude and having someone’s bare skin meant as a provocation. This leads to two extremes of
nudity existing simultaneously. First, you have the bare skin meant for titillation that started to appear
on television as soon as cable was created, showing hot young white female corpses, a constant
currency in the crime shows of the past.
“It was just always young white women being killed and being put on slabs and then you got to
see their breasts,” TV critic Nussbaum (2018) recalls.
In the late ’90s, HBO discovered its “secret sauce,” as Nussbaum (2018) calls it: a mixture of
ambitious narrative artistic television, titillating graphic sexual subject matter, and conventional female
nudity, as in The Sopranos, which many people watched because of the scenes at the strip club Bada
Bing where there were topless dancers in the background gyrating—something you couldn’t see on
network television. Since then, the titillating nudity of TV stars has evolved to the nearly naked photos

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Kim Kardashian-West posts of herself on Instagram. Then you have the other strain of nudity, the non-
sexualized, and more realistic one, in shows like Girls that try to expand the visual rhetoric of female
bodies on TV, what we consider normal to look at, and what we are attracted to or horrified by.
The first kind of nudity is connected to what Tomi-Ann Roberts ended up studying after her
encounter with Harvey Weinstein: the sexualization of girls and women.
“In the United States, people have a very hard time understanding when I say that to put a bikini
swimsuit on a six-year-old girl is to sexualize her. When you cover up a part of a body, you’re
implying that what is underneath it is forbidden. And to do that to a six-year-old girl, and to not ask a
six-year-old boy to cover his very same-looking torso, is to sexualize. But Americans can’t fathom
what I’m saying,” Roberts (2017) explains.
Roberts is talking from a rare perspective, because when it comes to American attitudes on
nudity, she has something to compare them with. Her mother is from Finland, where the culture around
nudity is very different from that in the United States, where people are more squeamish and less casual
about nudity. Why? One study that compared the United States and Sweden—Finland’s neighbor and
culturally quite similar—showed that Swedes are more permissive about nudity. The reasons were
Sweden’s lower level of religiosity, greater egalitarianism regarding gender roles, and a more
widespread naturalistic understanding of sexuality. (Weinberg et al. 2000) The same reasons can easily
be applied to Finland.
“Recently everyone’s kept asking me, if Harvey Weinstein had anything to do with the topics I
study, and yes, he did, but even more so I would say that the impact of my Finnish background is so
enormous that I almost can’t see outside of it,” Roberts (2017) says. “In a place like Finland, people are
much better able to distinguish between the kinds of experiences that involve just naked bodies versus
the sorts of experiences that are about sex.”

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The experiences with nudity that Roberts (2017; 2018) grew up with involve her spending
summers in Finland, going to the sauna naked with three generations of women and being exposed to
their bodies in a context that has nothing to do with sex. Instead, these experiences gave her an
opportunity to see how lived life truly affects women’s bodies: how breasts change shape after
breastfeeding, how stretchmarks stay on the skin decades after pregnancy, how women’s pubic hair
thins out with age, how scars from accidents or surgeries draw a map on the body, and how aging
makes veins surface.
Even though these kinds of encounters with nudity make it clear to Finnish people that the bodies
of “average women” in real life aren’t like those depicted in the media, they don’t mean that Finns are
immune to images of unattainable female beauty—to images that have been shown to decrease
women’s satisfaction with their bodies and overall appearance (Schick et al. 2011, 74). But what could
be argued is that seeing a variety of bodies decreases fatphobia—a phenomenon that is quite strong in
America. Idealizing and focusing on the thin, lean, and “fit” body can engender contempt for fat
people. Beliefs about fat people lacking willpower and seeing their weight as a sign of social
marginalization are widespread in the United States. Anti-fat attitudes are so pervasive that overweight
people are just as anti-fat as anyone else. (Hart et al. 2017)
One of the most insightful observers of the fat shaming culture in the United States is feminist
author Roxane Gay, who in her book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017, 188–189) writes:
“Fat shaming is real, constant, and rather pointed. There are a shocking number of people who
believe they can simply torment fat people into weight loss and disciplining their bodies or
disappearing their bodies from the public sphere. They believe they are medical experts, listing a litany
of health problems associated with fatness as personal affronts. These tormentors bind themselves in
righteousness when they point out the obvious—that our bodies are unruly, defiant, fat. It’s a strange
civic-minded cruelty.”

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Fat shaming thrives in a culture that focuses on talking about bodies, whether positively or
negatively. Studies have revealed that even though positive body talk is related to lower body
dissatisfaction and increased self-esteem, it still doesn’t protect from unhealthy dieting, bulimia, or
depression (Hart et al. 2017, 136). It is because of our intense concentration on bodies that we
internalize a constant need to control them—and a media culture that portrays a very narrow image of
female bodies forces us to compare our bodies to those shown to us and to see how we lack.
That is why seeing different bodies in different contexts matters: It gives us more comparison
points. Lena Dunham has been contributed by being one of the first on TV to show a variety of female
bodies in non-sexualized settings. Since Girls debuted, Dunham, who played the main character,
Hannah, has had her body become part of the discussion in the media. Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2012
in the New York Times Magazine:
“I could see that there was another thing to notice about Girls: Lena Dunham’s body, which she
had placed, quite deliberately, in the spotlight. Unlike many women on TV, Dunham is short and pear-
shaped. She has a tattoo of Eloise on her back, plus ink done by her friend and co-star Jemima Kirke,
whom she knew in high school at St. Ann’s. The filmmaker [Dunham] can look beautiful in the manner
of twenties movie star Clara Bow: She has a small chin, a bow mouth, and very large brown eyes
flecked with gold. But just as often, she lets herself look like hell. Dunham films herself nude, with her
skin breaking out, her belly in folds, chin doubled, or flat on her back with her feet in a gynecologist’s
stirrups. These scenes shouldn’t shock, but they do, if only because in a culture soaked in Photoshop
and Botox, few powerful women open themselves up so aggressively to the judgment of voyeurs.”
(Nussbaum 2012)
Dunham, as Hannah, acknowledges that her body doesn’t conform to the ideal, but at the same
time, she doesn’t care and refuses to aspire to it. Hannah is sexually active, has autonomy and agency,

