Posted on 07/12/2013 5:02:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Today's children live and breathe in a popular culture that teaches them to accept the worst kinds of sexual exploitation and violence as a normal part of life.
They're even encouraged to laugh at the idea.
The Parents Television Council has issued a new report on "TV's Newest Target: Teen Sexual Exploitation." Out of 238 scripted episodes that aired during the study period in 2011 and 2012, 150 episodes (63 percent) contained sexual content in scenes that were associated with females and 33 percent of the episodes contained sexual content that rose to the level of sexual exploitation.
The PTC found that underage female characters on primetime broadcast television are more likely to be presented in sexually exploitative scenes than adult women, and the appearance of underage female characters in a sexually exploitative scene actually increased the probability that the scene would be presented as humorous.
Sometimes the "humor" wasn't age-specific. On the now mercifully cancelled NBC sitcom "Whitney," a former cop named Mark tells an engaged couple how they should handle their inevitably excessive bachelor and bachelorette parties.
"There is such a thing as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Just in case you find yourself in a dead hooker situation." Lily (the bride-to-be) wisecracked back: "You know, Mark, we've been talking about it in couples therapy, and I think Neal's done killing hookers." Neal (the groom-to-be) added: "For now."
It's bad enough that network sitcoms would highlight prostitutes by making them plot points on broadcast television. But Hollywood's scowling mean-spiritedness and hatred for human dignity just always has to grow fouler. Now even the prospect of killing prostitutes at a bachelor party is considered a punch line. What kind of human being pushes the laugh-track button for that?
To mock teenaged girls, a routine source of sick humor is anything Seth MacFarlane touches on his Sunday night Fox cartoons. The May 6, 2012 edition of "Family Guy" made all its usual mean-spirited fun of Meg, the ugly-duckling daughter of the Griffin family. During a high school semester in Paris, Meg is abducted and is auctioned as a sex slave. The announcer says, "This girl is perfect is you want to buy a sex slave but don't want to spend sex-slave money."
"Family Guy" writers really seem to hate the Meg character, and even TV critics have objected to that trend. Teenaged fanatics of "Family Guy" could easily internalize the message that the ugly girls deserve whatever they get, and when their lives go seriously wrong, it's funny.
A recent episode of MacFarlane's "American Dad" also mocked sex with prostitutes. Try to follow this bizarre plot if you can. Klaus, the family's talking goldfish, somehow switches bodies with Stan, the lead character. Klaus-in-Stan's-body decides to "really take this body for a test drive." He starts by finding a sickly looking prostitute in a back alley. He hands her money, and she tries to hand him a condom. He shakes his head no and hands her more money. They head off-screen together.
Later, Stan protests what Klaus did while he'd entered his body. "He -- I -- did horrible things. I lost several virginities last night. He abused me. He did drugs; he had sex; he paid a woman to pee on my body. He beat up a cop and then somehow paid off the cop and then he peed on me, too."
Degrading your body to the point of being a paying recipient of urination by a hooker and a cop? That's your average Sunday night on Fox television.
The vast American majority has never seen the twisted comedy plots that are described here. Successful shows capture a small minority of the country.
But it's shows like MacFarlane's that are watched heavily by young people, and become the lunchroom patter the next day at colleges, high schools and even middle schools.
Cultural pollution is real. Associating humor with topics like rape, child molestation, prostitution and sex trafficking means our society is getting increasingly sicker, and the most infected part of the population are the children who watch a lot of degrading television and play a lot of degrading video games and listen to a lot of degrading music.
In the end, our whole society is degraded.
It mirrors our politics.
IT is also run by a minority OF a minority!
Whose fault is this? It won’t change until Americans turn off their mass hypnosis devices, it is not the network’s fault since they are only giving the people what they want. When large #’s of people start canceling their CATV and stop attending the latest film then the networks might notice.
I am sick sick sick of all this emphasis on sex as the solution, it isn’t, it is the problem
I dont even know what is on Network (entertainment) TV anymore, I gave it up decades ago.
I watched 24 for while as an exception then it got really stupid.
I really do get tired of Seth Macfarlane’s wittier-than-thou “humor.” His material is written not so much to be funny as to point up how talented he is and how his style is the one to copy if you’re going to succeed in the TV game.
Plus he can’t seem to elevate his “comedy” beyond the frat-boy nudge-nudge stage. It’s puerile, crude even when it’s sophisticated, and ever fouler in search of yucks.
No thanks.
Im enjoying Netflix because they have all the old Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith episodes.
WHAT!!??
No mention of all the FAGS that seem to infest every program these days?
Net Flix is great, Amazon tv, Hulu tv; it costs a bit but it’s well worth it. I never watch the networks or smutty cable shows. Also, TCM which is wonderful.
Exactly. Family Guy strikes me as distinctly unfunny. I get the humor, but I find myself not paying much attention to the show itself and instead thinking about what a bunch of pricks the writers must be.
I got rid of TV in March of 95.
Okay, I had never bought one until my wife was pregnant in December of 90 anyway. We’re book people.
Yep, not many things beat Morey Amsterdam's one-liners and bald jokes. Of course, somehow today bald jokes would be considered hate speech.
Network TV, except for Jay Leno and a few daytime game shows is sick. Leno is the only thing I watch on network TV.
We cut off our satellite a while back....we use netflix and borrow dvd’s from the library. My girls are teens, we have always been particular about what they watch, however it was the commercials that finally decided for us to get rid of cable. The entertainment industry has gone very low.
I tried netflix, but could not find any movies I like so I gave up. I recently bought some cheap DVD sets of old TV series. Some of which I had never watched and episodes I had never seen.
It all part of the plan to create slaves in America.
The TV shows are just not like they used to be, when you could look forward to the next show. Now they seem to be made just for stupid people
On TVLand or someother cable station, the other day they ran all the episodes that Ernest T. Bass ever appeared in. All five episodes. I was in 7th heaven. Ernest T. is my favorite character on that show.
It was fun in the beginning, Jack would shoot terrorists wives kneecaps to get them (male terrorists) to say where the bombs were and and all sorts of crazy adventures and actions, and that Cloe could hack any computer system in the world from her apartment laptop.
But its hard to make that last too many seasons, and they went PC in the later Bush years, had to read those terrorists their rights.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.