And how do you establish this anyway? Self-reports? “Other-reports”, i.e. asking the people who were bonked? And what counts as “sex” on TV? Kissing, fondling, bare breasts, moaning, simulated penetration, actual penetration? Isn’t the last named the only one that’s actually sex, i.e. the same thing as the sample are being surveyed for? Not much of that on TV as far as I’m aware.
It’s done all the time. The smaller the sample size, the larger the margin for error, but if the study is done with the proper scientific sampling, it would still be fairly accurate.
If the study itself is in question, I’d look into how the sample was determined, and the possible biases in the study (questions asked / answer interpretation, possible untruthfulness in the responses, etc).
I’d like to note that I’m not saying kids are interested in sex, just that they have sexual feelings. I freaked the heck out at age eleven or so when I realzied that thing I did before I went to sleep was related to that thing my parents gave me “the talk” about.
And I hate to say it, but most kids already have a decent intro into the darkness of human relations. Kids are very attuned to their parents emotions, and few relationships or marriages are all that perfect.
…could someone tell me what exactly is wrong with allowing a child of eight or ten to drink beer? Last time I checked beer wasn’t unhealthy, won’t do anything bad if consumed properly, and is only illegal because of stupid laws in the first place. I drank wine at the dinner table with my parents throughout my childhood, nothing bad ever happened to me. Granted, this didn’t happen every day, but what does it matter? Everyone knows that moderate consumption of wine is good for you, not bad.
I don’t think the media’s version of sex is what I want to give my young children. TV and movies --and music–present sex in a plasticized, commercialized, slick way with a lot of subtext about power, pain, men’s and women’s roles, love, and what sex should be that I think is simply unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for teens and adults too, actually. Our society has become so obsessed and drenched in commercialized sex that many of us can barely figure out what a healthy, loving, sexual relationship can or should be like. I would like to keep my kids away from that as much as possible, for as long as I can, thank you.
My 4-yo asks questions, and we talk about what I consider to be appropriate for her level. (That is to say, she knows the proper names of all the relevant body parts and much of what they are for, what boys have, ‘good/bad touching,’ and how babies are born. She has yet to ask how the baby gets in there, but I’m sure that will happen soon, and I’ll be explaining menstruation pretty soon too.) I work hard at modeling healthy attitudes and relationships for my children, and I don’t need HBO helping me.
I don’t think that saying “well, children in lots of countries see nudity and even sex and they aren’t harmed” is a fair comparison. It’s not nudity by itself that many people object to; it’s the way that nudity is presented in the media that is the problem. In an ordinary, daily-life context, it’s very different. Likewise, knowing that adults tussle in the family tent at night is different than knowing what MTV has to say about the subject.
Small children are usually unprepared to deal with the full details of adult relationships. Certainly they have their own sexual feelings, but that is far, far different than seeing adult sexual situations. Small children who see such material are frequently very bothered by it; they don’t know what it is and don’t much want to know. I feel that they should be allowed to grow at their own pace, without having more complex things they aren’t ready for forced upon them.
And one more thing; I think that bringing violence into the discussion is usually unhelpful, as it contributes to what I feel is a straw man argument that “those awful Puritan parents scream at the first sight of nudity, but let their children watch violence all the time!” --when most of the people who don’t like sexual media for children don’t care for violence either.
I disagree. How many complaints did the GI Joe cartoon generate with the FCC, compared to how many complaints were generated by the Janet Jackson incident? Can you imagine how many complaints would be generated if a Saturday morning cartoon showed a bare female breast, as compared to showing soldiers firing lethal weapons at one another?
Karmic, I’ve seen that study before. It seems likely to me that kids who are interested in sex will:
- Watch more sexual television; and
- Have sex earlier
than kids who aren’t interested in sex. Drawing a cause-and-effect relationship seems pretty tenuous to me.
Daniel
I pretty much agree completely with both Guin and dangermom.
I think there’s sex and then there’s sex, there’s nudity and then there’s nudity, if you know what I mean. Where that line is drawn is surely arbitrary to a degree (as are all lines), but I think it makes sense.
As dangermom said, for me it’s more an issue of whether I want the TV to raise my (hypothetical) kids, or whether I want TV ‘reality’ to be an integral part of my child’s development. It just seems hypocritical for me to spend my days lamenting the images and messages the media obviously and not-so-obviously feeds us about who we are and how we should be, and then give a young person in my charge carte blanche with regards to his or her TV viewing.
I don’t know what to think…
On the one hand, I started having (mild) sexual fantasies as early as five, and started reading romance novels with explicit sexual content in the 3rd grade (I needed a break from Gone With the Wind you see and picked up my grandma’s novels…). My mom made the effort to shield me from movies with sexual content, but then, my dad didn’t care. My favorite movies were Revenge of the Nerds and Road House…
All in all, I think I turned out pretty ok. Right now I have a healthy, safe, satisfying sex life, and everything is fine.