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and does with her body things our popular culture has deemed appropriate only for people with a
certain kind of figure.
“It was so important to me that there could be a girl who was confident but sex made her
incredibly anxious, or a girl who respected herself but was using sex to push boundaries to understand
herself better,” Dunham said of Hannah in the New York Times (Itzkoff 2012).
Lara Bradshaw is a lecturer in cinema and media studies at USC. In her view, both Dunham as a
person and Girls as a show expand the boundaries of acceptable female nudity and the notion of current
feminism. Girls has been said to have reframed the conversation about gender, feminism, and young
women on screen, and to have opened doors for shows like Broad City, a frank comedy by Ilana Glazer
and Abbi Jacobson, on Comedy Central; Insecure, one of the rare shows created by a young African-
American woman, Issa Rae, on HBO; Fleabag, an unfiltered show about a depressed, sex-obsessed
woman, on BBC Three by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; and Transparent, about a transgender woman and
her family, on Amazon. Jill Soloway, the creator of Transparent, acknowledged the influence of Girls
in an interview with the New York Times (Hess 2017):
“I think Lena Dunham did something gigantic by having a successful, unlikable woman at the
center of Girls. At least for white women, there was a sea change. One year before that, I would go to
meetings where people would look at me with a straight face and say, ‘You must have a root-for-able,
heterosexual man at the center of your show if you want us to make it’,” Soloway said.
Bradshaw describes Girls as being hyper-focused on Dunham’s body.
“It’s about displaying her body in very unflattering ways but also raising the larger discussion on
female form: what’s acceptable, and what types of gazes we might orient towards the female body,”
she says.
The nudity Dunham introduced—like having Hannah’s character in a bathtub together with her
friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Jessa blowing her nose in the bathwater—pushed the boundaries of

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how women are portrayed in popular media products, the same way Glazer and Jacobson have done in
Broad City, on which the characters, with the same names as the creators, casually hang around naked
with each other. Whether we see a woman wearing an unflattering dress, having messy hair, or
exposing cellulite on her body, it makes us look twice: it shows how strongly we are conditioned to
expect a perfect and idealized female form on television.
“I think there is more awareness of the very misogynistic and sexist tropes that are embedded into
the cultural products we consume,” Bradshaw says. “I’m a little bit hesitant to think that the boundaries
are totally pushed, especially regarding mainstream media and how women are still very policed
regarding their bodies. But still, I think that’s part of the discussion.”
As attitudes on nudity change, they are part of an even bigger picture that is glacially evolving.
“What remains untouched, what remains unmoved, is a deep and profound misogyny,” Tomi-
Ann Roberts (2017) says. “We could not elect a woman [Hillary Clinton] president. The bar was so low
for a competent man that Trump got the job over her.”
Even though the “pussy-grabbing” remarks revealed of candidate Trump didn’t prevent him from
being chosen president, they cracked the floodgates for outrage in feminist circles and opened a wave
of shock when the Harvey Weinstein story came out and the #metoo movement started. The movement
has simultaneously signaled to women that the time of exploitation is up, and has revealed divides
between current, intersectional and postfeminist era feminists, and the older generations of feminists, as
shown, for example, in reactions to Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s piece in the Globe and Mail,
titled “Am I a Bad Feminist?”
“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t
puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are
annihilated,” Atwood (2018) wrote referring to the #metoo movement. Her article generated fiery

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feedback from younger feminists on social media, regarding her sentiments as heretical and accusing
her of “being an old, cisgender white woman” in our intersectional age (Wente 2018).
As feminism goes through its own evolutions, misogyny and a masculine power structure prevail
in the entertainment industry.
“To me, it seems that the only currency actresses have to trade in is their youthful sexualized
body,” Roberts (2017) says—look at Game of Thrones, on which the most naked people are the models
and actresses who are trying to get a foothold in the industry. “It’s not going to be your acting chops,
it’s not going to be how good you are, that gets you the job. Once you’ve aged, then maybe, but then
we’re not going to see very much of you anyway, unless you’re lucky enough to be British and you’re
Judi Dench. That’s part of the scope of misogyny.”
What also hasn’t changed is the fact that the epitome of a woman in the Western world is
youthful and sexually attractive. And we have internalized it so strongly that unlearning it requires a lot
of work and plenty of new images.

IV. Diverse creators, diverse content?
One way to get new images on screen is to get new people to create them. Having women
involved in the birth of TV shows from the very beginning is crucial. We need more creators the likes
of Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on CW), Ava DuVernay (Queen
Sugar on OWN), and Nahnatchka Khan (Fresh Off the Boat on ABC).
Madeline Di Nonno (2017) of the Geena Davis Institute says that right now there is a gender
disparity in who is driving content creation. Stacy Smith, founder and director of the Media, Diversity
& Social Change Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, released a
study in 2014 about movies that showed that when a female writer or director is present, there is a
direct correlation to onscreen female roles: They increase significantly (Smith and Choueiti 2014). On

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the TV side, putting women in executive positions at networks and in charge of shows helps. The
Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State University found that on
programs that had at least one female executive producer, 32 percent of writers were female, which is
more than five times more than in programs with no female producers. And when there was at least one
female creator, women accounted for 51 percent of major characters on a show and featured
substantially higher percentages of women in other key behind-the-scenes roles. (Lauzen 2017a)
Still, one must remember that an emergence of women creators doesn’t automatically change the
content. Take, for example how sexual violence is portrayed on TV, as Emily Nussbaum (2018) does.
“I’m not saying that there isn’t exploitative sexual violence on television. There is. But there’s
also excellent sexual violence on television,” she says. “And as far as I’m concerned, the advent of
graphic rape and coercion scenes on TV is an overall good phenomenon for women because women
experience sexual violence and showing it shows that women’s lives are being treated as central on
TV.” (Nussbaum 2018)
And as Nussbaum (2018) points out, it has been both men and women creating these scenes.
“I don’t think it’s inevitable that a male creator is going to create something that is a clueless,
exploitative, and visually violent version of women, and that a female creator will not,” she says. “One
thing that worries me a little bit is the notion of female artists as determined to create something that’s
holistic and warm and good. It would be wrong to conclude that in a world where all art was created by
women, there would be less sexual violence and more loving and varied portraits of women’s bodies.”
(Nussbaum 2018)
But whatever kind of content women could end up creating, they don’t rise to positions of highest
power, even though women and men are almost equally represented at top American film schools (The
Hollywood Reporter 2018). During the 2016–17 television season, women constituted only 28 percent
of all creators, directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and directors of photography

