Sexual Content On TV

[AdolfOliverBush]

All right ch'all, this is the last paper I will EVER turn in for college. Let me know what you think. All feedback is welcome.

Adam Gill
THST 363
Dr. Jones
11/15/02

Sexual Content on Television

Just about every person watches TV every day. Some people may watch it for an hour. Some people may watch it for a couple hours. Children tend to watch a lot more TV than their parents do. Some shows have some kind of message in it that it is trying to relate to its viewers, others are just pointless trash that should not be watched by anybody. Children's cartoons tend to present some kind of problem for the main character that is easily solvable. Sitcoms tend to be the same way, too, although they tend to present a problem a little more complicated but yet is easily solvable in 30 minutes. There are many shows on TV for children to watch. With the invention of cable, children now have access to many different channels than did children of 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Just like the channels, the content has definitely changed over the years, becoming more graphic and explicit than before. A great deal of these images are not suitable for a young child's mind and can have effects on their behavior and the way they think. What I want to do is to look at how family and sex is portrayed on TV today and the effects it can possibly have on children.
All throughout the time that TV sets have been in the American family home, family members tend to talk less so that they can focus their attention on the TV program. Researchers have shown that although families did little talking during the TV program, most families agreed that TV brought them together and gave them topics for conversations afterwards. Many families also agree that the TV is a good teacher and model of beliefs about family life and what behavior is appropriate and desirable in their family. Most parents believe that TV has a better positive than a negatvie influence on children. In a survey conducted in 1997 of 1,205 parents, most parents were pleased with the availability and quality of TV programs for preschool children. However, the parents showed less satisfaction with TV content that was available for children of elementary school years.
On the other hand, there are many parents who express negative attitudes towards TV and its content. In 1997, K. Zinsmeister interviewed parents and found that they thought TV encourages passivity among family members of all ages. They also believed that TV stifles creativity and reduces interpersonal and physical activity. The parents also believed that TV programs place an overemphasis on sexual matters, particularly among children too young to understand such complex relationships. These beliefs have led many of the parents who were interviewed to remove the TV set completely from their homes. Zinsmeister concluded that more Americans rate TV's influence as negative than positive. He also said that Americans said that the content on TV is getting worse at twice the rate that they say it is improving.
Since there has been a wide complaint among many Americans about TV content and the effects that it can have on children, TV's started to come equipped with the V-chip. These are placed in all newly manufactured TV sets and can also be placed in old sets that do not contain it. The V-chip allows ratings for TV shows to be displayed so that the viewer can know what they are about to watch. However, all you are getting is a rating like the one used for movies that suggests a certain age that they recommend to watch the program. The problem with these types of ratings is that the people may rate the program perfectly suitable for children but there may be content that the parents find offensive or inappropriate for their children. It may contain the word “butt” that some people find inappropriate.
In 1997, J. Cantor found that 80% of his respondents in a survey said that they wanted the program rating system to reveal the content of the program as well as or instead of just merely a program rating. A lot of the parents showed skepticism about subjective ratings of who should see certain programs and they also showed little trust for the program ratings set by the TV industry. Parents also wanted distinct ratings for violence, language, and sexual content. Overall, parents preferred content-specific ratings of cable programs to the ratings used by the Motion Picture Association of America by nearly three to one.
In his study, Cantor also found that parents' concerns differed in the content that they wanted viewed by their sons and daughters. Parents who had children in the age range of 8-12 were strongly concerned about the sexual content that was on TV. However, parents who had children in the age range of 13-18 showed more concern about their daughters viewing sexual content on TV than they did their sons. Another study by J.E. Sneegas and T.A. Plank in 1998 showed different viewing habits among children of both sexes when they were alone. Girls more often avoided shows based on program ratings, watched more shows rated TV-G, and they watched more shows with no content warnings. Boys, on the other hand, tended more often to watch shows with ratings with of TV-14, TV-M, and more shows containing violence and sexual content. They reported that boys would be more likely than girls to succumb to forbidden programs with prohibitive ratings.
No matter what the program rating is or who is viewing it at a certain time, the people that work at the TV networks still do not remove the sexual content in the shows. According to D. Kunkel, sexual content appears in 56% of all programs and it appears in an average of 3.2 scenes per hour among all TV shows that contain sexual content. The majority of parents believe that their children are exposed to too much sexual content on TV. Obviously children should not be watching those types of show, but some parents are not home all day so they can't monitor every show that their child watches.
In a 1998 national survey of 1,204 American adults by the Kaiser Family Foundation and ABC Television, most of the respondents believed that TV shows too much casual sex and that it encourages irresponsible sexual activity. A majority of respondents also believed that TV shows inaccurate images about sexual life. Some of these inaccurate images included the notion that frequent changing of sexual partners is necessary for great sex. They also believed that people on TV can have spontaneous sex without having to worry about the consequences. The respondents also said TV shows that only thin, beautiful people can have great sex. They also said that having a normal sex drive means always being in the mood to have sex. The respondents gave little support for the belief that on TV older adults can have great sex. Overall, the respondents believed that TV should also teach about safe sex practices along with the sexual content that they portray.
The survey also asked the participants about family conversations dealing with sexual topics as a result of what they had seen on TV. Most of the participants said that they had conversations with their children as a result of what was on the TV program and most of them also said that the conversation turned out very positive. A little under one-third of the parents believed that an unwanted conversation about sex occurred with their children as a result of what was on the TV program. Most of the parents also reported that they had switched off the TV set and prohibited their children from watching certain shows because of the sexual content that was on the show.