But a few summers ago I was writing and posting a very explicit fanfic on my LJ. It went right past erotic into pornographic territory, and I put up all of the necessary disclaimers and warnings that amounted to “If you’re not at least 17, please do not read this. It’s not for you…”
And I would get comments from people who were 12, 13, 14, 15…and it would really freak me out. They weren’t doing anything really different than what I did, and I don’t feel like I’m scarred for life, but at the same time…shudder…I didn’t want kids to read about the Fun Jaunt to the Sex Shop, you know?
Ultimately I think that it really comes down to the person. My sister who is only 19 months younger than me, has an extremely unhealthy view towards sex (It’s disgusting and wrong and animals do it. Humans should be better than that…that’s pretty much an exact quote). I think that’s a pretty awful view to have. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with allowing a child to view/read/discuss sex in a frank and explicit matter if the parent is on hand, willing to answer questions, and exhibit a healthy attitude towards it.
I think that could be a very interesting discussion, and I’d like to participate–but not on this particular thread (and maybe after I finish the million things I have to do…).
That’s just how statistics works. If you choose the people you’re studying fairly, it doesn’t matter what percentage of the total population they make up. IIRC, a sample size of 1792 gives you something like a 2.3% margin of error. Political studies are done all the time with smaller sample sizes than that.
But as Wrath and Left Hand of Dorkness point out, there are other problems with interpreting the study to say that watching more sex on TV leads to having more sex.
Judging by the quality of writing and ignorance of basic human anatomy, kids that age are writing a lot of the porn stories that are out there.
I don’t think it would encourage kids to have sex, however, for a young child, it may give them a rather warped view of sexuality, before they’re ready to understand all the various kinks and fetishes that are out there.
It was hard enough wrapping my mind around plain ol’ vanilla missionary when I first heard about it-I can’t imagine how I would have reacted to the notion of say, golden showers, or fisting.
Kids will ask about sex when they’re interested in finding out what’s going on. I think it’s a good idea to talk about it. I see no problem with letting them watch something they’re interested in seeing it. My parents let me stay up late with them and watch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas when I was about seven or eight. I wasn’t traumatized, but I didn’t get some of the jokes. References to Vienna sausages made me crack up for a while though.
I was an early reader and picked up one of my mom’s bodice-rippers when I was pretty young, maybe seven or eight. I didn’t get the power-submission aspect of the slave-mistress, interracial, violent sex that was featured in that book. I talked to my mom about it, which I remember surprised her a little since she didn’t expect me to be reading a book like that, and we discussed some of the things that happened in the book. I found that I wasn’t really interested in that yet and put it aside for a while.
I found my dad’s porn stash, a French tickler, and a vibrator when I was about nine, maybe younger. He had this stuff locked up, but I was an amoral and inventive little bugger, like most kids. I learned how to pick locks to get in that box. Boy was that an eye-opener. Not only did I find out more about my parents’ sexuality than I bargained for, but I found out what kind of stuff adults liked to fantasize about. That’s all porn is: adult fantasy. Kids like to believe in magic, adults like to believe in hot nasty sex with no consequences.
Watching that porn made me interested in finding out more about the real thing. I raided the libraries for information about sex and sexuality. Imagine reading the Kinsey report when you were 12. That would probably freak out most parents, but my impression was that there were an awful lot of weird people out there, which made me feel pretty darn normal. Some of the things I learned before puberty made me wonder why adults were so crazy about sex. It wasn’t until puberty that I started to understand the feelings. Before, I wasn’t ready for them, so I dismissed sex stuff as basically irrelevant aside from being an interesting thing to learn about.
I had the usual crushes in grade school and junior high, but ended up not having a real date until I was about 17 (I used to be shy). I lost my virginity at almost 18 to an older woman (she was 29) and that started my sexual career. Thanks to reading about sex a lot, watching girl-on-girl porn for pointers, and good teaching experiences the first few times I did it (thank you, Yvonne!), I had good technique and generally good sexual experiences. My only problems when I first started were actually related to masturbation. I’d trained myself to go for a long time and manual stimulation is more intense than vaginal, especially with condoms. It took me a very long time to finish.
I don’t think there’s any reason to hide things from children when it comes to either sex, or violence. If they’re ready to deal with it, they’ll be interested, if not then they’ll be disgusted. That doesn’t mean you should slap on something like “Prison-Rape Sadomasochism: A Look Inside My Hole” to educate your kids, but I don’t think you should prohibit them from watching something they want to see either. I read some extremely violent and sexual books at a young age and it didn’t warp me, and I think that books can have a bigger effect on you than movies do.