23
working on broadcast network, cable, and streaming programs, according to a report by the Center for
the Study of Women in Television & Film. The numbers are similar for behind-the-screen players in
prime-time TV shows, and for years, these numbers haven’t changed. (Lauzen 2017a) And the same
goes for movies: In 2017, women constituted 18 percent of all directors, writers, producers, executive
producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 domestic-grossing films in the United
States (Lauzen 2017b). There has also been no meaningful change in the prevalence of female directors
across the top films from 2007 to 2016 (Smith et al. 2017a).
“They [women] have to be extremely nimble and very confident and have to network very
aggressively. So how do they maintain that confidence, how are they trained for that confidence, what
kind of business skills are they given?” Di Nonno (2017) of the Geena Davis Institute asks. “I think if
female creators are equipped with the tools to raise capital and skilled at pitching, it could be
advantageous for them as well.”
And profitable. Having women behind the camera increases female roles, and Di Nonno (2017)
tells about a study the institute did in 2015 that showed that movies with female lead characters
generated nearly 16 percent more at the box office, on average, than those led by men (GD-IQ 2015).
To narrow the gender gap on the film side, USC’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative
has suggested that companies set target inclusion goals and create inclusive consideration lists when
hiring for behind‐the‐scenes positions. Adding five female speaking characters to every film would
lead to equality on screen in a mere three years. (Smith 2017b)
In television, many steps have already been taken. In 2017, producer Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck,
American Horror Story) launched the Half initiative. It ensures that at least half of all directing slots on
Murphy’s shows produced for 20th Century Fox TV will be given to women and/or minorities. In fall
2017, all the episodes of the second season of Netflix’s Jessica Jones were directed by women. Also
last year, on HBO’s new show The Deuce, women directed half the episodes, and director Lesli Linka

24
Glatter and NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke formed an initiative called Female Forward
that begins in the 2018–19 season. It gives female directors the opportunity to shadow productions of
NBC shows and a chance to direct at least one episode on those series. (Friedlander 2017)
“Television does a much, much better job than film in having women creators,” Di Nonno (2017)
says. “One reason is that there are a lot more opportunities: In a season, you can have over 20 episodes,
and getting women to direct, write, or produce is easier than in film.”
One of these female creators is Shannon Bae. Bae is an independent producer who has worked in
TV, on films, and in the digital space, for example producing behind-the-scenes videos for a daily blog
by John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain as she traveled on the 2008 presidential campaign trail.
Bae previously worked on shows including Steven Soderbergh’s K Street on HBO and on independent
films circulating the festival circuit. Two years ago, Bae co-founded her own production company
which currently has several projects in development. In recent years, Bae has mainly worked with
women, and her closest producing partner is a woman. She started reading scripts in the late 1990s
when she was working for an investment banking firm that also had a film division that produced
movies. (Bae 2017)
“Back then,” Bae (2017) recalls, “a lot of scripts that came across our desk were romantic
comedies and stories about love and relationships but not necessarily in a very raw or real way. It was
still very sanitized.”
She says there was a point in the beginning of the 2000s when things shifted. Scripts turned edgy,
with a lot of violence and sex, like Requiem for a Dream and Mullholland Dr. in movies, and The Wire
and Deadwood on TV. It started with pushing the boundaries of violence, and was followed by nudity.
After one successful show or movie, content creators tried to outdo one another by making shows with
even more violence and sex, to get critical acclaim. Bae compares it to someone coming into new
money: Instead of knowing what to do with it, they spend it all. (Bae 2017)

25
“Creators were like: ‘Wait, we can show sex? We can! Let’s get crazy!’ It was very graphic and
explicit,” she says. “It’s almost like they got it out of their system, and since then they are constantly
having to push that boundary and that becomes the new normal.” (Bae 2017)
Now, Bae (2017) believes, there’s yet another shift, possibly toward a lighter tone.
“Everything is very cyclical,” she says. “Maybe it’s the times we’re living in. People just start to
think that ‘Things in my own life are so bleak, I don’t actually want to sit here and watch how bleak
somebody else’s life is.’” (Bae 2017)
On TV, much of the acclaimed bleak and dark content with violence and sex has been created by
men: The Wire by David Simon, Breaking Bad by Vince Gilligan, The Sopranos by David Chase,
Game of Thrones by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
“If you look at the executive producers of TV shows, a lot of them are middle-aged white men.
Many times, they’re of a certain generation, and their attitudes about sex and their perspectives about
women are very much what has been seen,” Bae (2017) says. “If the executive producer is saying, ‘I
want to see tits and ass,’ that’s what’s going to be put out there because guess what, he’s your effing
boss.”
There’s a line between exploitation and empowerment, Bae (2017) says.
“There are women taking their sexuality, being empowered and portraying it in a story, and then
there’s others telling that experience. Right now, I’m not very confident that a white male can tell the
female empowerment, the sexual empowerment of a female, that story, without it being exploitation,”
Bae (2017) says.
This is one of the things that might change after the Harvey Weinstein case became public, Bae
(2017) hopes. And for her, it’s mostly about changing men.
“I do feel like there’s a monumental attitude shift: not with women because we get it, we live it,
but with men. Men have to make the connection that the oversexualization of women in the media

26
affects the lives of women in the men’s own lives. Before it was compartmentalized, but in order to
have a healthy attitude about nudity, sex, and sexuality, you have to make that connection.” (Bae 2017)
How the current conversation about sexuality and power will influence attitudes remains to be
seen, but regarding nudity on TV, the easiest way to effect change is to advocate for diversity of
creators.
“It feels like we’re starting to see female nudity that the female has decided on,” says Nicholas
Weinstock (2017), a producer who used to work as the creative head at Apatow Productions, led by
Girls executive producer Judd Apatow, and is now at Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour.
“In other words, women are electing to be naked or exploring their sexuality, as opposed to
female nudity that throughout modern history has been more of a subject for the male gaze, a trend of
men undressing their ‘prize’ when it comes to women. Now women’s bodies aren’t used for titillation
so much as simply existing on television.” (Weinstock 2017)
For Weinstock (2017), TV as a whole is embracing new, specific subject matter and with it
welcoming artists of all stripes.
“A lot of the new stars of television are actually completely new stars for a change,” he says.
“They’re emerging as artists, and they actually get to be in charge of their own show creatively.”
(Weinstock 2017)
Weinstock (2017) cites the creators of Atlanta, Insecure, and Master of None as examples. Less
than a decade ago, Donald Glover, Issa Rae, and Aziz Ansari would have had to work with experienced
showrunners, and thereby their voices would have automatically been muted. Now, they’re directly in
charge. There’s a push to hire people to writers’ rooms to make them diverse and actually reflective of
the stories told. (“The world is crowded with unseen, underrepresented women, including the fat, hairy,
wrinkled, disabled, scarred, menstruating, menopausal and non-straight,” New York Times film critic
Manohla Dargis wrote in 2017.) And with nudity, that means showing bodies other than white ones.

