Americans tend to take their vices to the extreme: Krispy Kreme has a drive-through window, Pizza Hut puts cheese inside the crust, ESPN has four channels, Las Vegas stages a full-scale pirate ship battle on a daily basis. When it comes to the supreme vice, sex, indulgence is taken to an even higher level, with potentially dire consequences for American youth.
Sexuality and sexual images permeate virtually every aspect of American public life. Our desire for sex is hardwired into our brains. It's natural. Yet there's a point beyond decent taste that is far too frequently crossed. Recent studies offered by family interest groups reveal a sharp increase in sexual content in the media: two out of every three television programs contain sexual content, an increase from 50 percent just two scant years ago. "Raunchy" references are up by more than half from two years ago on cable television, where broadcast standards are much laxer than those on network television.
For college students and other adults, whose sense of self and whose sexuality is, for the most part, stable and healthy, this trend is either enticing or merely annoying. The real danger is to the health - mental, sexual and otherwise - of tweens (ages 9-12) and young teenagers. The images they are inundated with strike at the precarious time of beginning to recognize one's sexuality and gradually developing one's self-concept. The visuals of today's MTV pop princesses and lotharios barely old enough to vote writhing around (or on) each other, scantly-clad and staring provocatively at the camera, inject a strong measure of sexuality heretofore unseen in American culture.
As a result, these children, which is what they essentially are, become hyper-sexualized before their time. They are not given a chance to breathe, a chance to walk slowly into that awkward, sometimes dangerous, transition between the innocence of childhood and the trials of adulthood. What we are left with is 11- and 12-year-olds, developmentally unprepared for the emotional and physical implications of sex, assuming the behaviors and roles of 21-year-olds. When making the soccer team and remembering their locker combination should be their biggest worries, too many boys and girls are concerned about making themselves appealing to the opposite sex.
Such an early focus on appearance and sexual appeal undoubtedly has damaging effects, both physical and emotional, on children thrust too quickly into adulthood. Anorexia, bulimia, teenage pregnancy and abusive relationships have all been linked to those suffering from poor self-esteem. Kids are growing up too fast and society - parents, teachers, television, Hollywood and corporate marketing - are all to blame for allowing mature content to seep into the lives of our most vulnerable.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that cannot be easily solved through a presidential mandate or congressional act. Children need the guidance of responsible adults in their lives - parents, neighbors, teachers - to act as a counterbalance to the ubiquitous sexual imagery. A bright line needs to be drawn down American adolescence: this is acceptable behavior for a person your age, and this is not. Parents are especially necessary, for they can control what products their children consume at an early age and what their kids can see in the family living room or at the local theater. Any discussion of this topic would be incomplete, however, without a rebuke to those who market this material in such an explicit manner and through mediums easily accessible to pre-teens. Record companies and advertising executives, as citizens, have a responsibility to act in a manner beneficial to their consumers.
Just as guns must be kept out of the hands of children to protect them and others, damaging explicit content must also be filtered away from those most susceptible to its influence. Society must redefine what is "age-appropriate," and, hopefully, the mass media will comply.
