New Study Confirms What Discerning Parents Instinctively Knew

There is now scientific research proving what many parents have always believed about today’s coarse, sex-saturated culture. Such things do impact the behavior of youth. The study of 1,228 youth aged 12-14 concludes that the more exposure children have to movies with sexual content,the more likely they are to engage in similar behaviors later as teens.

The study also cautions parents not to simply rely on movie ratings to protect their children. It is not just the R rated films that might be off limits. Researchers found that of the 684 movies in their study, 68 percent of G rated movies, 82 percent PG rated movies, and 85 percent of PG-13 rated movies contained sexual situations.

Here is what Ross O’Hara, one of the study’s authors, observed:

“I found that the most surprising part of these results were that adolescents who viewed more sexual content from movies reported higher sensation seeking during their teenage years. Not only did this higher level of sensation seeking predict an earlier age of sexual debut and riskier sexual behavior, but could have important implications for other risk behaviors, like alcohol use or smoking.”

This should be no surprise to those who have ever stopped to consider that businesses spend millions for just 30 or 60 seconds of screen time to influence what kind of toothpaste we should buy, what kind of clothes we want, or what kind of hamburger we might eat.

Social liberals always amaze me on their double-mindedness on this subject. On the one hand they routinely dismiss and mock our concerns about sexual content in the media. Yet, behind the scenes, homosexual activist groups like GLAAD work relentlessly to normalize and promote homosexual characters on screen as creative, funny, desirable or no big deal, knowing the power film has on viewer attitudes.