Regarding violence, I watched a documentary with my parents about the Holocaust that few of my peers were allowed to watch, and that gave me a more realistic view of the consequences of violence and war. I had very little interest in splatter films that everyone else seemed eager to watch because of that documentary and because of reading books that featured explicit rape and violence in both realistic and fantastic settings. If I hadn’t experienced those things at a young age, maybe I would have thought films that featured violence for the sake of violence rather than as a part of a larger story were cool rather than stupid and pointless.
Unless I was an abnormally pragmatic and centered kid, I would say that even watching hardcore porn at a young age probably wouldn’t warp someone. If I’d seen really nasty violent porn when I was young I would have been disgusted and not been interested in watching it. I would have recognized it as being unusual when I learned more about sex, and there’s no way I would have confused that graphic sexual story with the way people normally have sex, as long as I had other information to compare it to. The same goes for violence. Reading about and seeing footage of real violence makes dramatic violence less glamorous. The absence of information is harmful, in my opinion.
I don’t have kids yet, but I doubt I will change my opinion much on this issue. If they want to watch violent or sexual films, we’ll watch them together and talk about them. If they need to turn it off, we’ll talk about what bothered them and why. I’ll explain anything I need to so that they understand whether the behavior is normal or not that common in real life, and when it happens and why. Protecting them from those things without need just keeps them from dealing well with them later. Teaching them how to understand their own feelings and responses to movies and books is a valuable thing. I won’t force sex and violence on my kids, but if they think they’re ready for it, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps, but I think it’s part of a larger issue that bears directly on this thread, which is, all kinds of stuff that happens on TV is stuff we don’t want our kids emulating, and for the most part they don’t.
Heck, the same is true of books. When I was a kid, there was an effort to ban Where the Sidewalk Ends (I think–one of Shel Silverstein’s books, anyway) from the library because of a poem in it that encouraged children to get out of the chore of doing dishes by deliberately dropping a dish on the floor. Some parents thought it would encourage disobedience in their kids.
I loved Shel Silverstein, memorized dozens of his poems when I was a kid, including that one. That poem offered a promise of a great reward by doing a simple and kind of fun act, and made it sound like you’d be really smart and clever to do it.
Do you think I ever did it? Hell, no! It was a fantasy. A really funny fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless, and my eight-year-old self knew that perfectly well.
If I’d seen something sexually explicit as a kid, it would’ve seemed fascinating to me, but not nearly as alluring as that poem was. No great reward, no simple and fun act, no cleverness.
I really suspect that sexually explicit stuff is being singled out not because kids will emulate it more than they emulate all the other bad behavior they’re exposed to in fantasies, but because it squigs out adults.
I could be wrong, though. Trading Places was the most explicit thing I saw as a kid, and that only after some soul-searching on the part of my parents.
Daniel
Absolutely. WhyDad still has the more common hang-ups about sex and about WhyKid seeing sex. We watched a video of the SciFi channel’s Battlestar Galactica last night, which has two pretty hot ‘n’ heavy scenes, back to back - but was still made for basic cable, so there weren’t even nipples, much less golden showers!
WhyDad was squirming on the couch, trying to make awkward conversation to somehow mask the two folks quite enjoying one another on the screen, while I carefully ignored him completely, watching intently and WhyKid was :rolleyes: at our antics.
Yet the close of up the soldier’s face blackened and burned to a crisp while his platoonmate cradled his dead body, weeping, didn’t even phase WhyDad. I really don’t get that man, sometimes.
It depends on the context and the type of “sexual contact.” I never had a problem with my kids seeing or reading sexual material that depicted it in the context of consensual, loving, responsible activity. Violent, exploitive or otherwise abusive material would be something I’d want to keep away.
Some of the other old-timers may recollect the 1968 Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet. It was given an R rating – indicating no one under 18 could see it, IIRC – because it showed the teen-aged Juliet’s naked breast and the teen-aged Romeo’s bare butt. The most ridiculous rating I ever heard of. It showed sex in a loving, tender relationship, between a married (albeit secretly) couple! Yet the same teens banned from seeing this “shocking” sight could go see any number of sniggering, snide, demeaning “comedies” that showed sex as something dirty. Or any number of flicks where nasty violence occurred.
Was it really R rated? I remember watching it in high school English class in the mid 80’s.
On checking further, I find that you are correct. It was rated PG. I still seem to recall controversy, though. It may be that it was originally R and then re-rated at PG.
This latter statement is correct. According to imdb
Was it perhaps a slightly expurgated version? I remember seeing it in high school in the 80’s too, but I don’t remember the nudity. I do remember the balcony scene, which had us all squirming with embarassment–the teacher was sitting right there, for goodness’ sake! If there had been actual nudity, we might all have died right there in our seats. Ah, horrifying memories of high school…