Is there enough married sex shown or talked about on television? That intrepid defender of the nation's video morals, the Parents Television Council, says no.

"Sex in the context of marriage is either nonexistent on prime-time broadcast television, or is depicted as a burdensome rather than as an expression of love and commitment," a new PTC report concludes. "By contrast, extramarital or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with greater frequency and overwhelmingly, as a positive experience."

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.

Outré takes

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.

Here's some more socially destabilizing stuff that the PTC found:

References to cheating on a spouse outnumbered references to married sex by 2:1 across all the broadcast networks.

It's really bad during The Family Hour. The study doesn't say when exactly that hour is time-wise, but it's the sixty minutes when kids watch the most. During that time slot, nonmarried nookie apparently stomps the married kind by 3.9:1.

Visual depictions of some third-party taping or watching while sex happens outnumbered visual references to married sex by 2.7:1.

"Wait for it . . . "

The ABC Network wins the prize for references to married sex, PTC says, but a lot of them were negative. Apparently the group thinks you won't laugh when you read some of the scripts they excerpted. Here's one from a marriage therapy scene in the Carpoolers.

Woman: He told me he would rather have sex with a catcher's mitt.

Man: No, what I said was I'd rather have sex with a mailbox.

Therapist: On top of being a very hurtful comment, I think that's a federal crime.

Admit it, you'd like another. Ok. Here's one from How I Met Your Mother.

Marshall: If Lily and I have sex twice a week, which, let's be honest, we all know is being conservative, and we've been together 10 years, plus 17 more times on the honeymoon, minus the two-week drought when I said the checker at the grocery store looked like a young Lily, then, we have had sex a total of, wait for it, 1,053-1/2 times.

While you're trying to figure out why you should disapprove of that last quote, read this nonmarried sexual reference that the PTC doesn't like from ABC's Dirty Sexy Money.

Jeremy: Someone just came in.

Natalie: So we'll have a three-way!

Somebody actually got paid to write that? There's the scandal here.

But the report doesn't just focus on ABC's crimes. Here's a hot tip: At NBC, references to "incest, pedophilia, partner swapping, prostitution, threesomes, transsexuals/transvestites, bestiality, and necrophilia combined outnumbered references to sex in marriage by a ratio of 27:1." In fact, in the 46 hours of programming that PTC surveyed, its auditors found but a single reference to marital sex. Now you know which network to watch. CW and Fox have less extreme ratios, but the PTC doesn't approve of them either.



ABC rules the commercial airwaves when it comes to fornication

Diddling for dollars

What does the Parents Television Council conclude from these findings? It notes that the Federal Communications Commission has of late stepped up its enforcement of its decency rules, "but clearly the FCC's enforcement actions to date have done little or nothing to deter broadcasters from exploring once-taboo subject matter." More recently "FCC enforcement has stalled in the face of court challenges from the networks."

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.

They too "must be held accountable for the messages they underwrite with their advertising dollars," the PTC notes. "Only when corporate sponsors band together in the name of responsible entertainment can we expect to see meaningful change from the broadcast industry."

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