BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a special report on the sexual pressures on preteenage girls. Parents, social critics, and many young girls themselves deplore it, but sex sells, so advertisers and entertainers use it to attract audiences. They use it without the regulation or social pressures that once were restraining forces. And they use it without censorship, which hardly anyone favors. Mary Alice Williams reports on the media and the children who are its targets.MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: They're sweet. The sexually debasing lyrics they're mimicking aren't. Ever since Elvis shimmied his pelvis, parents have worried about protecting their teens from the obscene. This is different. These aren't 17-year-olds. They're 11. And these self-confident sixth graders and even their younger siblings are increasingly exposed to torrents of overtly sexual messages by people selling things to preteens.
ALICE (Teenage Girl): It makes me feel like an object and feel really, really weird. And it is not like girls should be like that.
WILLIAMS: The culture tells them something different. They listen to music. Britney Spears made it big wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. Look at her now. Most of BILLBOARD's top 20 CDs are slapped with "Parental Guidance" stickers. They [kids] do homework on the Internet where there are lots of porn sites. They watch TV. The teen hit DAWSON'S CREEK on the WB alludes to oral sex and masturbation. In prime time, the Kaiser Family Foundation has catalogued an average of five sexual references per hour.
KERRY (Teenage Girl): This sexual stuff you don't just see on TV. You see it day to day. It happens in middle school. It will happen in high school. You just see it around.
WILLIAMS: Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain is an ethicist with University of Chicago Divinity School.
Dr. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN (University of Chicago Divinity School): There's certainly a relationship between the culture and the increase of sex because of the many cultural messages that bombard young people daily.
WILLIAMS: According to studies, more girls than ever before are sexually active before their 15th birthday. One in 12 children has lost his or her virginity by the eighth grade. Almost a fourth of ninth graders have slept with four or more partners.
Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician who treats adolescents only, talks with his teenage patients daily about sexual issues. He says he is seeing more sexually transmitted diseases in younger and younger children and that expectations of sex have changed drastically.
Dr. MICHAEL RICH: What we are seeing now that is different from previous years, I think, is that sex is expected. Sex is part of the normal interaction, day-to-day interaction between boys and girls.
JERRY DELLA FEMINA (Advertising Executive): This is about as sexy as we get.
WILLIAMS: Advertising agent Jerry Della Femina doesn't use sex to sell his clients' products. But he knows why people do.
Mr. DELLA FEMINA: It's easier to be lewd than to be creative, and people try to get attention, and the one thing that gets attention is sex. Sex sells. People turn around. They look at it.
WILLIAMS: Like many in the industry, he thinks it is up to the parents to monitor what their children see and hear.
Mr. DELLA FEMINA: I believe that it is the parents' job to provide them with a sense of values so that if they do see something that is off, they are not affected by it.
WILLIAMS: Diane Levin, with the Coalition to Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, studies the effect of culture on kids' behavior.
DIANE LEVIN (Coalition to Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children): I have interviewed thousands of parents, and they agree it is their job and they try very hard to do it, but they can't keep it out of their children's lives. I resent that I have to struggle with this issue. I think that in the best of all possible worlds we would have a society that is trying to create an environment that helps parents in their job instead of making it harder.
Dr. ELSHTAIN: At one point in time in this culture, the assumption was that families and churches and schools, and even the wider culture, reinforced one another in helping to sustain children through a period of growing up. And I think that coherence has broken down.
STEPHANIE (Teenage Girl): The sixth graders learned how to do something they are not supposed to do. And it is called "giving booty."
Ms. LEVIN: What they are seeing right now is a sexual relationship between males and females that is totally objectified -- the sexuality that you see is not in the context of relationships. It is not in the context of caring and feeling. I am very worried about where this is going to lead. There is a whole set of problems that has to do with the relationships males and females are going to develop with each other.
WILLIAMS: Perhaps normal to adults too, to the extent that they are increasingly desensitized to the saturation of sexual messages and squeamish about talking with their children. Sex education is left to the schools, which are restricted from teaching the realities of oral sex and doing "booty." But our children are still learning and absorbing values from what they see around them. I'm Mary Alice Williams for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY in New York.
