The Parents Television Council wants more hot sex on TV, and so do I

Image via grigiomedio.

Many mainstream interweb outlets are buzzing this week about the Parents Television Council’s new “report” (should always be in quotes when we talk about those pervs), called Happily Never After. In it, they bemoan, or maybe they just moan longingly, about how sex on TV is all boring and stuff when it’s about sex *within* their standards of conservative Christian marriage, but looks all naughty and fun (and is shown more often) when it’s not. Weird! Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Me also thinks that most Christians are having hotter sex than the PTC. But still, their “findings” and charts are titillating. The best writeup, not to be missed, comes from Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, which is a site I would have adulterous thigh-biting sex with all the time if I could, but ignore that visual long enough to dig these snips from Lasar’s superb PTC: Broadcast TV a sordid hive of fornication and adultery:

(…) Now I’m sure that plenty of couch potatoes wouldn’t mind seeing Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie get connubial on the telly. That, of course, is not what the PTC wants. 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”—a term that makes me want to shave my head and sit in a cafe reading a leather-bound edition of the works of Michel Foucault. “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. The PTC folks, on the other hand, have definitely had their eyes glued to the set. For this report they audited every single scripted prime time entertainment show on ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, and NBC for the first four weeks of the 2007-2008 TV season. That’s 207.5 programming hours. (…read more!)

Lasar’s incredible punchline is ominous: “This will suggest to many, if not the PTC, that the FCC’s recent indecency rampage has been futile—not to mention unlawful. But the survey does hint that the Council is now looking elsewhere to wield its might, namely at advertisers.”