TV sends kids wrong message on sex
/The Boston Herald
He was a clean-cut, bright, on-his-way to Annapolis kind of guy. She was his female counterpart: pretty, smart, studying to be a reporter. They were just high school kids, but they were mature, sensible kids. No need to worry about them. They were in control. They knew what they were doing.
Before they made love, he told her that she was the first girl he had ever been with. He was the first for her, too, and so they weren't worried about something like AIDS. Pregnancy was their only fear and since they were mature and sensible, they were careful - eventually.
In the old days, their story would have ended in either marriage or a betrayal. Those were the choices, then: couples stayed together or they broke up. It was as simple as that.
The twist today, however, rests not just in a little white lie, a lie we should instinctively understand because sometimes by saying a thing is so, it becomes so. Say it often enough and it turns into solid truth. You are the first, he told her because he wanted her to be, because the encounter he had had two years before was something he'd buried. It was loveless. It was quick. It meant nothing.
The twist today is that it wound up meaning everything. Because from this one, loveless act, he had contracted AIDS and passed it along to the girl he loved.
"In the Shadow of Love: A Teen AIDS Story," which aired on Channel 2 and on Channel 5's after-school special two weeks ago, related this drama. And television has never been better.
The tragedy is that the story is real. There are at least one million Americans who don't even know they are HIV positive, and many of them are kids. "Most of them will get sick during the next decade," the National Commission on AIDS reported last week, calling AIDS "the most deadly sexually transmitted disease ever to confront humanity." Yet, despite this raging epidemic, most television programs continue to trivialize and actually encourage sex.
"In the Shadow of Love" was trying to say to kids: Don't do it. Don't risk your life. Don't take a chance. Don't believe some boy when he tells you you're the first. Be smart. Don't have sex. Meanwhile, on Fox's "True Colors," 18-year-old Terry Freeman was being mocked by his family for being a virgin. (His non-virgin girlfriend said she would take care of this.) And on ABC's "Roseanne" 17-year-old Becky Connor was talking to her mother about getting birth control pills. On ABC's "Doogie Houser, M.D." 18-year-old Doogie was making love for the first time. And on NBC's "Blossom," 15-year-old Blossom was talking about going to second base.
AIDS is no longer a disease afflicting only fringe groups of promiscuous homosexuals and IV-drug users. AIDS has crossed over into the general population and into our schools. Yet television continues to treat sex like a harmless game, giving it its great, big, media seal of approval, in drama, comedy and song, as if AIDS is no problem at all, throwing in a "special" once in a while to assuage those who are scared to death that the children of this country are going to do what they've seen done at least a million times in their lives with no consequences at all.
How do you fight it? The latest survey shows that white Americans watch 7 hours of television a day and black Americans watch 10. Parents and church and schools and newspapers all combined cannot neutralize what is drummed into impressionable heads 50 to 70 hours a week.
Turn off the TV? Not a bad idea. But what about all the accumulated hours? What about what's already been absorbed?
A study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that unprotected heterosexual intercourse is at least 17 times more dangerous for women than for men. While only one of 72 men whose regular female partners were infected by the HIV virus were HIV positive, 61 of 307 women whose regular sex partner was an HIV infected man became infected.
"The cumulative deaths of the first 10 years of AIDS will more than double in the next two; by the end of 1993, the toll will rise from 120,000 to over 350,000."
These are the facts that television ignores, while it fills the airwaves with permission. Government has been urged to lead in the fight against AIDS. But government can do only so much. Television has the audience. It could begin to save lives now, if programers would just act responsibly and tell the truth about sex: that it's dangerous, that it has consequences, that it can kill, and that it's not the one and only way to have a good time.