27
“There’s now this particular situation of white women showing their bodies that don’t fit the
standards of Hollywood, as a kind of aggressive statement of ‘I too can be seen and desired,’ and the
rules internally and externally have been different for women of color in that way,” Emily Nussbaum
(2018) of the New Yorker says.
This leads to a demand to treat all nudity equally.
“For example, The Deuce on HBO is a show about the sex industry and there is nudity in it, I
think in really smart ways,” Nussbaum (2018) says. “There’s a black female character in the show, and
as the show proceeded, we hadn’t seen her naked or in a sex scene. In the context of this show, your
character is not treated seriously unless we get to see you naked. On many other shows, the most naked
person is the weakest person, but in that show the most naked person is the strongest person.”
But getting there will take a while. As Anne Helen Petersen (2017, xii), senior culture writer for
BuzzFeed News, writes in her insightful book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of
the Unruly Woman: “It’s one thing to be a young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying
things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another—and far riskier—to do those things in a
body that is not white, not straight, not slender, not young, or not American.”
When Lena Dunham was criticized for the lack of diversity on Girls, the critique was harsh partly
because she was expected to write a show that would “live up to the task of being all things to all
women,” as Meredith Nash, senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania, and Imelda Whelehan, Dean
of Higher Degree Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, write, quoting Croatian
scholar Maša Grdešić (Nash and Whelehan 2017, 2). But the absence of people of color in a show that
took place in one of the most multicultural cities in the world, New York, was striking, and by the end
of the series, Dunham expressed regret.
“I wouldn’t do another show that starred four white girls,” she said in an interview with Nylon
magazine (Wappler 2017).

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Weinstock (2017) says there has been a radical change in the diversity of voices and an openness
to singular artists.
“I think it lends itself to new uses of female nudity, new freedoms visually,” Weinstock (2017)
says. “And I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a result of that new freedom of television. If a woman
wanted to be naked in a new-feeling way on the screen ten years ago, there would have been a
showrunner who would say, ‘No, I’ve worked with CBS ten times, they would never do that, don’t
even pitch that,’ or ‘I’ve worked on five different shows. Nobody wants to see a woman asserting
herself in that way,’ or ‘That actress is not skinny and fit enough and she’s too chubby.’ Writers would
hear all these opinions before they even got to the network with their pitch, so they would never see the
light of day. And now things are much more at play.”

V. Reshaping the landscape of television
Television’s new kind of freedom is attributed to the fact that television as a medium is changing,
rapidly.
The changes have brought about a huge expansion of original programming, and audiences are
becoming more and more fragmented as the amount of available content increases. Everyone is making
shows: telecommunications companies Verizon and AT&T, subscription services Hulu and Netflix,
and online giant Amazon.
A change in the TV industry started during and after the financial crisis of 2008, when several
major American film studios shut down or scaled back. Raising money through private equity became
harder, and foreign rights to movies were more difficult to presell. Because companies in the film and
TV industries have merged to become part of the same conglomerates, moviemakers turned to TV, and
at the same time, doors were opened to new players. (Scott 2010)

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Partly because of this shift, the aesthetics of movies trickled down to the small screen. Other
factors in the “cinematization of television shows” are the rise of new platforms and the fact that
streaming services have turned us to binge watchers, which together have increased the number of
movie-like scripted dramas and anthology series (McNamara 2016). Watching TV for twelve hours
straight is not a sign of being a down-and-out recluse anymore.
“Even three years ago, it was not normal for a TV show to come out at once and stream onto your
computer, all ten episodes,” Emily Nussbaum (2018) says.
As our viewing habits have changed, we now watch content on multiple devices, and our content
is personalized and more private. We subscribe to whichever channels and providers we want to,
switching from one to the other, depending on what they are offering. And previously, watching
content that could be deemed explicit felt shameful, and we had to watch in secret at home. Now, we
can watch TV shows with sex scenes on our phones in the bus on the way to work. Television has
always been a medium of intimacy that overcame distance, and with our current devices, it has become
even more intimate.
Tomi-Ann Roberts (2017) doesn’t see us becoming more intimate with our devices as necessarily
a good thing.
“With the rise of our capacity to interact with media images in the palm of our own hands, the
chronic distribution of a certain kind of big-breasted, slender, smooth, white-skinned, around-twenty-
one-year-old idealized bodies is just ubiquitous,” she says. “The ideal has always been impossible, but
now we have far greater and intimate exposure to it.” (Roberts 2017)
To Roberts (2017), it doesn’t matter that there are more non-idealized images of women
circulating as well—with an increase in imagery altogether, they get lost in the crowd, or they reach
only an audience that specifically wants to see it.

