THE FORMER OWNERS OF THE WASHINGTON POST MORPHED INTO THE MORAL MAJORITY SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED:

Shot:

In May 1981, however, affiliate managers from Salt Lake City, Utah; Biloxi, Mississippi; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Columbia, Missouri, told me they were not experiencing any upsurge of fundamentalist mail. Nevertheless, the networks were convinced the popular pendulum was swinging away not just on the matter of homosexuality, but from titillation shows featuring the female body. What the industry called the “jiggle” genre had been distinctly overexposed. On top of this, the Coalition was beating the drums, mobilizing a public mood— not the only public mood, but never mind that— and intimidating frightened advertisers. Norman Lear organized People for the American Way, to fight the New Right, but he along with other Hollywood liberals shared the Reverend Wildmon’s distaste for smarmy sex jokes, and Reverend Wildmon’s distaste for smarmy sex jokes, and what he called “reprehensible” jiggling. No prominent voice in the industry, except for the producers of shows like Three’s Company (who warned against another wave of Red Channels-style blacklisting), was prepared to stand up for T&A. The upshot was that by the fall of 1981, jiggle was conspicuous by its absence from the new schedule, and the half-draped, alluring male body was more evident than that of the female.

The “far righteous” had succeeded in their limited objectives…But the Bible Belt had already sent the networks a message guaranteed to reverberate through network corridors for a long time to come.

—Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, 1983.

Chaser:

—Slate, the last Internet redoubt of the Graham family, which owned the Washington Post for decades, yesterday. As Iowahawk tweets in response, “remember: attractive women in bikinis = misogyny, Lena Dunham in bikini = brave & inspiring.”

To study — for purely educational reasons — to better understand the looming Red State menace, click here for numerous additional examples of gross disgusting misogyny approved by the incoming labor secretary.