According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, sexual content on prime-time TV has steadily increased since 1998, as reported in a preamble to an Advertising Age online poll. This was presented along with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s call for the party to develop and focus on morality issues, and a report that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama “blame[s] media companies for ‘coarsening the culture’ with their content.” Advertising executives wonder what kind of effect this call to (morality) arms will have on their industry, because, as they well know, sex sells.
I get nervous when terms like “morality” and “sex” and “blame” make an appearance under the banner of defending America’s “moral values.” We all might be speaking the same language, but the interpretation is not always the same. This was made clear to me at a Spanish class I recently sat in on. To start the class, the instructor had the class sing “Macarena.” Yes, that “Macarena.” Here’s the first verse translated into English:
“Give your body pleasure, Macarena/because your body is for giving it pleasure and good things/give your body pleasure, Macarena/Ehhhh, Macarena.”
I don’t remember the timing on the following, but just as the class (all women) was remarking on the song’s sexual looseness, I slapped my palm on the table and said “Andale!” as an expression of “So, that’s what they’re saying” (the lyrics fly by) but also, and more accurately, “You go, girl!”
The polite disdain that followed surprised me, which just went to show me that one person’s idea of empowerment is another’s idea of sexual looseness. So, who decides what’s what?
For anyone who watches TV with any regularity, the increase in sexual content is obvious. I don’t need a study to tell me that. Curiously, responsible approaches to relationships and sexual activity on TV is occurring among young-adult characters (the ones, our news media tells us, who are the least responsible or the least able to make sound decisions).
On last season’s prime-time soap The OC, teen couple Seth and Summer decided to refrain from sex since they clearly didn’t know what they were doing. The humor and seriousness of their decision was well played, but would be beyond the comprehension of the “grown-up” characters on the supposedly more sophisticated Grey’s Anatomy. This very popular ABC series features first-year surgical interns who shamelessly trample each other for scalpel time, yet have no idea what a condom is or what it’s for. One intern got syphilis from a nurse he slept with, who got it from a rival intern. Another intern got pregnant by her superior. In the last episode, when the aforementioned nurse and the intern who originally gave her syphilis decided to get it on again (at work), she gasped, “I hope you remembered a condom this time.”
You “hope”?
I imagine most parents would cringe at the idea of their high-school-age daughter having sex. What is interesting on Veronica Mars is not that Veronica is sexually active but that her father – a private detective – is unaware of it. Sort of. What cleverly plays in the background of this sleuth-centric series is the reality that many adults and parents apparently can’t stand: Their adult child has a private life. What is difficult to define is that demarcation between being a child and being an adult, something that will be vociferously debated among parents and their children everywhere until the end of time.
I don’t think anyone should learn about sex, intimacy, and relationships from a TV series or any other entertainment medium, although that is exactly where most of us get our strongest impressions. Assuming that suppressing sexual content on the small screen is going to redefine our moral landscape is as rife with land mines as defining “sexual content” itself. I think a bigger question to mull over is why, if this nation is truly moving toward a conservative theocracy, do shows like Grey’s Anatomy not only persist but thrive? It’s all too clear. A large audience likes to watch.
As always, stay tuned.
This article appears in December 2 • 2005.