This February (2001), the Kaiser Family Foundation released its second biannual report on the sexual content of U.S. television programming. The following is part one of a three-part article that profiles the report, focusing on adolescent viewers and the probable impact of TV's sexual content on this highly impressionable audience.

Sex on television? Hardly a reason to alert the press. Our Friends are doing it, Dharma & Greg, too. Two Guys and a Girl, a Party of Five, on the Third Watch, in The City. You get the picture.

No question, television offers a steady diet of sexual content. But a recently released study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Sex on TV (2), tells us there's more sex on TV today than ever before--more, even, than just a couple of years earlier.

Between October 1999 and March 2000, Kaiser researchers documented the sexual content of 1,114 randomly selected programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, Lifetime, TNT, USA, HBO, and one independent station. Sports, daily news, and childrenšs programming were excluded from the study, but special attention was paid to programs targeting teenagers.

Movies, Sitcoms Lead the Charge

The new Kaiser study found sexual content has increased significantly since the 1997/98 television season. In the 1999/00 season, 68% of programs contained either talk about sex or some depiction of sexual behavior, compared with 56% in 97/98. 'Sexual behavior' was defined as physical flirting, passionate kissing, intimate touching, sexual intercourse (either strongly implied or actually depicted), oral sex, and sexual pathologies such as voyeurism.

In those programs that routinely depict sex, the number of scenes with sexual content increased, from 3.2 to 4.1 per hour. Movies were the genre most likely to include sexual content (89%), followed by sitcoms (84%), soap operas (80%), news magazines (74%), dramas (69%), and talk shows (67%). Reality shows brought up the rear at 27%.

Of all the programs surveyed, 10% showed a couple engaged in, just starting, or just finishing sexual intercourse, up from 7% two years ago. But of all the programs with sexual content, only 10% made even a passing reference to the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity such as pregnancy and STDs (not a statistically significant increase over the 9% figure from the 97/98 season).

TV-PG ... TV-14 ... TV-R?

Among the most dramatic changes documented in the Kaiser study are those relating to adolescents. The study found, for example, that while the percentage of programs depicting teenagers engaged in sexual situations stood virtually unchanged at 9%, "the nature and extent of the teenage sexual behaviors contained within those programs has changed markedly."

"Arguably the most noteworthy change," the authors suggest, "is the finding that it has become much more common to show teenagers engaging in sexual intercourse." In the 97/98 season, just 3% of characters involved in sexual intercourse were teenagers; in the 99/00 season that figure tripled, to 9%. "While there are clearly more programs that feature sexual content with adults than with teens," the authors comment, "there is no longer any gap between the range of sexual portrayals that are depicted within either group."

A Healthy Diet?

That television has become a core member of the American family is indisputable. "The average American watches nearly four hours of programming a day," says Kathy Giuffre, PhD, a sociologist at Colorado College who teaches media studies. "The TV is left on in the average home almost eight hours a day. In the course of a single week, kids are exposed to dozens and dozens of instances of sexual behavior on television. It begins very early, and by the time they themselves reach the age where they may be sexually active, they've already built up a history of years of this type viewing."

Though television figures prominently in the lives of most American kids, today it must compete with a variety of other media. Jane Brown, PhD, a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, believes that the potential influence of television has to be understood in the context of what she describes as a "media diet."

Brown specializes in the study of how kids learn about unhealthy behavior from the media. "Television," she explains, "is a big part of the media diet, but it's only one part. Kids start quite early with the medium, so it's very dominant. But for adolescents, music becomes a very important part of their media lives--their media diets, if you will; magazines, as well, especially for girls, and movies for all teens. And now the Internet. It's all beginning to converge. As the Internet adds more video and more audio, it's going to be increasingly hard to distinguish between media."

For these reasons and a host of others, determining the influence of television on young impressionable minds is a daunting task, especially in regard to sexual content. "We don't know very much right now," says Brown. She points, though, to research on the relation of television viewing to aggressive behavior: "We have years and years and thousands of studies that I think convincingly establish a causal link between exposure to violence on television and aggressive behavior."

Underscoring the power of television to influence young minds, Giuffre adds a telling anecdote: "It concerns young girls--as young as 8 or 9 years old--who have shown changes with regard to their body image, such as developing eating disorders, when they're exposed to television. There was a great study done a couple of years ago involving the Kingdom of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific, which had not had television until several years ago. Coinciding with its introduction, this country, in which eating disorders were unknown, suddenly developed eating-disorder rates that rivaled America's."

While these studies offer suggestions, we've a lot yet to learn, as a society, about the influence of the sexual content of television. The Kaiser report provides a foundation on which to base further study. "What the Kaiser study does," says Brown, "is let us know what's on and gives us some guidelines on what the effects might be."

--Taylor Sisk