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Sex and The City dangerous for girls?

Categories: Teens & tweens, Health & safety, Media, That's entertainment

ABC News has a rather interesting article on the dangers of young girls watching Sex and The City. The piece features the story of "Lisa" and the impact the show had on her as a fourteen-year-old girl. She says she became hooked on the show and began to emulate what she saw. She promptly lost her virginity, started drinking Cosmopolitans and began regularly cheating on her boyfriend with up to seven guys in one week.

"When you're that age you try to emulate people on TV. Carrie smoked, so I smoked, Samantha looked at hooking up with random people as not a big deal, so that's what I did too," said Lisa. "It wasn't 'Sex and the City's' fault. I love the show, but I think it made it a little easier to justify my behavior."

Lisa, now 22, eventually saw the error of her ways and is now a married Mormon living in Utah with her husband and two children. Of kicking her SATC addiction, she says, "I had to sell my DVDs on eBay. But now it's OK. It took a while to get here."

Lisa's story may be a dramatic example of the influence of television, but many believe SATC did change the way women view hooking up. "It did have some impact given that it was a sea change in how women talked about sexuality and what was shown on a network -- full frontal nudity, talking about affairs, vibrators, etc.," said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociology professor. "If it's not permission giving, it at least demystifies and normalizes what goes on in women's lives in a more than snickering way

That's all well and good if you are talking about adult women, but what about impressionable teens? University of Connecticut's School of Medicine professor Dr. David Greenfield thinks there is a real danger there. "With teenagers and young adults, there's a certain degree of role modeling that goes on. There's a certain 'if it's done on the screen then it's OK, it's normal,'" he said.

The one thing I kept looking for in this article and never found was a reference to the parents of girls like Lisa. Where are they when their daughters are watching sexually-charged shows like SATC? I realize that monitoring the television-watching habits of a 14-year-old girl can be difficult, but it's not impossible. My daughter was sixteen years old when SATC first began airing on HBO. Neither of us watched it because by that time, I had pulled the plug on our cable television subscription.

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