By: J.K. Wilson
Sex, as well as violence, has always been used to increase an audience across all platforms of media, especially where video is involved. Starting in the late 1980’s, sex was an element in most movies, late night drama TV shows, and especially mainstream music. The question to be asked: what kind of sex was it, and what kind of sex are we seeing now?
For the last 10 years, there have been staggering increases in the number of crime, law, and legal enforcement television shows, the number of fake, depicted scenarios of rapes, sexual assaults, and various other harmful acts either resulting from or leading to a morally questionable sexual act, in media, and the number of real acts of various sexual assaults being reported in the news media.
The American public, known to heavily invest a large amount of free time watching hours of television and internet coverage, has slowly been introduced to a different, darker view of sex than during the start of the television era for American viewers.
Even a consideration of the last 5 years can be used for analysis in any debate of sex in the mainstream media. One question remains: Is the increase in coverage of sexual violence in the media a result of an increase in actual acts, or the cause of an increase in the actual acts? Do media companies have any responsibility for these increases?
