Gossip Girl Report

Does Sex on TV Make Kids More Likely to Have Sex?

by Kelly on April 22nd, 2008

A reader left a comment about the OMFG promos that got me to thinking: does sex on TV make kids more likely to have sex?

I don’t know that I think it does.

I have always loved TV. I watched pretty racy shows when I was a teen - 90210, Melrose Place, Dallas, almost of all of the soaps. And I was a good girl. A really good girl. I don’t mind saying that I did not have sex in high school. And neither did most of my friends.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t exposed to it. Quite the contrary. It was on TV, in the movies, in music. Everywhere.

And still, that didn’t change my views on the subject.

No matter how glamorous and sexy the idea of sex might have appeared on TV, I knew better. I knew that I didn’t want to be the girl in my junior high who earned a rather unpleasant nickname by “servicing” one of the boys in my school at a party while drunk (you know who you are). I also didn’t want to be the girl who had sex in the back seat of the football team captain’s car and got kicked out in the parking lot after she puked (you also know who you are).

Girls know the difference between right and wrong. And while it’s popular to blame TV for mistakes in judgment, I don’t know that it’s fair. If your self esteem is at the point where you base your behavior solely on what you see on TV, I think you have bigger issues.

I’m not saying that TV doesn’t have any influence on popular culture - clearly it does. But maybe, it can be, as Blake Lively has said, cautionary rather than inflammatory. With that in mind, I think the OMFG ads for Gossip Girl are inappropriate - not because I think they’re too racy but because I don’t think they encapsulate the show. The show has thus far equated poor choices with poor results. In fact, the only couple on the show that has had sex without any regret is the only couple in a serious, monogamous relationship.

It’s unrealistic to believe that teens are not having sex. But I think fewer teens are having sex than we are led to believe. Those teens aren’t featured in the media but they are all around us - just like in my school, we knew which kids were having sex and they were getting all of the (bad) attention. Many kids don’t have sex - they just don’t get the sexy promos.

At least, that’s what I think. You tell me, does sex on TV make kids more likely to have sex?

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POSTED IN: Social/Impact Issues