No, It’s Not Your Imagination — Sex on Television

No, It’s Not Your Imagination — Sex on Television

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
November 11, 2005

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a major study on Wednesday, finding that the number of sex scenes on television has doubled since 1998.

As the foundation summarized its findings: The study found that 70% of all shows include some sexual content, and that these shows average 5.0 sexual scenes per hour, compared to 56% and 3.2 scenes per hour respectively in 1998, and 64% and 4.4 scenes per hour in 2002. These increases combined represent nearly twice as many scenes of sexual content on TV since 1998 (going from 1,930 to 3,780 scenes in the program sample totaling a 96% increase between 1998 and 2005). But despite these overall increases in sexual content, the number of shows in which [sex] is either depicted or strongly implied is down slightly in recent years (7% in 1998, 14% in 2002, and 11% in 2005).

That’s a pretty amazing finding — 70% of all television programming (other than news, sports, and children’s programs) included explicit sexual content. This amounts to prime-time pornography.  There is now no excuse for being shocked.

The full report is available here.



R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

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