Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2004 > September > 08 > Entry
TV sex and real sex
Here’s a big surprise: A new study conducted by the RAND Corp. has found that teenagers who watch a lot of TV with sexual content are twice as likely to have sex — and have it at a younger age — than teens who don’t watch sex-filled TV.
The 12-year-olds who watched a lot of television with sexual content were found to act like the 14- or 15-year-olds who watched less TV with sexual content.
The two-year study questioned nearly 1,800 teens about how much sexually oriented programming they were watching. A year later, the kids were questioned again.
“The kids who watched more sex on TV were twice as likely to initiate intercourse over that year, as compared to the kids who watched the very least sex on TV,” Rebecca Collins, a behavioral scientist who headed the study, said in the survey’s summary. “We found that we could predict whether kids went from being virgins to having had sex over the course of that year, using the information about which shows they watched.”
Here’s what I always wonder about these surveys: Which shows were the kids watching? And how is sexual content described?
Various surveys, including this one, claim that two-thirds of TV shows contain sexual content, but what “shows” are we talking about? Under closer questioning, people surveyed are often found to actually be watching videos and calling them TV shows. So, is a DVD or video of “American Pie” the same as an episode of “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter”?
And is cable, especially premium cable, considered the same as network TV? If so, then “Sex and the City” gets lumped in with “The O.C.” And people who let their 12-year-olds watch “Sex and the City” or “Nip/Tuck” get what they deserve and shouldn’t be whining about television causing their kids to have sex.
And what exactly is “sexual content”? A breakdown of one study a few years ago found hand-holding and kissing were designated as sexual content — presumably along with intercourse and hot-and-heavy petting.
While some of these surveys are interesting on the surface, they’re hardly ever specific enough to matter. And certainly not specific enough to warrant the hysteria some provoke.
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