WARNING: This column contains a three lettered word beginning with the letter "s" and ending in "ex." If you are in any way offended by such content, please adhere to this warning and continue at your own risk.
Yet another ground-breaking study recently has been released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, proving a startling notion: People are "doing it" more often on television. It also shows that an ever-growing number of people have way too much free time on their hands. That's right, sex is becoming more mainstream in television entertainment and, quite frankly, I couldn't care less.
What bothers me is not that such studies are pointless graphs and statistics taking up space in major national newspapers, but that people inevitably draw faulty conclusions from such studies. These studies imply that morally depraved behavior on television has a strong correlation with harmful choices adolescents make during their lives. For this study in particular, the implication is that the more kids watch people talk about sex on television, the more likely teens will get pregnant or contract sexually transmitted diseases.
I came upon such ideas when reading an article that highlighted this study ("Sex on T.V." Feb. 6, www.kff.com). A woman sitting next to me, clearly a mother who has more experience raising kids than I do, remarked with quite a bit of vehemence, "If they took that dirty stuff off of T.V., our kids wouldn't be getting pregnant anymore." I figured with her experience she knew what she was talking about, but then I realized she was yet another combatant of the statistical war against the entertainment industry.
The inference drawn by the woman, that behavior on television and movies is the primary cause of our social pitfalls, is not uncommon among most of us. When kids revert to guns to solve their problems, we want to blame the movie "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" for having introduced to the general public every gun known to man. When adolescents get pregnant or contract STDs, why not put the same burden of blame on television?
The only problem with accusing the entertainment industry is that, by doing so, we take the blame off the primary cause: ourselves. Most of us are given a few natural gifts that ultimately determine the choices we make, and one of these is our very own common sense. At the expense of sounding callous, I will contend that it is impossible to place the influence of television as the primary cause of our personal fallacies so long as we have brains to tell us what is right and wrong.
My annoyance, however, is with this particular study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the subtle suggestion it attempts to make. Take some of the statistics this study uses to prove its case. The research found there is a 12 percent increase in the number of shows with "sexual content" in the past two years. Programs showing teens in sexual situations increased from 8 to 9 percent within the same time period, and teen characters involved in intercourse jumped from 3 to 9 percent. Should someone declare a national emergency?
Maybe the study itself is harmless, but when a representative of the Kaiser Family Foundation subtly throws in the statement, "every year in this country, there are three-quarters of a million teen pregnancies and four million cases of sexually transmitted diseases among teens" along with the press release that announced the study, there is no doubt of the insinuation.
I am in no way advocating the entertainment industry, specifically the part that caters to television shows, as a saintly figure committed to the purification of young souls. Sex sells, the numbers prove it, and someone has put two and two together to figure out how to make a little more money off of primetime television. This can hardly be argued.
What is debatable, however, is what the industry's bottom line means for us. If it means an endless attack on directors and producers, then we have missed the point entirely. It should, if anything, illuminate the fact that unless parents take an active role in their children's lives, it's really not going to matter if television becomes a 24-hour PBS special.
At the end of the day, statistics and numbers blaming the entertainment industry will do nothing but unduely ease our minds that we, as parents and growing adults, are doing nothing wrong. This alleviation of a burden comes at a time when we desperately need to realize that the cause and solution to our problems lies not in actors and movie scripts, but in ourselves.
(Faraz Rana's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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