HIMYM’s Marshall and Lily: what kind of example are they setting for the children? / Eric McCandless/CBS
The Parents Television Council issued a report today on sex on broadcast TV. The report, “Happily Never After,” you may not exactly be stunned to learn, finds there to be too much of it. In particular, the report finds, there’s much more out-of-wedlock sex than marital sex: verbal references to nonmaritial sex outnumbered those to marital sex by 3 to 1, and for sex scenes, the ratio goes up to 4 to 1.
I’m fine with that. The report, I mean. (Maybe the sex too, but that’s another post.) I’ve locked horns with the PTC before, but mostly over their lobbying for government intervention to reshape TV to their liking. If they want to analyze and lobby TV with their complaints about content—in other words, to be TV critics—hey, the more the merrier.
Of course, I do disagree with some of their arguments. But I actually agree with some!
Disagreements first. The report summary makes the argument, “Today more than ever teens are exposed to a host of once-taboo sexual behaviors…” Why single out teens—as opposed to the much larger audience of adults—in the argument? Because this lays the groundwork for the PTC to call for government decency regulation: central to the PTC’s raison d’etre is the idea that if it is possible for someone under 18 to see something on TV, that is tantamount to their being forced to see it—and this, therefore, justifies the call for in loco parentis action to prevent you from making the wrong decisions for your kids.
The report catalogs an impressive list of examples and kinds of sexual behavior—threesomes, masturbation, incest and on and on. But typically, it doesn’t distinguish how the sex is presented: the mere fact of its discussion apparently equals an endorsement. Thus the MILF Island episode of 30 Rock—which presented the show as, basically, the collapse of Western civilization—is listed without comment as an example of “adult/child” sex on TV. Likewise, in the marital sex column, it cites one scene in How I Met Your Mother—in which Ted and Barney bust Marshall’s chops for only having had sex with Lily—as an example of how marital sex is denigrated. But anyone who watches HIMYM knows that Marshall and Lily’s sex life is generally treated as active and hot; enough plots have turned on their horndoggery that the PTC seems to be cherrypicking here.
Of course, I’m cherrypicking a bit too, and I do think they have a point about the portrayal of sex and marriage. It doesn’t bother me that there’s less marital sex on TV: just from the standpoint of plot, change is interesting and stability is not, so of course dating and hookups are going to play as hotter. But there is too much of a tendency, especially in TV comedies, to recycle the knee-jerk Married With Children joke about married sex being boring or nonexistent. It’s the white-people-dance-like-this cliche of sex humor, and the PTC finds plenty of examples, from Big Shots to Carpoolers to Rules of Engagement. (Of course, it’s telling that some of those shows were rightfully canceled.) The surprising thing is that there are no examples from ‘Til Death, which is basically one long married-sex-is-boring joke.
It would be nice to see TV writers give that hobbyhorse a rest. Of course, I have to wonder what the PTC would think about the “teens” being “exposed” to hot-but-positive portrayals of married sex. And how badly would it freak the teens out?