I would like to know if anybody out there is as appauled at the television commercials as I am. In the middle of the day I could be watching t.v. with my children and on comes a distasteful commercial, could be for chewing gum, victoria's secret, tampons, body lotion, whatever. There we are, watching sex selling the products, blatenly. Even the news, recently showed "What you don't know your teens know" and it showed a naked girl on top of a figure in bed. I can't stand it and I do not know what to do about it. I think we as a society are letting the networks and advertisers get away with whatever they want with no regard for the future society that our children will provide. Can going to the F.C.C. help? The networks? boycoting en masse? I just don't know. Anybody have any comments?

egads!!!! i agree completely! they say sex sells. but everything? i find it disgusting. no matter what it is they find a way to tie sex into it. the absolute worst is the abercrombie and fitch catalogue. take a look at it. as god as my witness it is chld porn. i kid you not. i feel so sorry for kids today. they get such mixed signals. i continue to tell mine that everything is not about sex and for now i feel that is the best i can do. it would take an entire coalition, similar to the ones for cigarette and alcohol ads from yesteryear, i believe, to end the way ads are going these days! geesh...do i sound old or what?!?!?

Agree! TV programs and commercials are vulgar and too revealing. Is ANYTHING private? As a mom, I simply hit the "mute" button on commercials and if I neglect to do that, then I make a parental comment such as, "that's inappropriate" to my kids. Victoria's Secret is nothing more than pornography and my husband has the good sense to turn his head away from their commercials. Yuck!

TV has become sickening! The funny thing is that now that my sons are teens, 17, 13 they are embarrassed if I am in the room when something inappropriate hits the screen. There was some lurid sexual innuendo on something the other day and I walked in to see what they were watching...as soon as I stepped into the room they both left. When I asked why they said ":MOM!!!you can't let your mom watch that crap, it's disgusting!" but would they have watched if I wasn't there?

A funny for you...the kid across the strewet is 15 and his younger (and BADDER) brother is 8. Justin (15) spends a lot of time over here, doing yardwork and snow removal and helping with the dogs for me, and Chris is here a lot too. They both like to "hang" with "my" kids in the summer and on vacations, so we are all here a lot. Justion and Chris' parents have HBO on 1 TV, in the den, so they can keep an eye on what the kids watch. I have them watch TV in the living room and if there is something on that is inappropriate, we mute the TV or change the channel. They are all used to that.

Now, all my kids are older and they were all sitting in the living room watching the big screen and there was a movie on that I thought they could watch, but Chris couldn't. So, I told him he had to go home for a while. He did, and later that night his father told me that Chris was in the couch in the living room there and had the remote in his hand while watching HBO. His father came in and asked him what he was doing, because he isn't supposed to watch that channel on the TV unless someone is there to censor him. Chris just said "It's OK, Dad, because as soon as I hear a bad word, I hit mute!!"

While reading these entries I was reminded of a quote from a famous educator that said we must focus our energies not on preparing the path for our children, but for preparing our children for the path. I would love to think that one day we will not need to use bordeline pornagraphy to sell everything or that the news will not be filled with horrible acts of violence, but people do terrible things to each other for reasons we may never fully grasp. The fact is that it won't go away, at least not anytime soon, so we need to prepare our children for what's ahead. I don't think that means exposing them to all of it becasue desensitization is one of the worse results of our media-centric society. Micki has an excellent way of exposing with guidance. Anyone else have any ideas on preparing our children for this kind of stuff?

This topic caught my attention, and where I started reading, Oyster-ears wondered if anything can be done and I finished where Candice says that there's nothing we can do about it so we need to learn to live with it. Actually, there are communities around the country where viewers have organized themselves and demanded that the locally produced programs (which are fewer and fewer because of cable, but there's always the local news, and there are the cable companies that decide which stations to offer to subscribers) clean up their act. Rocky Mountain Media Watch is a famous such viewer group. The truth is that the broadcast airwaves belong to the public -- the FCC is the trustee for our airwaves and allows the networks to use them to make lots of money. The networks make lots of money by selling our eyeballs to the advertisers. What viewers can do is complain to the companies that sponsor the ads, and complain to the networks that the ads are unacceptable. This stuff continues because we're all too complacent. Viewers have given up control. By giving up control, we're in collusion. And this is only part of the story. Collectively, we have the power.

I didn't say there was nothing that can be done about it. I think that creating societal change takes time. More time than our kids have now. So while we should fight for change, what do we do with our kids NOW so that the media influences them less? While things like complaining to companies and the FCC are good things to do, it does not make something that is such a part of our society go away overnight. That's why we also need to look at what we should do to educate our children and to help them understand what they see and hear. While you would fight to clean up bad neighborhoods in your area, you certainly wouldn't let your children go there by themselves while the clean up was in progress.

[ December 20, 2002, 09:27 AM: Message edited by: Candice Johnson ]

I agree with DJ, lets do something about it. I know the airwaves belong to the public so why can't we have a say so in what goes out there. There could be a collective voice even if it is only in our area to try to put a stop to overuse of sex on t.v.. Desensitising is exactly what is happening and you can't reverse that. I see it in my children and myself. Can we start with the F.C.C.? Is there a contact person, does anybody know anybody? We could also start with our congressmen and senators and even local,local reps. One of the things working against us is that we are all busy; school, homework, our own jobs, volunteer and don't forget taxi service and support of all the sports games. I think we tend to put onto the back burner stuff we don't want to think about, it is not immediate. We have to decide if we are passionate about the future of our children and what the society is offering them. Any comments? Any suggestions? Any contacts?

we could also turn off out televisions! Too extreme?We could heavily monitor them while our kids are young and pray when they get older. We could tell our children that we will not buy products that use sex and violence to sell their products. These are immediate suggestions I have in response to "what do we do now?" Thank you everybody for your interest, it makes me feel like I am not alone in my concerns.