The phenomenon that we know as mass media began less than 600 years ago. The invention of typesetting in 1450 meant that books, instead of being laboriously handwritten, could be mechanically printed, which made them available to the common woman and man. Black-and-white silent movies first played for a paying audience in 1895, and in 1896, The Kiss, the first film in cinematic history of a couple kissing, was criticized as scandalous and brought demands for censorship (Dirks, 2006). The first black-and-white television sets arrived in the 1940s (initially so fascinating that families would sit in the living room watching test patterns on the screen). By 1972 the
number of color television sets in U. S. homes finally exceeded the number of black — and-white TVs. The explosion of media technology since then has flooded us with exposure to sexual words and images. Increased amounts and explicitness of sexual content have accompanied the huge technological advances (see I Figure 1.2).