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In these ways, the media function as a kind of sexual "super peer," providing role models of attractive adults and older adolescents engaging in risky behavior - and putting additional pressure on young people to have sex at earlier and earlier ages.
A growing number of studies are revealing that exposure to sexual content in television, movies, music and magazines accelerates white adolescents' sexual activity and increases their risk of engaging in early sexual intercourse. White teens who watched the most sexual content doubled their risk of initiating intercourse the following year, or of significantly advancing in sexual activity other than intercourse.
Black teens, by contrast, appear to be more influenced by perceptions of their parents' expectations and their friends' sexual behavior than by what they see and hear in the media.
Teenagers who start having sexual intercourse early are at a greater risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Both male and female adolescents who are younger at first intercourse are less likely to use a contraceptive method.
This situation is a national concern, considering that despite recent declines, the teenage pregnancy rate in the United States is still three to 10 times as high as the rates in other industrialized countries. Among those countries, only in the United States are schools limited to promoting abstinence alone until marriage and required to discuss the exaggerated failure rates of contraception.
Look no further than the Centers for Disease Control study released on March 11, which estimated that one in four young women between the ages of 14 and 19 in the United States - or 3.2 million teenage girls - is infected with at least one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases. Reducing sex education into a two-word slogan - "no sex" - clearly has not been an effective advertising campaign for American parents and schools.
The corruption of childhood is now pretty much a fact of modern life. The adult world - through films, music, fashion, magazines and newspapers - has elected to share with young people its various sexual obsessions, rather than shielding them from them. While the age of consent has remained the same, the age of knowledge has been hurtling downward.
While hypersexualized media content is by no means certain to convert an otherwise innocent child into a sexually reckless adolescent, just as every pack of cigarettes smoked increases by some small amount the likelihood of lung cancer, every media portrait of sex as fun and risk-free increases by some small amount the likelihood of early sexual experimentation.
Apologists argue that today's parents are simply overwhelmed in their battle with thousands of competing media images and ideas over which they have little direct control, and that the responsibility for healthier media lies with the producers of media.
While the major television networks need to recognize that with their free use of the airwaves comes a certain responsibility to public health, parents still hold a large measure of control over the media habits of their children.
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