Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, August 06, 2008 12:24:19 PM
People still talk and laugh about how Ricky and Lucy had separate beds on “I Love Lucy”. The funny thing is, married sex it still largely taboo on television. It’s fornication and sodomy that’s portrayed more.
The Parents Television Council has received the attention of the Associated Press’ television writer, Lynn Elber, with their latest report on how network television portrays sex.
Marriage gets little respect on network TV shows that instead revel in the pleasures of extramarital and even kinky sex, according to a study released Tuesday.
The study by the Parents Television Council includes a strongly worded condemnation of prime-time TV, contending it "seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light."
Strangely, it usually portrays marriage in negative light without focusing on the very real risks for men.
Even more troubling, according to the watchdog group, is what it characterized as TV's recent obsession with what it termed "outre" or bizarre behavior, including partner swapping and pedophilia.
This is a paradox in television programming. Characters on television are rarely presented as regular attendees of any particular church. This probably has less to do with hostility towards organized religion than simply wanting as much of the audience as possible to identify with the characters. The moment you peg them as a particular denomination, a certain amount of the audience is going to think of them as “different than me.” However, the same makers of television seem to have no reservations in portraying characters as having certain sexual fetishes or philias.
Visual references to practices such as voyeurism and sadomasochistic sex outnumbered married-sex references by a ratio approaching 3 to 1.
When you depict sex as something that happens outside of marriage but you don’t depict or reference married people having sex, what children pick up is: married people don’t have sex. It is the same thing in the home. If a married couple completely hides the fact that they ever have sex, their children are going to get the message that married people don’t have sex, or it only happens rarely. This will make fornication seem more exciting (get it while you can!), or in some cases, make the children think of sex as something that is always bad.
Now, obviously I’m not suggesting that parents have sex in front of their children. That’s a very bad idea. But the children should learn that mom and dad do need and enjoy private time together, and as they get older, that sex married sex is a wonderful thing to be enjoyed frequently and privately.
But TV Watch, a nonpartisan coalition that counts networks among its members and argues that individuals and not government should decide what's seen, fired a volley at the council.
"The Parents Television Council won't be satisfied with television content until they convince the government to enforce their personal, selective judgments," Jim Dyke, executive director of TV Watch, said in a statement.
There’s nothing wrong with the PTC calling attention to this stuff. While I wouldn’t like to see a government crackdown on television content, I would like truth in labeling. The PTC could just as easily accuse TV Watch as pushing to have everyone completely desensitized to fornication, adultery, shacking up, sodomy, and various fetishes. And another problem is that the negative consequences of fornication and sodomy are rarely depicted.
Among the networks overall, references to adultery outnumbered references to marital sex by 2 to 1. The "family hour" - the first hour of prime-time TV, which draws the most young viewers - contained the highest ratio of references to non-married vs. married sex, the study found.
The solution, besides being informed, is for viewers to support the kind of programming that affirms marriage and purity.