Going back to when I was a kid, there were certain rules
in my house regarding television. One rule was “don’t sit too close” on the
thought that an expansive view of a screen that took up my entire field of
vision would somehow melt my eyes. (In retrospect, given my need for corrective
lenses, that one may not be off.) Another rule involved what I wasn’t allowed
to watch after 10pm, which for years I assumed was some secret cache of
information that would blow the lid of the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the
truth about the reality of Batman, but turns out it had more to do with
swearing and lower-cut dresses.
But there was always one maxim that overruled all others;
one propagated by everyone from my grandmother to my teachers to the slightly
scary old neighbor woman who lived next to our house: Too much TV will rot your
brain.
Silly television. That's what my smart phone is for.
The notion that watching too much television would
permanently warp my development, both moral and intellectual, was taken as a
given. It was rooted in a firm discomfort with the notion that this magic box
was going to create a legion of unintelligent, immoral deviants that would
populate the world and cause things like the decline of the church and the end
of wholesome family entertainment about singing families who perform for Nazis.
It’s into this mindset that panic over the rise of
reality television has really taken root in a small echo chamber of the world.
(One that is, ironically, increasingly becoming accessible to people who fear
that going away from The Way Things Used to Be through another temptation of
modernity – the computer.) that panic scaled significant heights with MTV’s
reality franchise 16 and Pregnant and
the show’s three spinoff series: Teen Mom,
Teen Mom 2, and Teen Mom 3. (Note to people who don’t watch this stuff – yes, those
are the real titles. I was suspicious too.)
"We're empowered!"
Since 2009, the four shows have followed the stories of
teenage high school girls through their pregnancy and first year of motherhood,
a formula that has been perfect for MTV because not only does it bring in teen
viewers but it also gives moral crusaders something to scream about and those
who are secretly or not-so-secretly titillated by sexually active teenage girls
things something to drool over. The predictions when these shows began were
dire: They would ruin society, they would make pregnancy into something that
would be glamorous for teenage girls what with the promise of a TV series
dedicated to your pregnancy and the attendant People Magazine cover spreads
that went with them, that we’ve done wrong by Our Girls by not making them into
proper ladies who knew how to keep their knees together long enough for some
boy to agree to marry them first.
But guess what? It hasn’t happened. In fact, turns out
the shows have
led to a decline in teenage birth rates. Turns out that when teenage girls
watch what happens when one of their peers gets pregnant and gets her own TV
show, the tendency isn’t to emulate her but to go running to the nearest CVS to
stock up on birth control. Seriously – the study in that link above mentions
that upon watching the shows, girls show an increase in internet searching and
Tweeting about birth control and abortion.
This is, obviously, good news. Aside from the fact that
it’s just nice to know that teenage girls are more competent and capable of
analysis than we collectively give them credit for, it’s also bodes well for
the possibility that I may finally be able to convince my mom to let me watch
TV shows late at night for once.
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