 

[AdolfOliverBush]

Along with receiving images from the TV about sex, children are also getting messages about family life. The majority of the families on TV now are White, although there has been an increase in the number of Black families on TV. However, families of other races, such as Hispanic/Latino, Native American, and Asian, are pretty much nonexistent. Members of Black families on TV are more likely to come from broken homes headed by single females. The education level and social class of Black families are also more likely to be lower than that of White families.
Over the history of TV, most of the families have been headed by married couples and the most common depiction of a family is nuclear. The gender of children in families on TV today tends to favor boys just slightly more than girls by 5%. The divorce rate of families on TV has jumped from 2.9% in the 1970s to 15% in the 1990s. The portrayal of single parenthood on TV has increased significantly in the last few years whereas the likelihood of households being headed by an adult who has lost a spouse has decreased considerably. Portrayals of an unmarried head of a household on TV programs featuring families is still very uncommon to this day.
Single parents heading families make up about 31% of families on TV today. In the 1960s, about 27% of single parent households on TV were the result of the death of the other spouse. In the 1990s, that depiction dropped to about 8.4%. In single-parent families in the 1990s, about 38% of all household heads were divorced. On TV, fathers have always tended to be the head of single-parent household although that statistic highly contradicts the census figures of the 1990s. This is a dramatic change because it used to be that single-parent families were caused by forces other than choice. Now TV is portraying a spouse electing to leave a family for reasons of personal choice, thus communicating a different message to the audience of family and marriage.
Another new depiction that arose in the 1990s was alternative relationships. Although the show Ellen, starring Ellen Degeneres, disappeared as a result of the star admitting she was gay, other shows such as Friends and Mad About You, which feature lesbian partners in minor roles, and Will and Grace, a show depicting two homosexual friends, have been successful among the audiences. Gay males are seen on TV holding down responsible jobs and working side by side and even being friends with straight men. There are few limp-handed handshakes, feigned swoons, or other stereotypical portrayals. Although most of these shows are intended for an older and more mature audience, look for these types of relationships to appear in more TV shows in the future, even ones suited for children.
Children and adolescents are also susceptible to what has been called the "cultivation effect". This means that TV can shape a person's view of the real world and their expectations about the people in it. Studies about the cultivation effect have linked soap opera viewing with beliefs about relationship difficulties in the real world, sex on TV with beliefs about real-world sexual activity, and sex-role portrayals on TV with beliefs about sex roles in real life. Other distorted depictions on TV is the under representation of minorities in high-status roles, a tendency to portray men as problem solvers and women as caregivers, and the depiction of elderly persons as sad, lonely, and weak. Viewing this distorted world of TV reality can shape a child's view of society, especially if the depictions are believable and not directly contradicted by real-life experience. TV can also affect an adolescent's construction of social reality, including moral development and beliefs about sexual activity.
Studies conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation have found many different effects that TV can have on children and adolescents. One study showed that boys and girls who were exposed to content portraying pre, extra, or non-marital sexual relations rated these portrayals as significantly less bad than did their peers who viewed either sexual relations between married partners or non-sexual relations between adults. Another study with young adults showed that exposure to pornography combined with violence leads men to hold more callous attitudes about rape and sexual coercion. Another study showed that massive experimental exposure to nonviolent erotic material leads men and some women to be more callous towards women’s issues and sexuality. Another study found a desensitization toward violence in general and sexual violence in particular only after viewing explicit sexual content containing violence. Participants exposed to explicit sexual content without accompanying violence did not become desensitized.
A study on teenagers showed that those who chose to view TV programs containing a lot of sexual content were more likely than those who viewed a smaller portion of sexual content on TV to have engaged in sexual intercourse. It is unclear whether both are linked, but it would seem highly likely. Another study conducted on adolescents showed that soap opera viewers believed that single mothers have relatively easy lives. They believe that they have good jobs, are educated, do not live in poverty, and that a single mother’s male friends will be important in their children’s lives.
TV can also influence adolescents’ sexual vulnerability indirectly by the messages concerning physical attractiveness and the ideal body. TV provides images of an unattainable “ideal” that may have a cumulative effect on individuals’ satisfaction with their appearance. In several experiments, adolescents were shown pictures of models who were thin, average, or large. Those who saw thin models had lower self-evaluations and body dissatisfaction than those shown models with other body types. Repeated exposure to such images may lead some adolescents to extremes of dieting and eating disorders, females in particular but males just as well.
The problem is not so much the media, such as TV, but that parents rely on TV to educate their children on sex instead of teaching them on their own. Most parents assume that someone else is educating their children on sex, such as school or TV, and their children are scared to ask their parents about sex. What ends up happening is that since so many kids are starting to have TVs in their bedrooms, they sit by themselves in their rooms learning about sex from the TV. Adolescents will watch shows that entertain them, contribute to their identity formation, help them cope with their problems and emotional mood states, and form the basis of their selection into youth subcultures. TV helps to socialize adolescents into various adult roles and relationships while providing glamorous, young models to emulate.
Some reasons for adolescents using TV to learn about sex is they are curious about the other gender, they want information about how to act in a romantic or sexual situation, the want role models of appropriate attitudes and behavior, and they want to see pleasurable experiences. Some adolescents seek sexual content to emulate or reinforce their own attitudes and behaviors about sex while others avoid sexual content that repulses or frightens them. TV provides the least embarrassing way to get information about sex and romance.
Adolescents who do not discuss TV with their parents have higher rates of having engaged in sexual intercourse than those who do discuss TV content with their parents. More females use TV to learn about interpersonal relationships than do males. Adolescents who use TV to learn about social relationships believe that TV portrayals are more realistic than do other adolescents. In studies where teenagers have little other knowledge about sexuality, TV seems to create expectations. These teenagers were most likely to be dissatisfied with their first intercourse experience if they considered media messages to be accurate and if they perceived TV characters to be their sexual superiors. The teenagers who reported satisfaction with their first intercourse experience said that they perceived TV portrayals of sex as accurate. Another study showed that adolescents who believed that media characters experienced high levels of sexual satisfaction reported being less satisfied with their own state of virginity.