30
“I think it’s wonderful, I do, but I don’t think they’re reaching Jane Sixpack. I just don’t. The rest
of the American viewership can kind of exotify or set aside shows like Transparent and Girls as
anomalies and curiosities.” (Roberts 2017)
But even though these shows have small audiences and difficult and unpleasant characters—
niche tastes for niche audiences—it doesn’t matter as much anymore. These shows are still getting
made. In the end, the fragmentation and privatization of TV can lead to a more multifaceted future.
Slowly, on TV, individual big trends disappear and different niches can be explored simultaneously.
Because there is no going back to the age of big audiences, the landscape, as former TV critic Mary
McNamara (2014) of the Los Angeles Times writes, “is divided into smaller fiefdoms of fans who,
aided by social media, comment on ‘their’ shows with psych-student fervor.” Smaller audiences
demand new revenue models, and now, “creative developments outrun the financial constructs,”
McNamara writes. “In this moment, television feels more like ‘ours’ than ‘theirs.’”
“I think that feeling comes from a combination of changing production processes, where you
have a small network that can publish a strange, sketchy, slightly experimental thing, and just the
vastness of shows being made,” Nussbaum (2018) says.
So, which niche is next? Producer Nicholas Weinstock (2017) hopes that male nudity could
become as commonplace as female nudity (a study done at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los
Angeles found that actresses are almost three times as likely as actors to be required to strip for their
roles). Steps are being taken with shows like The Deuce, of which James Poniewozik (2017) of the
New York Times wrote, “The show may well set an HBO penis record.” Because we are becoming
more comfortable with seeing different bodies, we are thus becoming better with seeing flaccid, if not
erect penises—albeit white ones, as Wesley Morris (2016) pointed out in his article “Why Pop Culture
Just Can’t Deal with Black Male Sexuality” in the New York Times Magazine.

31
Says Nussbaum (2018): “I thought The Deuce was fascinating in this way because they showed
the kind of men who were considered old, ugly, and fat naked in a way that was really provocative
because it was neither just pure mockery or humiliation, nor was it celebration and treating them as
sexy. It was as though you were just allowed to let your eyes linger on their bodies in a way that is
unusual.”
Weinstock (2017), for his part, says, “I have a very feminist wife who likes to catalog male
frontal nudity in shows, and she’s trained me to notice whenever there’s an opportunity for male nudity
that is avoided at the last minute. And it is striking how much female nudity there still is compared to
male nudity. And I think—and for the sake of equality, I sort of hope—that that will change.”
Lara Bradshaw of USC says the future might have more nude bodies that we would consider
“other,” that don’t conform so much to what we’ve been fed in the mainstream media about what
bodies should be: like transgender bodies in Transparent, black bodies in Insecure, and heavier bodies
in Orange is the New Black.
“I hope this happens, that these sorts of representations will become part of our everyday
experience. That they become normalized and part of our education and understanding of each other,”
Bradshaw says. “Representing the female form in different lights is actually very radical and
significant.”

VI. A change is coming
It is not insignificant why and how we see naked women on TV, and the kinds of women they
are. The changing nature of female nudity on our screens is part of a larger change, not only of
television as a medium, but of who tells the stories we see and whose stories are deemed worth
telling—stories of people of different ethnicities, sexualities, ages, nationalities, and genders. The
change we are seeing is about moving from titillating nudity on shows like The Sopranos to everyday

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nudity on shows like Girls, seeing women’s bodies in ways that challenge prevailing attitudes about
gender.
“When you only see female nudity in the context of something sexy happening, the message is
that women’s bodies literally are for nothing but that,” Emily Nussbaum (2018) says, neatly
encapsulating the issue.
Nussbaum (2018) emphasizes that not all these new stories about women have to be good or
uplifting. There just has to be more of them, told in enticing ways.
“The thing that always bugs me is that I feel some critics are overly focused on positive role
models and the idea of inspiring things. And I’m like, ‘No, I just want more interesting art,’ and
interesting art can sometimes be disgusting or upsetting or uncomfortable as well as inspiring,”
Nussbaum (2018) says. “It’s not about empowerment. It’s literally about less boring stories. I feel like
the whole point is to be knocked off kilter by somebody else’s point of view.”
Now, the feeling of change, and the need to hear more stories, is spreading. When Tomi-Ann
Roberts sent her email to the New York Times detailing her encounter with Harvey Weinstein, she was
certain that nothing would come out of it. But that same evening, one of the writers of the Times piece
that inspired her to email, Jodi Kantor, replied.
“I was astonished that she cared, which is weird to say,” Roberts (2017) said. “But I just thought
since I’m not an actress, this isn’t nearly as interesting a story.”
Roberts gave an interview to the Times, and once the story was published on October 10, 2017
(Kantor and Abrams 2017) it was immediately followed by numerous interviews and interview
requests from media outlets like CNN, PBS, ABC, and Democracy Now.
As she recalls, “I do remember what I was wearing the day after: this Hennes & Mauritz cat shirt.
I was doing all these interviews, and I got messages saying, ‘P.S. Great shirt.’ With the whole pussy-

33
grabbing thing [of President Trump,] I was like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s fitting I have cats on my shirt.’”
(Roberts 2018)
Roberts gave interviews but ended up exhausted.
“Reporters only wanted to hear the sordid details of that particular evening over and over and
over. I was so demoralized by that, people thinking that that was the most interesting part of my story:
‘Oh, a college professor got harassed by Harvey Weinstein when she was 20 in a bathtub!’” (Roberts
2017)
After one day, Roberts (2017) made an out-of-office email reply in which she said she doesn’t
want to talk about her encounter any longer. The flow of messages died down. Since then, the tone of
the public conversation has changed from individual stories of assault to larger societal issues about,
for example, harassment in the workplace.
“I think a surprising thing in all of this has been my own surprise at myself that I wasn’t
traumatized then,” she says of her long-ago encounter with Weinstein. “For years I thought that if I was
so out of my league as to think that I could get a part in a movie, what happened was just a perfectly
obvious way I was going to be treated.” (Roberts 2017)
That’s not the case anymore.
“Do you remember when the Bill Cosby stories first broke?” Roberts (2018) asks. “It seems like
one of the primary tropes around that was like, ‘Oh, as soon as a couple women came forward, all the
rest of the women tumbled out because they were just copying these previous women’s stories.’ And in
a sense the sheer volume of women who were coming out against Bill Cosby seemed like it acted
against their case. That is not true right now,” Roberts (2018) says. “Something has shifted where the
sheer number of women seems to now mean something quite different.”
With more voices comes a variety of stories. And, hopefully, a future that doesn’t include a
woman being asked to bare her breasts to a producer in a bathtub in order to get a TV role. A future in

34
which women’s breasts end up on TV, not because they’re sexy, but because they’re a natural part of
this beautiful thing called life, in all its messiness.

VII. Appendixes

i. Transcript of the first audio piece: Interview with Kristina Frisch
00:00 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
Before makeup artist Kristina Frisch gets to talking about her work and how she prepares actors
for nude scenes, she derails and tells another story. This story doesn’t include naked actors, but it still
has to do with nudity. Frisch is the head of the makeup department on a TV show called You’re the
Worst.
00:18 – 7:30 A.M BY SLOTHRUST (THEME SONG OF YOU’RE THE WORST)
00:23 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
It airs on FXX and was created by Frisch’s husband Stephen Falk. You’re the Worst is a sitcom
that mixes drama and exhilarating cynical comedy.
00:34 – AUDIO FROM A SCENE IN YOU’RE THE WORST
00:44 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
In the show’s fourth season, there’s an episode in which one of the characters, Rebecca, passes
out drunk, and her sister draws a penis on her face. Later in the scene, Rebecca’s husband, Vernon,
takes a pen and adds drops of semen to the drawing on his wife’s face. Kristina Frisch says the process
was grueling.

35
01:05 – INTERVIEW: KRISTINA FRISCH
“The amount of approvals that we had to go through for the drawing of the penis was crazy. Like
25 emails just with regards to like ‘okay, can you not define the head of the penis.’”
01:24 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
After discussions about the penis’s head, talks with the network began on the subject of semen in
the drawing. Can there be any, and if so, it should look like circles, not like drops. There was also to be
no hair drawn on the scrotum.
01:39 – INTERVIEW: KRISTINA FRISCH
“It was literally like an outline, and it’s still a dick on someone’s face! It was just ridiculous.”
01:47 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
The penis drawing is just a rare example of how Frisch deals with nudity in her work. More often
than not, she puts makeup on actors’ bodies as they prepare for nude scenes. Like everything else on a
TV set, a nude scene is a team effort. It starts with the wardrobe department setting up their modesty
garments for the actors. For women there are nipple covers and a modesty patch, which is sort of like a
flesh-colored thong, and then there are cock socks for men.
02:13 – INTERVIEW: KRISTINA FRISCH
KRISTINA FRISCH: “We will talk to the director to find out logistically what we’re going to
see. So, we’ll know where we need to put on makeup, if any tattoos need to be covered, or like
blemishes or that sort of thing. After the makeup is done, and we get down to it, it’s a closed set,
always.”
LAURA KANGASLUOMA: “So how many people are there?”
KRISTINA FRISCH: “Usually like a representative from makeup, a representative from
wardrobe, sometimes a hair rep, and then the writers and producers and director and that’s it. Like
they’ll set up courtesies around the village so that it’s all blacked out so nobody can see. It’s really

36
funny, of not funny, but amusing in that so much care goes into how private it is in that it’s going to be
broadcast. But it’s not like they broadcast what everyone is seeing, you know. Like you’re seeing a
glossed version.”
03:12 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
Bodies are glossed over, even though You’re the Worst is a part of a current TV trend where
bodies are shown looking as much like real life as possible—in shows like Comedy Central’s Broad
City and Amazon’s Transparent.
03:25 – MUSIC: TRANSPARENT THEME (SOLO PIANO VERSION) BY DUSTIN
O’HALLORAN (THEME SONG OF TRANSPARENT)
03.30 – INTERVIEW: KRISTINA FRISCH
“We don’t polish things as much as a sitcom, but you know, so we’ll leave like some tan lines or
some bruising or something like that. But we, you know, we just take out anything like zits and
pimples. And some people want to add a little contouring so that they seem a little slimmer or there’s
more muscle definition, so we’ll throw some of that in there.”
03:55 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
Because, at the end of the day, the person Frisch hopes is the happiest, is the actor in the nude
scene. What she has noticed in her work is that almost all actors, regardless of their body type, feel
insecure before getting naked.
04:09 – INTERVIEW: KRISTINA FRISCH
“Though there are exceptions, most people are not super comfortable with it, even though it’s a
part of their job, and that goes for men and women, they are just as insecure. I do it as much like a
doctor as possible, I use clinical terminology and I, you know, always ask the person at the end, like
‘How do you feel? Do you want any more or any less of anything?’ Like I make it feel like it’s a joint

37
effort, not like, you know, ‘I’m the boss and it’s my face.’ It’s not my face, it’s their face, I want them
to be happy.”
04:45 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
For now, a part of what makes actors happy is covering their pimples and adding muscle
definition. And it’s no wonder: we, the viewers, aren’t used to seeing their imperfections, and when we
do see them, we are eager to get on social media to complain about them. If we are to become
accustomed to seeing bodies looking more realistic on TV, it shouldn’t just come down to the actors
sitting in Frisch’s makeup chair to let their pimples be seen. It requires us viewers checking our
attitudes.
05:13 – 7:30 A.M BY SLOTHRUST (THEME SONG OF YOU’RE THE WORST)

ii. Transcript of the second audio piece: The waves of feminism
00:00 – AUDIO FROM NEWS FOOTAGE OF WOMEN’S MARCHES
00:09 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
That is the sound of millions of women marching together, in different cities from around the
world.
The first Women’s March in 2017 was organized in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election for
president in 2016—or better yet, in the shockwave it caused. The agenda of the Women’s March has
since then evolved and taken new shape, such as the #metoo movement.
00:31 – AUDIO FROM NEWS FOOTAGE ABOUT THE #METOO MOVEMENT
00:48 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
Last fall, the huge wave of stories about sexual abuse by powerful American men broke. It started
with a piece published in The New York Times on October 5. It revealed decades of alleged sexual

38
harassment and assault by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Since then, the stories have
expanded to include over twenty men in the movie and media industries—not to mention the stories
about politicians. The #metoo movement has made visible the staggering forms of discrimination
women face in the workplace, and the heart-wrenching stories of women in the entertainment industry
who have endured sexual harassment and violence. It has made clear why feminism is still needed.
#Metoo has also shown to the larger public that there is a divide within feminism: a rift between a
younger and an older generation of feminists. In order to grasp this rift and realize, why it matters, you
have to have a general understanding of the history of feminism. So, here goes: a condensed and
simplified history of feminism.
01:47 – SOUND EFFECT: DRUM ROLL
01:49 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
The first wave feminists are known as the suffragettes. They were mostly white, middle-class
women in Western countries who fought for women’s right to vote and own property in the beginning
of the 20th century. From the 1960s and 70s onward, the second wave feminists centered around
women’s rights in the workplace, right to contraception, rights within a marriage, and the liberation of
sexual values. A third wave of feminism rose in the 90s and the turn of the millennium. Third wave
feminists had slogans and songs, [02:20 – MUSIC: WANNABE BY THE SPICE GIRLS] and they
preached the beauty of female friendship and empowerment.
Amidst the second and third wave of feminisms, something else started blooming in the field of
gender equality: an idea of post-feminism. So, what does that mean? Well, just what the name implies:
post-feminism, an age after feminism. The thought pattern goes as follows: The battles won by past
generations of feminists have made us all equal, so we don’t need feminism anymore. It’s now time to
enjoy the fruits of our labor.

39
How do postfeminists suggest we live in this equal world? Well, by making our own choices. If a
woman devotes her life to her career, it’s her choice; if she wears sexy clothing, it’s her choice; if she
chooses to stay at home after having kids, she is free to choose so. And yes, women, exactly like men
and all other genders, should be able to choose whatever they want in life. But what post-feminism
sometimes forgets in its emphasis on choice is that there are still unequal power structures that shape
our world. For example, the reason why many women choose to stay at home with their kids has to do
with the fact that their male spouses make more money. And lower wages aren’t a question of choice.
Professor Lara Bradshaw is a lecturer in cinema and media studies at USC and she says that post-
feminism doesn’t address structural forces but instead puts all the pressure on the individual.
03:49 – INTERVIEW: LARA BRADSHAW
“Thinking about this individual logic that has been put into place that encourages both men and
women to conform to this more kind of individualized identity, right, where they’re basically achieving
their citizenship through promoting of the self, through doing, taking care of the self through various
regimens and health and exercise, mental health, achieving financial stability.”
04:14 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
For a long time, the popular culture epitome of the postfeminist woman was Bridget Jones.
[04:20 – AUDIO FROM THE OPENING SCENE OF BRIDGET JONES] She had achieved a
successful career, financial independence, and sexual liberation; she had a group of friends who she
considered family, but still, something was off: she was single and chubby. Because even with all the
freedom to choose, there are prescribed life markers in the post-feminist ideal that women are expected
to choose: things like a heterosexual marriage, children, career, and a healthy body. And if she doesn’t
choose these things, she has to compensate for them somehow—think of Samantha in Sex and the City
not wanting to get married and to compensate for it she has to be a tough businesswoman and sexually
liberated. [05:07 – AUDIO FROM A SCENE IN SEX AND THE CITY] In a post-feminist context

40
everything revolves around constantly choosing to be the best version of yourself. And as it were, the
women making these choices are for the most part women who can afford to choose: white, privileged
women in Western countries.
So, as a counterbalance to post-feminism, something happened: a fourth wave of feminism arose,
also known as intersectional feminism. Its ideas had already grown during the second wave of
feminism, but in the current age have become widely spread. Intersectional feminists acknowledge that
inequality comes in many, overlapping forms. It’s not just gender that places people in different
positions of power in our society, it’s also race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation, and
religion.
So, are you still with me? We have four waves of feminism, out of which the fourth is widely
known as intersectional feminism, and especially during the third wave, we’ve seen ideas of post-
feminism rise. Got it? Great.
06:22 – SOUND EFFECT: MARCH MUSIC
06:25 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
Now it’s time to explore the rift within all forms and generations of feminism that the #metoo
movement reveals. To put it roughly, the rift is between the second and fourth waves. As fourth wave
feminists hail intersectionality and try to point out why white, privileged women need to take a back
seat in the conversation about power, older feminists blame their younger peers of forgetting the bigger
picture and concentrating on details that they think aren’t as important—thing like which gender
pronouns to use, or focusing on LGTBQ rights.
06:57 – AUDIO FROM NEWS ABOUT A STATEMENT SIGNED BY FRENCH ACTRESSES
07:19 – NARRATION: LAURA KANGASLUOMA
There is nothing new about younger generations challenging the values and beliefs of older
generations. But what feels hard to resolve about the current divide within feminist generations is that it

41
focuses on who is more right. When we focus on who is the better feminist, we weaken our strength
with which to fight against a common enemy, which is the patriarchy.
It’s clear that since feminism has transgressed to catch phrases and slogans printed on t-shirts, we
have passed the point where everyone proclaiming themselves as feminists, no matter what their wave,
could gather under the exact same umbrella. But at the end of the day, would we even have to? The
current discussion about intersections is about recognizing differences in a meaningful way, while also
giving proper credit. It’s about understanding privilege and how much of feminism’s representations in
the West are centered on whiteness and middle-classness. Having a discussion between feminists, even
a heated one, is necessary, but it requires a channel of communication to be kept open. In order to move
forward we need less diminishing of one another and more moments where feminists can agree on what
combines them, and then standing up for that.
It’s kind of like going to a march together: marching doesn’t require that we all carry the same
placard, it just requires walking side by side.
08:39 – AUDIO FROM NEWS FOOTAGE OF WOMEN’S MARCHES

iii. Explanation of the code
List of interactions:
1) The video of the headline text (id=”headlinevideo”) starts playing when the user opens the
page, and pauses and stays still as the video ends. Using CSS animations, both the lede and the
silhouette image including press photos of the different TV shows in the thesis fade in and the button
urging the user to click to read more appears. As the button is clicked, CSS animation scrolls the page
down to the beginning of the first chapter of the piece.

42
2) I created a data set about the TV shows I mention in the thesis. I then imported data from this
data set (data/alltvshows.csv) to create a grid of the press images of the TV shows to place under the
silhouette images. I gave each TV show its own id (id=“tvshowlinkNUMBER”), and as the TV shows
are mentioned in the text for the first time, their names function as links that open a pop-up modal that
grabs appropriate data to the modal (i.e., the name of the show, a photo of it, the years the show was on
air, its network, its creator or creators, and a short description of it). The modal fades in and has a close
button that hides it. The user can also hide the modal by clicking anywhere else on the screen.
3) As the user reaches the end of the first chapter, I used a plug-in called ScrollMagic to create a
horizontal scrolling effect, without creating a separate horizontal scroll at the bottom of the page—that
means that even though the page moves horizontally, the user only uses the vertical scroll to advance
on the page. The horizontal scroll is created by using four “panels” (id=“panel_NUMBER”) that are
lined up horizontally next to one another between the chapters.
4) As the user scrolls horizontally from the first chapter to the second chapter (and later from the
fifth to the sixth chapter), I used the Waypoints plug-in to make two images in the horizonal panels
(id=“panel_NUMBER”) fade in.
5) The background color in the second, fourth, and sixth text chapters (those next to the breast
silhouette image) starts to fade in from a darker red to the same pink that is used in the silhouette
image. In order to start the color change, the user has to hover her mouse over the text chapter. In order
to get her to place her mouse over the chapter, I placed a little image of a lipstick mark on the top right-
hand corner of the chapter, with instructions for the user to click it. When the user clicks on each
picture of the lipstick mark, an overlay pops up to give the user more information that is not included in
the text part, and the background color starts to change.
6) The positions of the bum silhouette and the images of the TV shows inside it are fixed, and
they appear on screen as the user is on the first, third, fifth, and bibliography chapters. I appended

43
enough images of the TV shows to fill the screen and they stay static. The breast silhouette is different:
It fades in and out using ScrollTop, and there are enough images of the TV shows inside it to fill the
whole chapter, instead of the whole screen. That means the images of the TV shows under the breast
silhouette appear to be in motion, scrolling on as the user scrolls down the chapter.
7) The two images in the horizontal scroll panels (id=“panel_six” and id=“panel_seven”)
between chapters three and four are audio rollovers. When the user rolls her mouse over each picture,
two audio pieces start to play, and if the user leaves the picture, the audio pauses. Also, when the user
rolls over the pictures, the image with the text (class=“infolayer1” and class=“infolayer2”) fades out
and an image connected to the audio piece’s topic fades in.
9) From the fourth chapter onwards, there are quotes from interviewees in the text and you can
hear those quotes, said by the interviewees by clicking on their names.

VIII. Bibliography

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/

Bae, Shannon. 2017. Personal Interview. November 29, 2017.

Carroll, Aaron E. 2017. “Sex Education Based on Abstinence? There’s a Real Absence of Evidence.”
New York Times, August 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/upshot/sex-education-
based-on-abstinence-theres-a-real-absence-of-evidence.html

Chamberlain, Amberly. 2016. “The Naked Truth: An Examination of Gender Bias in the Field of
Acting.” Master’s Thesis, California State University, Long Beach.

Conaty, Matthew. 2017. Phone Interview. November 21, 2017.

Cwynar-Horta, Jessica. 2016. “The Commodification of the Body Positive Movement on Instagram.”
Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology, vol. 8, no. 2: 36–56.

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Dargis, Mahohla. 2017. “Recasting a Woman’s Body.” In “6 Ways ‘Girls’ Changed Television. Or
Didn’t,” New York Times, February 2, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/arts/
television/girls-season-six.html

Di Nonno, Madeline. 2017. Skype Interview. October 12, 2017.

Doherty, Thomas. 1999. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema,
1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dowd, Maureen. 2015. “Dirty Words from Pretty Mouths.” New York Times, February 28, 2015.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-dirty-words-from-pretty-
mouths.html

Dunham, Lena. 2015. Not That Kind of Girl. Paperback edition. New York: Random House.

FCC. 2018. “Obscenity, Indecency & Profanity - FAQ.” Accessed March 15, 2018.
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/guides/obscenity-indecency-profanity-faq#TheLaw

Fisher, Deborah A., Douglas L. Hill, Joel W. Grube, and Enid L. Gruber. 2004. “Sex on American
Television: An Analysis Across Program Genres and Network Types.” Journal of Broadcasting
& Electronic Media, vol. 48, no. 5: 529–553.

Friedlander, Whitney. 2017. “Putting Female Voices First.” Variety.com, October 31, 2017.
http://variety.com/2017/tv/spotlight/tv-directing-initiatives-profile-women-minorities-
1202603879/

Friman, Laura. 2017. “Läskiksi meni.” Trendi magazine, June 21, 2017.

Frisch, Kristina. 2017. Personal Interview. October 11, 2017.

Gay, Roxane. 2017. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. New York: HarperCollins.

GD-IQ. 2015. “The Reel Truth: Women Aren’t Seen or Heard. An Automated Analysis of Gender
Representation in Popular Films.” https://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/gdiq-reel-truth-women-
arent-seen-or-heard-automated-analysis.pdf

Haralovich, Mary Beth. 1992. “Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker.” In Private
Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, edited by Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, 111–
142. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hart, Ellen, Chong Man Chow, and Cin Cin Tan. 2017. “Body Talk, Weight Status, and Pathological
Eating Behavior in Romantic Relationships.” Appetite, vol. 117 (October 2017): 135–142.

Hartley, Nina. 2017. Personal Interview. September 15, 2017.

Henson, Melissa. 2017. Skype Interview. October 25, 2017.

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Hess, Amanda. 2017. “Chris Kraus and Jill Soloway Talk About the Show ‘I Love Dick.’” New York
Times. May 5, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/arts/television/i-love-dick-amazon-
chris-kraus-and-jill-soloway.html

Itzkoff, Dave. 2012. “Cable’s New Pack of Girls, Trying on the Woman Thing.” New York Times,
March 2, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/arts/television/lena-dunham-on-girls-her-
new-hbo-comedy.html

Kantor, Jodi, and Rachel Abrams. 2017. “Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Others Say Weinstein
Harassed Them.” New York Times, October 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/us/
gwyneth-paltrow-angelina-jolie-harvey-weinstein.html

Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. 2017. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for
Decades.” New York Times, October 5, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-
weinstein-harassment-allegations.html

Lauzen, Martha M. 2017a. “Boxed in 2016–17: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract More women are naked on American TV than ever before, and they’re naked in new ways. In addition to model-sized women draped in silk sheets in sex scenes, now women characters with cellulite are shaving their legs in the bathroom. Why are we seeing this now? The answers have to do with the tumultuous television industry, shifts in society’s attitudes -- and Harvey Weinstein.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kangasluoma, Laura Sirkka Elina (author)

Core Title In the new nude

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Publication Date 07/10/2018

Defense Date 07/10/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag body positive movement,female nudity,metoo,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexuality,television industry,television shows

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Bradshaw, Lara (committee member), Bustamante, Peggy (committee member)

Creator Email kangaslu@usc.edu,laura.kangasluoma@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-15097

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Legacy Identifier etd-Kangasluom-6385.pdf

Dmrecord 15097

Document Type Thesis

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Rights Kangasluoma, Laura Sirkka Elina

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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