It is 10 a.m. on a chilly January morning in Televisa's XEW studios on calle Ayuntamiento in central Mexico City. Although the buildings are historic (they were originally used for radio), the location is hardly glamorous. Indeed, the street is better known for its bathroom appliances than for its media celebrities. I am here to watch a taping of Amor-didas (the title is a pun on “bites” and “love”), a late night sex talk show for Unicable. Willowy hostess Dr. Silvia Olmedo, with blond hair spilling over her sheer black top, fluffs the presentation of her three guests (off camera: “I have trouble with names”; on camera: “They are all great women”), younger women whose hair is yet more elaborate and clothing yet tighter than those of the doctor. Today's (tonight's) topic is, inevitably, what women want. And it would appear that women's needs today have changed little in modern Mexico. Girls, we hear, like to be wooed, not grabbed; and they prefer a man who listens and supports to one who ignores and bullies. Olmedo does not get around to the more promising topic she announced in the intro (“The little blue pill: does it improve women's pleasure or send them straight to the emergency room?”), but in the tiny studio audience we still dutifully applaud.

Amor-didas would appear to embody all that is wrong with television in Mexico (and, indeed, Spain where gossipy talk shows are stripped for up to three hours over prime-time network schedules). The show is conventional, conservative, and (above all) feminine, targeted (like the telenovela) at an audience of women of low social class and basic education. Canal 11's modern fiction series offer a much better pedagogy in sex. Yet, as television studies scholars have long argued, everydayness, repetitiveness, and closeness to the public are positive virtues in a medium that, unlike cinema, is integrated into the texture of daily life. And, indeed, when the four women are, finally, free to converse (a less sympathetic word would be “gossip”) they create a sense of the para-social (of a discursive world parallel to and connected with that of the audience) which feels warm and welcoming not just on the small screen but even in the chilly studio with its five restlessly roaming