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Parents Council's TV Sex Study Indicts Viewers More Than Networks

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By WALT BELCHER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 7, 2008

Updated: 08/07/2008 11:33 pm

A new study that slams broadcast television for glorifying kinky sex and ignoring good, old-fashioned marital (and presumably unkinky) sex is really an indictment of public tastes.

That's not what the report is intended to do. The morally straight Parents Television Council's "Happily Never After" study is intended to shock us. The goal is to show how prime time television is becoming a cesspool of depravity that needs to be cleaned up.

The PTC's message is call your legislators, call the Federal Communications Commission and sign up to support the council's efforts to make broadcast television safe for children.

The council doesn't pick on cable television too much because cable isn't regulated, although the PTC would like to see that changed because as wicked as broadcast has become in the council's eyes, cable is even wilder.

The PTC's monitoring crew would have gone ballistic trying to keep a count of the profanities on "Deadwood," and "Californication" certainly would have topped the "Happily Never After" list for depicting way too much casual sex.

"Everybody's having sex on TV except for husbands and wives," complained PTC president Tim Winter after a study of 207 hours of broadcast TV found references to adultery outnumbered references to conjugal sex by a 3-to-1 margin.

The PTC is a little late in catching up to this trend, which started in soap operas about 20 years ago.

When marriage is portrayed, it is almost always negative, Winter added, accusing the networks of "actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light."

More troubling, the study said, is an apparent obsession with "outre sexual expression," which includes threesomes, partner-swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, prostitution, strippers, masturbation, pornography, sex toys and "fetishistic behaviors" such as sadism and voyeurism.

The study singled out "Grey's Anatomy," "Boston Legal" and "Desperate Housewives" among those most harmful to family values.

PTC says children shouldn't be subjected to these shows. Well, of course not. Parents need to take some responsibility here to set limits. There are plenty of kid-safe networks out there.

PTC says good marital sexual relationships as depicted on NBC's "Friday Night Lights" are rare. They're right. But we live in a culture obsessed with sex. And "Friday Night Lights" is struggling in the ratings while other shows the PTC finds lacking are popular.

And that, my friends, is an indictment of the viewers, not those amoral network suits who are pandering to the 18- to 49-year-olds whom sponsors love. With the audience fractured across 200-plus channels, the broadcast networks are chasing the group that brings in the most advertiser dollars. And it's tough to compete with the uncensored cable networks. I am not saying that it's right; it's just how it is.

There's also a lot of infidelity and kinky stuff in the world. Anyone who has seen "Jerry Springer" knows that.

Studies also show an estimated 44 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds today have had premarital sex, and they're having it more often. One study found couples living together had sex an average of 146 times a year compared with 98 times per year for married couples, while single folks were only averaging 49 times a year.

Network television has always been a somewhat distorted mirror of its audience. And the world has changed a lot since the days of "Ozzie & Harriet" and "Leave It to Beaver." But even so, the PTC is right when it points outs that happily married and sexually active couples are under-represented.

Tune In Tonight

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Swingtown, 10 p.m., CBS

Here's a show that made the PTC's list of negative depictions of marriage because it includes spouse-swapping in the 1970s, a craze that went out with bell bottoms and leisure suits.

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