Thursday, November 6, 2008

Is Watching "Gossip Girl" Getting Teen Girls Pregnant?


I'll admit it. I watch "Gossip Girl." Partly because I write about TV for my job, and partly because I seem to at times have the television viewing habits of a 15-year-old girl.

The difference between me and the demographic of this show (I'm assuming 14-24-year-old young women) is that the actions of these characters don't influence me, but they apparently are influencing young girls.

There was a study done recently sited in the Washington Post that found girls who watched shows like GG, "Sex and the City," "Friends" and even "That 70s Show," were twice as likely to engage in behavior that could lead to pregnancy.

I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore when the new "90210" opened with a girl giving a guy a blow job. Too many girls look at themselves as sexual commodities to be traded amongst the guys in their circle and don't recognize or respect their own value. It's startling to me to read about girls who randomly perform oral sex on boys at parties, on school buses and in school bathrooms. Where have we gone so wrong? I know lots of folks will say it all started with Bill Clinton, but girls felt bad about themselves and gave pieces of themselves away well before Monica Lewinsky.

In reading about the correlation between TV viewing and pregnancy I thought back to when my daughter was in middle and high school and how I handled what she watched. Thankfully, she wasn't a huge TV watcher, but we watched a lot of things together. Granted, in the 90s and early 2000s things weren't quite as explicit, but watching together gave me the chance to talk about my values, and how important respecting yourself and your body is. Thankfully my daughter made it through those fragile years without getting pregnant or, as far as I can tell, too scarred by the time. I like to think that my taking the time to be with her and talk about the choices characters on "Gilmore Girls," and the original "Beverly Hills 90210" made helped guide her.

Like so many areas of parenting that appear to have been abdicated, teaching our children about sex seems to have been left to the likes of Carrie Bradshaw and Chuck Bass.

We can't just blame what's on TV for the slutting up of our youth anymore than we can blame the manufacturers of Twinkies for the obesity problem that is rampant among our children. The buck truly stops with the people buying the food and paying the cable bill. We can't ever have complete control over our children, I certainly know this after raising three, but we can be a strong influence. We just need to shout from the rafters until it gets through to our girls - you are truly a treasure and should never, ever just give yourself away.

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