The Media Is Just Too Darn Suggestive These Days

With all this business about girls dressing like tramps and articles stating that 140 incidents of sexual behavior occur on prime-time network television each week I am starting to worry that the media might be a tad over the top.

Sure, you will automatically dismiss that kind of talk as an aging guy romancing the days of his youth. I usually think that also. I know we had suggestive TV when I was a kid. And R-rated movies. We didn't have the Halloween costumes some of these girls wear but I can't say that is going to tank our culture. We had Porky's and civilization didn't end.

So I sit down next to Lady Scientist to discuss it with her. You know, get the female perspective. She's watching Veronica Mars on the handy Replay DVR. It's a rerun but I haven't seen any of them since the first season so it's new to me even if it's from last spring. We are chatting along and suddenly I hear them make reference to a Clint Eastwood movie and then a Mexican comic book character. I guess because the guy she is talking to is a latino cop.

I grab my laptop.

"Are you blogging again?" she asks. "These people can't possibly find you that interesting."

"Noooo, I am googling Dirty Sanchez. He was a comic book character. Mexican or something. I can't remember."

"I don't think that's what they're talking about."

"That's why I am Googling it. If you don't know, and I don't know ... Google."

"I didn't say I didn't know. I said that's not what they're talking about."

"You know?"

"Of course," she says, "I'm an aerospace engineer."

????

But I let that go and she tells me what it is and why it is on TV during prime time and explains that TV networks aren't reflecting the mores of society these days, they are creating them. In order to be edgier and more relevant to the target youth market they have to go out of their way to be a little more flagrant each year. It doesn't help that cable is exempt from censors either.

"Okay, at least explain to me why they think teenagers want to do this Sanchez thing."

"No one actually does it," she says. "They just talk about it. So if 2% of kids talk about it, desperate TV writers will stick it in their show in order to appeal to the insecure kids who want to feel cool. Didn't you just do a whole rant on why NY should ban KFC? You should go after TV."

"Actually, I was against the KFC ban. Got clubbed like a baby seal for it too. But yeah, if New York people care about kids enough to ban optional food they should certainly frown on TV references to comic book characters doing stuff that I can't even see on stage in Tijuana."

But just to be sure it wasn't old age I decided to check some of my old comic books and see if they were as bad when I was a kid and I scanned in the one you see below.

Nope. Nothing suggestive here: