(Sex in "The Wild, Wild West!")

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In the mid 60’s existed a show that was testosterone driven and hormonally charged. A show that the network insisted was aimed at the teen and young male audience but has generated more rememberance from the young mothers who watched it when it first aired and their daughters who developed their first, kinda confusing, crushes at the ages of 8 and up on the stars of the show, then it is remembered by the dads and sons of the day.

The Wild, Wild West was unique in its approach to sex appeal. It wallowed in male beauty and kinky risqueness. It boasted, the networks claimed, a James Bond in Spurs approach, but how did that really translate?

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Let’s look at the similarities….

A handsome hero named James

Gadgets

As Dr. Evil in Austin Powers would put it, excessive usage of “the slow moving dipping mechanism”.

Secret Agent stuff.

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And the Dis-similarities….

The Pretty women…In Bond the pretty women with suggestive names and less then modest clothes sense could not be compared to Jim’s “Pretty Young Things”. While most of the women were beautiful, the clothes tended towards an almost embarrassing modesty considering the image we are promised as a James Bond of the West. Very little attempts at fashionable titillation ever happened in WWW…UNLESS you counted Jim’s clothes. Also the women in Bond, would invariably, end up in his bed. While West’s kisses could curl toes it wasn’t allowed to be suggested on television at the time, that Jim had made it to anything but first base.

No…the sex had to be contained somewhere else in the show…but where?

Jim has a partner. Artie is the lynch pin…he holds Jim’s safety in the palm of his hands on many occasions. Bond? Other then the devices of Q…he works alone. He also divides your attention from the lack of sexual diversion for the heterosexual male viewing audience.

Action…Here West wins hands down. More brawling then sneaking, more fighting then kissing. Sexual tension had to be burned somewhere. Maybe the men tuned in for that?

So was WWW aimed at heterosexual men or heterosexual women…AND gay men perhaps?

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Let’s look at the era. Entering the mid 60’s we were still living in Camelot’s shadow. Women were still mothers, wives, teachers, and only in Bond films were they death dealing sex goddesses. On television they were still coddled, and the writers and producers were still selling women tame pablum designed not to offend anyone. Gay men had what to look at? Paul Lynde grinning on Bewitched? PUHLEEZ girlfriend!

Westerns of the era had heterosexual men in almost casual, serviceable, functional trousers, with clean cut, but not overly handsome faces, dealing lead and quips and the occasional staged stuntman fight, and as a reward they got chaste kisses with the school marm or longing sighs from Miss Kitty. Nothing sexually charged about televised horse operas, men in westerns hadn’t really evolved past Roy Rogers in complexity. Little boys still preferred a cowboy who would rather kiss his horse then...yuck...a girl. They were fodder for the front of your kid’s lunch box, and something for dad to fall to sleep in front of with a beer in hand. And westerns certainly weren’t designed to make the women want to watch.

The future looked to bring more of the same…Pa Cartright with his solid boring sons who were forever getting shot in the shoulders and sides..(medicine in the later half of the 19th century must have been more advanced then we thought…how many times were those kids and their dad shot? They each carried enough lead in their bodies to act as boat anchors!) So when WWW went into production we were assured that the same target audience was the goal.

But was it?

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Jim’s first appearance in The Night of the Inferno set the tone for the series. Imagine mom setting down with her husband and children on the premiere night and tuning in to this new western. Looking up, what does she see?

A shirtless, buff, and dynamically struggling handsome man. Suddenly that book in mom’s lap is set down. Or the ironing stops. The stew starts burning to the bottom of the pot.

The shirtless hero, looking absolutely nothing like hubby sitting in the recliner, is incredibly handsome, and in fights that do not pan back to disguise the fact that a stunt double is taking the blows this handsome, shirtless man is doing his own fighting! On his train we get to see that not only does he have a great torso…but that the wardrobe department has seen fit to dress him in pants that were tighter then any other TV cowboy was wearing, and that this attribute was not going to be covered with the tails of a jacket. This “male” aimed show puts the hero in tight pants and a flamenco dancer’s, a toreador’s jacket, cut at the waist and accentuating what ISN’T being hidden.

Mom is, by this time watching the show while casting an eye around the room. Does anyone else seem to notice that she has become really interested in this show? No. They are enjoying gadgets, and fights…dad is watching the girl with mild interest. But her charms aren’t the ones really on display.

The display is playing for the secret target group. Women.

Week after week mom tunes in. The kids are cool with it. Does dad even suspect? Probably not. Moms aren’t supposed to have a weekly obsession like that…they are supposed to be offended by vulgar displays of flesh. She certainly got upset at the suggestion that Barbara Eden might have a navel after all. But tune in she does. If dad notices any sort of extracurricular difference in mom at all it might be that he thinks he’s just become a better lover because mom is more interested in what is happening in bed now.

But are the sexually suggestive displays reserved as simply eye-candy? What IS being suggested? Let’s look at the peccadilloes to be found in your average WWW episode.

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Jim shirtless. Jim shirtless, exercising, boxing, swimming. Jim became shirtless faster then skirts go up at the Moulin Rouge, and for less reason. More so in the black and white episodes then in the color. And obliging bad guys were a grand source of prime shirtlessness. Invariably the bad guy will, for some unknown reason, undress James West before tying him up. In today’s television culture such a scene would play out as a prelude to gay date rape. One episode even have them pantsing our hero! There Jim is…left to fight the bad guys with only a towel to hide his nonexistent modesty. For what reason can a network concoct the idea that a man fighting in a towel is there to attract a teen boy audience?

Another kink which must have made mom feel like a very naughty girl and has forced many a young girl to grow up wanting to explore a different idea of fun is….BONDAGE!

Say What? No Way! My mom never got jollies from that sort of imagry!!! Them’s fightin’ words!

Put down the fists partner. It’s true. Get used to it.

Week after kinky week we were treated to not only bad guys kind enough to undress out hero, but they were also into TYING HIM UP after undressing him.

In The Night of the Firebrand we have a foppish, handsome dandy in a shiny, puffy blue shirt (played by Pernell Roberts…Adam of Bonanza fame) who has captured and undressed Jim and tied him with arms stretched high over his head to a pole in a square…AND LEFT HIM CLAD IN HIS BLACK LEATHER CHAPS.

Forget mom’s heart racing…that had daring young homosexual men fanning themselves! It isn’t what WE are reading into it. I have a feeling we are reading exactly what we were supposed to be reading into it and those getting it were selling lotsa soap powder and chuckling up their sleeves.

Our handsome hero had to be sewn into, tight pants that split in battle, but would magically mend in time to admonish the moms that THEY had the dirty minds to imagine glimpses of underwear! It’s all in your mind ladies.

There was a delightful shame to these thoughts. A kinky guilt involved in finding tight pants, tied up men and a bullwhip….exciting. In an era when women were not supposed to harbor thoughts that sent men searching for reading material in seedy pulp adult book stores…women had a dirty little secret that they weren’t gonna tell if the network promised not to tell.

WWW fodder for the liberation of the female masturbatory mind. The official policy was to deny, deny, deny. To front the idea that teen boys and young men were the audience sought and the audience watching the most. Women knew different. Our moms paid the sponser’s bills…bought the products…watched from behind knitting, sewing, ironing and over the tops of unread books. And it was their daughters who experimented, went on the pill, and taught their daughters that their sexual feelings were all right.

WWW was 45 minutes of weekly, female, sexual reprogramming.

And nobody but us knew the truth!