 

[AdolfOliverBush]

Another study found that TV messages that people perceive as high quality seem to have a greater impact on beliefs and attitudes than those they judge to be of low quality. The typical portrayals of non-marital sex may be more appealing than those of marital intercourse. In a study adolescents were shown a collection of clips. The adolescents enjoyed the married intercourse scenes the least and considered them least funny and least sexy while they thought unmarried intercourse scenes were the sexiest. In another study using sexual clips, young children said that their favorites were the ones that gave pro-social messages such as using contraception and postponing sex until one is ready.
It is quite clear that children and adolescents are influenced by what they see on TV. It seems that most programs today are geared toward an adult audience. Since the portrayal of sex and violence on TV has become so common, is has desensitized many people as to what is appropriate for their children to watch. A lot of parents seem to expect the TV to take of their job for them. They expect their children to get certain messages about life, sex, and society from TV. What they don’t realize is that so many of the images on TV are distorted and bias. Then the parents wonder why their kids are sexually promiscuous at a younger age. It’s because the parents didn’t do their job in teaching their children. Parents should strongly monitor what their children are watching on TV and then possibly sit down with them afterwards to ask them what they got out of the show. Be involved with your children and know what messages they are receiving every day.

Bibliography

Bryant, Jennings; Bryant, J. Allison. Television and the American Family. Mahwah, N.J. :
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd Ed. 2001.

Huston, Aletha C.; Wartella, Ellen; Donnerstein, Edward. Measuring the Effects of Sexual
Content in the Media: A Report to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
http://www.kff.org/content/archive/1389/content.pdf

Shelov, Steven; Bar-on, Miriam. “Sexuality, Contraception, and the Media”. Pediatrics. Feb.
95, Vol. 95, Is. 2.

 

[AdolfOliverBush]

Hopefully you can distinguish between the paragraphs. I have to go now so I don't have time to.