Once taboo television topics are now hitting the airwaves pretty regularly during prime time on U.S. television. The Parent Television Council set out to prove that sex on broadcast television has succumbed to the pressures from cable.
Desperate Housewives and Lipstick Jungle are getting raunchier to compete with explicit Secret Diary of a Call Girl and Tell Me You Love Me. The study found that not only is prime time more sexy, it's also more kinky. The study found shows with masturbation, sex toys, bondage or fetishistic sex. Visual references to a third party voyeur, transvestites, transsexuals, threesomes, kinky sex, bondage, sado-masochism and prostitution outnumbered the same for marital sex nearly three to one.
This is also being reflected in advertisements for the show, as seen in the cluster below.
Why This Trend Is Growing
- Increasing Sexual Content in Television Programming
- Opportunities for companies to develop parental control technologies or for streaming services to market themselves as more family-friendly.
- Competition Among Television Networks
- Opportunities for production companies to create more explicit content to compete with existing television shows.
- Changing Attitudes Towards Sexual Content on Television
- Opportunities for researchers to study the effects of sexual content on viewers and marketers to analyze the target audiences for these shows.
Industries Being Reshaped
- Entertainment Industry
- Opportunities for production companies and streaming services to create and distribute more sexually explicit content.
- Technology Industry
- Opportunities for companies to develop parental control technologies that are more effective or user-friendly.
- Advertising Industry
- Opportunities for marketers to analyze and target audiences for sexually explicit content, or to advertise more family-friendly shows or products.
