“Is there enough married sex shown or talked about on television? That intrepid defender of the nation’s video morals, the Parents Television Council, says no. ‘Sex in the context of marriage is either nonexistent on prime-time broadcast television, or is depicted as a burdensome rather than as an expression of love and commitment,’ a new PTC report concludes. ‘By contrast, extramarital or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with greater frequency and overwhelmingly, as a positive experience…’ Its new report, Happily Never After: How Hollywood Favors Adultery and Promiscuity Over Marital Intimacy on Prime Time Broadcast Television, laments that scripted references to out-of-wedlock sex outnumber the married kind by three to one. As for scenes ‘depicting or implying sex between non-married partners’ — well, as you might guess, they stomp the married scenes by a ratio of four to one. Even worse, however, is TV’s focus on ‘outré sexual expression’ … ‘Today more than ever teens are exposed to a host of once-taboo sexual behaviors,’ the PTC report warns, ‘including threesomes, partner swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, and sex with prostitutes, to say nothing of the now-common depictions of strippers, references to masturbation, pornography, sex toys, and kinky or fetishistic behaviors.’ I hope that my students don’t read this survey (I teach history at UC-Santa Cruz), because many of them cultivate the good habit of not watching TV. These revelations might make them get started.” — Ars Technica (US)

Gut response: Who the fuck cares? Perhaps there were grounds for caring back when two or three monolithic networks dominated the airwaves. But nowadays broadcast television is fast becoming irrelevant. If broadcasters are featuring increasing amounts of “outré sexual expression,” it’s for the obvious reason that they have to compete for eyeballs with cable networks and the internet. Given a choice between watching mom-and-pop lovemaking on tv or Asian S&M anal dwarf lesbians on the web, what are most people going to choose?

In the final analysis, it’s not about big media conglomerates forcing illicit sex down the throats of viewers. It’s about capitalism. It’s about supply and demand. It’s about creating content that people want to see. There are viewers who don’t want to see smut, and there are networks (often faith-based) that cater to them by providing wholesome programming. The rest of us are pigs, dogs, and Dirty Old Men, and we’re not going to watch the boob tube unless there are boobs — and threesomes, partner swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia, and the rest of that sordid list.

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