Especially for Parents

News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
May 2003

Altered Perceptions – Media and Youth

“Is there a correlation between the media children consume and the way they behave?” With this question Steve Jordahl began his April 10, 2003, article, published on Family News In Focus, a Focus on the Family web site. Jordahl reports that Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, has brought forth a bill that seeks government funding for an extensive study with the goal of determining the degree to which media influences the behavior of youth.

There are many studies that demonstrate a relationship between violent media and violent behavior. In fact, a recently published long-term study, conducted by psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D. Eron at the University of Michigan, demonstrates the relationship between violent media exposure during childhood and violent behavior in adulthood.

Published in the March 2003 issue of Developmental Psychology, an American Psychological Association journal, this study was one of the few to follow its subjects into adulthood. It was found that adult men who were repeatedly exposed to violent media while growing up were three times more likely than their cohorts to be convicted of crimes, including domestic violence and assault. Women were found to be four times as likely to participate in violent behavior than those who were not exposed consistently to violent media.

In addition, according to an American Psychological Association press release of March 9, 2003, the University of Michigan study’s findings “hold true for any child from any family, regardless of the child’s initial aggression levels, their intellectual capabilities, their social status as measured by their parents’ education or occupation, their parents’ aggressiveness, or the mother’s and father’s parenting style.”

Violence, however, is not the only media concern that parents face. The explosion of pornography in our society and its insidious seep into our already sexually saturated “popular culture” has the potential to seriously affect the psychosexual development of our youth, altering their perceptions of themselves and sexuality in general.

Our society has certainly reached the point of sexual saturation. The Kaiser Family Foundation 2003 study of sex on television found that 83% of the top 20 television programs watched by teenagers have some sexual content. According to their study, “only a small minority of all portrayals involving sex on television includes any treatment of the possible risks or responsibilities of sexual activity.”

Rap music is notorious for its sexual content, its music videos known for their portrayal of people in various stages of disrobe. Yet, such antics are not limited to that genre. Country music favorites, the women that make up the Dixie Chicks, recently appeared naked on the cover of the May 2, 2003, edition of Entertainment Weekly.

“We don’t want people to think that we’re trying to be provocative,” said singer Natalie Maines in the Entertainment Weekly “exclusive” interview. Appearing nude on the cover of the magazine, with a few select phrases written on their bodies, was the Dixie Chicks’ chosen means of addressing the outrage that many felt over an anti-Bush statement made by Maines at a March 10, 2003, concert in London.

That Zogby International, a polling and research company based in Utica, N.Y., was hired to poll parents on such questions as whether or not children between the ages of 5 and 8 should be taught that “boys and girls have body parts that feel good when touched” or whether they should have masturbation defined for them, demonstrates the degree to which sexual content has infiltrated our schools.

The poll, conducted at the request of New Mexico GRADS, which is funded by the state Human Services Department, found that three out of four parents—despite SIECUS recommendations—would prefer that schools not teach their kindergarten and elementary school students about masturbation. SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, also recommends that elementary students be taught about bisexuality and the safety of legal abortions.

And from laugh-track backed mentions on prime time TV and programs popular with teens to porn star appearances in music videos and mainstream ads, pornography is also spilling into our collective popular culture. On February 24, 2003, Stuart Elliott of the New York Times wrote of Pony sneakers and their new ad campaign. Their new print and billboard advertisements will feature performers from pornographic films.

“When I grew up in the 80’s in Paris, models were the ultimate feminine ideal,” said Come Chantrel, vice president and general manager of Pony at the Firm, as quoted by Elliott in his New York Times article. “For the 20-year-old kid, porn stars have kind of replaced what models used to represent.”

As our culture redefines what qualities are deemed desirable or attractive and what behaviors are deemed acceptable, how can we not expect youth, just coming into their own understanding of sexuality, not to be influenced?

Rusty Benson addressed aspects of this issue in relation to the rapid increase of computer pornography and the ease with which it is accessed in his article, Will Glut of Online Porn Create More Young Sex Offenders?, published in the November/December 2002 issue of the American Family Association Journal. “He is already beginning to see the edge of a disturbing trend with more teens regularly talking about such perversions as necrophilia, bestiality, and ritualistic mutilation,” wrote Benson, referring to comments made by Dave Fowers, who has worked with the Utah Division of Youth Correction for 28 years and has specialized in juvenile sex offenders for more than 12 of those years.

However, it is not only in the realm of troubled youth that pornography is becoming a more regular topic of discussion. In recent years, pornography on college campuses has been receiving increasing media attention.

On April 7, 2003, Inside Edition reported that Shane’s World, a California production company, encouraged Indiana University students to drink alcohol and to have sex on film. Calli Cox, a Shane’s World performer and publicity director for the company, told Inside Edition that the company plans more campus films. College courses that incorporate pornography are also on the rise.

Kansas University has recently been at the center of a controversy concerning classroom pornography. On April 29, 2003, FOX News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly interviewed state senator Susan Wagle and University of Kansas student Jessica Zahn concerning material that Zahn said was presented in Professor Dennis Dailey’s human sexuality course and the action that Sen. Wagle took in response.

According to Zahn, Professor Dailey, in addition to repeatedly showing pornographic films graphically depicting a variety of sexual activities and making comments of a sexual nature to individual female students, also showed the class “quite a few pictures of the spread genitals of females, making comments about anatomy, such as which ones were beautiful and what kinds of activities they were engaged in.”

“I want to make this type of activity not funded by the taxpayer,” said Wagle, according to a March 28, 2003, CNN.com report. Senator Wagel initiated a bill that would have eliminated the 3.1 million dollars of funding received by the university if the human sexuality course includes material that is obscene. On April 21, as reported by the Kansas City Star on April 22, Governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the bill. The university is in firm support of Professor Dailey and his curriculum, according to the CNN report.

Sen. Wagle told Bill O’Reilly on May 14, 2003, that another bill has been passed “that would require each publicly funded university to come up with a policy on how they treat the issue of pedophilia and sexual harassment and also what they do with sexually explicit films in classes dealing with sexuality.” She expects that the governor will receive the bill within the next few days.

That violent and sexual media have the power to affect the behavior of children and to alter their perceptions of what it means to be men and women has clearly been demonstrated time and time again. According to Steve Jordahl’s April 10 article (see first paragraph above), Senator Brownback “hopes a definitive study will put pressure on the (entertainment) industry to address the problem.”

It seems, however, that the entertainment industries have already solidly proven that they have little regard for the effects of their products on anything but their own financial well-being. Addressing the problem will certainly take more than hoping that the pressure of yet another definitive study will move industry standards to levels that the majority of Americans find suitable.