Post Super Bowl multiple choice quiz:
 Which felt more disconcerting as a NE sports fan/mother/wife/woman?

A. That the NE Patriots lost to the NY Giants again?
B. The Teleflora commercial?
C. The GoDaddy commercials?
D. The enthusiasm that many of the adult males in the room displayed when the above commercials aired?

When it comes to media, my husband and I have a rather conservative filter both for ourselves as well as our sons (ages 18, 16 and 12). If you have ever spent any time watching a sporting event with our family, you would know our ritual. Find three sporting events broadcast simultaneously (95% of what we watch centers on some kind of ball moving rapidly with the help of 10 to 22 men). As soon as a commercial comes on, flip to sporting event B. Continue this rotation until the final buzzer, bottom of the 9th, etc. Provided that the controller rests in one of our hands, we’re good.

This year, breaking tradition, we watched the Super Bowl at a friend’s house. Though we religiously avoid both commercials and commercial TV, we have enough social skills to understand that watching at someone else’s house meant we could not commandeer the remote. By 9:30 PM, I felt completely undone, and not because Brady and company faltered in the final drive. As I lay in bed trying to push the provocative images and depressing meta-messages out of my head, I felt deep conviction that our media choices, though often misunderstood, were actually born of wisdom.

Our gradual decision to limit both content and time our kids spend in front of a screen was both proactive and reactive. My husband was a self-confessed television addict growing up, watching 6 to 8 hours a day. Not that TV was the only factor, but it definitely contributed to some deeply entrenched addictions and a great deal of passivity. Our goal was to make the media serve us rather than ending up serving it. As such, even when the boys were young, we scrutinized the content choosing to withhold shows and movies that contained violence or sexually suggestive material.

Perhaps our lifestyle affords us a unique vantage point to observe popular media with a bit more objectivity than your average consumer. Perhaps the work we’ve done for the past 17 years walking alongside folks who bear the scars of addictions and broken relationships have predisposed us to resist the gravitational pull of popular culture.

Here’s what we see; American movies, TV, music and print ads create, and then dictate, unrealistic and unhealthy relational norms.

For instance, the media’s promise of fame has caused us to shift our privacy boundaries. Twenty years ago, it was understood that an infinitesimally small number of humans would ever become famous. Now, thanks to American Idol, YouTube, etc., achieving fame is not only perceived as viable, but has become a serious goal. Twenty years ago, it was unthinkable that any of us would permit a stranger wielding a video camera to record our most private moments, let alone post them for the world to see. Now, many of us would eagerly trade our dignity and respect for 15 minutes of fame. Andy Warhol would be so proud.

Additionally, media has gradually but noticeably been pulling back the curtain on adult sexuality. While sex on the screen is not exactly a 21st century phenomenon (soap operas have been around since the 1950s and X rated movies such as Midnight Cowboy and Clockwork Orange became mainstream after late 1960), the media has been pushing the proverbial envelope regarding what is appropriate for young viewers.
Cue Teleflora and GoDaddy Super Bowl commercials.
Granted, I have been in the equivalent of a commercial cave for the past 18 years, but I was shocked to the point of tears. What exactly was the message of these ads? Certainly not that buying flowers for a loved one is kind and thoughtful or that having a solid web presence will expand your business.

At the risk of being interpreted as an irrelevant Puritan, it was sex. It was that women must wear provocative outfits and use their bodies to seduce and satisfy men’s sexual needs. While I take offense at this any hour of the day, I found it particularly disturbing in the presence of young children and my hormonal teenage sons.

I understand that it’s a risk to write this but I would like to invite all of you parents to consider following our family’s example. Here’s why. The sheer volume of suggestive messages normalizes such behavior and communicates to our children that this is the approved pathway to adulthood. If that’s not enough, the overtly sexual nature of such visuals actually affects their brains.

According to Dr. Judith A. Reisman,
Pornography not only influences behavior but also actually alters brain chemistry, making children most vulnerable to its toxic imagery. Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that emotionally arousing images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail. This applies to so-called “soft-core” and “hard-core” pornography. Once our neuro-chemical pathways are established they are difficult or impossible to delete. These [media generated] erotic fantasies become deeply imbedded, commonly coarsening, confusing, motivating and addicting many of those exposed.

In both the Teleflora and GoDaddy commercials, the content clearly crosses the boundary from playful and flirtatious to soft pornography. If you disagree with this assessment, please stay with me. Merriam-Webster defines pornography as, “the depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement.” Granted, the women were all dressed, just barely, and no sexual acts were committed. But I think we could agree, the intention of both ads was indeed to arouse sexual feelings. This is problematic when viewed by children and teenagers. Despite research which validates Reisman’s claims, the media refuses to acknowledge this (again, there’s irony here since the money they pay for the ads, $3 million for 30 seconds during the Super Bowl, ought to serve as a reminder that we are in fact impressionable).

What Dr. Reisman and others are hoping to communicate is that our brains remember visual imagery much more clearly than any other form of cognitive information. Which is why I can still remember the pornographic images I saw as a 10-11 year old but I can’t recall a single book I read during that same time period. Anything visual that confuses or sexually stimulates us gets turbocharged and ends up seared into our memories. Since children fail to understand both the complexities and the nuances inherent in adult sexuality, their brains are over-stimulated and their souls confused whenever they view inappropriate imagery. And these days, inappropriate imagery is ubiquitous.

According to a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average American child spends more than 38 hours a week using entertainment media (video games, music, TV, ‘watching’ and communicating via their computers). The report further notes that “68 percent of the material children watch contains sexual content, up from 56 percent in just two years.”
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, writes, “Sex becomes the common currency through which adults make their way in the world and continually sends a signal to children that sex is all that matters. One of the big problems that we are faced with is that increasingly adults have lost the capacity to draw a line between their own attitudes and those of children and increasingly we’re recycling adult attitudes about sex through the prism of children.”

The content, combined with the unrelenting nature of such sexually charged messages, begins to numb a child to their inappropriateness and ultimately alters their understanding of what healthy sexuality is meant to be.

I understand that I am not speaking for everyone here, but most parents would prefer that our children abstain from sexual involvement prior to age 17 or 18. (There are those of us, present party included, who hope that our children will postpone this pleasure until marriage.) And even at that age, we would hope that it will be an expression of love with some level of commitment rather than a casual hook-up. But since this type of mature, responsible sexual involvement is not what popular media communicates to our kids, their resultant behavior should not surprise us.

“Adolescents who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch fewer such shows,” according to a new RAND Corporation study. The study, published in the November 2008 edition of The Journal Pediatrics, “is the first to establish a link between teenagers’ exposure to sexual content on TV and either pregnancies, among girls, or responsibility for pregnancies among boys.”

Our culture is increasingly hyper-sexualized. Sex is used to sell everything from web hosting sites, to cars, to M&M’s. Ads, television shows and movies communicate that one can be, should be, sexually active with few, if any, negative consequences. In the not so distant past, media which pushed the boundaries was metaphorically and in actuality covered in brown paper and hidden behind the counter enabling those who wanted it to simply ask but preventing those of us who didn’t, to avoid it. Now it has become so mainstream that it’s literally inescapable.

The more we expose our young children to adult sexuality, the more we train our sons to objectify women’s bodies and encourage our daughters obsess about developing perfect physiques which will ultimately seduce and satisfy men’s sexual appetites. We steal their innocence and propel them into a world that they are not yet ready for either emotionally or physically. Only “three out of ten children”4 have any limits set on their screen time. Let’s up that ratio. Grab the remote. Do your kids a favor. It matters.

BTW – The correct answer was D

1 Senate Subcommittee hearing on Pornography, Dec. 2004

2Kaiser Family Foundation, Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens up Dramatically from Five Years Ago, Jan. 10, 2010

3 Rand Corporation,  Does Watching Sex on Television Predict Teen Pregnancy? Finding from a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

4 Kaiser Ibid