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In the late 1970s, when Movieguide editor-in-chief Ted Baehr was director of the TV Center at City University of New York, he was immersed in studies of how the mass media influence children at different stages of cognitive development. Now a widely quoted media critic, Baehr continues to be concerned for the impact of movies on children.

Baehr, who grew up as the child of two Hollywood actors, is also concerned about the transformation of the entertainment culture from within. He has just completed writing So You Want to Be in Pictures?, which he told CT editor David Neff contains "a positive portrait of a lot of good people doing a lot of good things in Hollywood." The book will be published in January by Broadman & Holman.

In September the Rand Corporation released a study that showed teens who view the most sexually related material on television are twice as likely to engage in intercourse as those who watch the least. What do you make of it?

It's not surprising for people who have read the studies of the influence of media on everything from buying products to violence. Of course, not every youth has a propensity to copy sexual activity, although sexual scripts of behavior seem to be the most likely to be copied.

The rising concern today is not because there's a return to Victorian prudishness, but because of the increase in sexually transmitted diseases. Another study showed that 50 percent of sexually active kids have a sexually transmitted disease by the time they're 24 or 25 years old.

And how does the incidence of watching more sex-oriented scenes relate to the difference between cable programming and traditional broadcast?

Earlier studies point out that suggestion, innuendo, and jokes are as provocative, if not more so, than explicit sex. Dr. Victor Cline found that prisoners who had committed sex crimes were turned off by explicit depictions of sex, and I would imagine the same is true of youth. They wanted innuendo, jokes, and the "come hither" that suggests the other person wanted the sex. For susceptible kids in the adolescent stage of cognitive development, titillation is actually a much more powerful draw than the overt stuff that everybody gets so angry about.

Physically, teens are maturing sexually. How does this relate to their cognitive development?

Although teens have reached the point where they've got their raging hormones and adult physical attributes, their brain development and cognitive development do not end until their late 20s.

Teens experience an extreme change in their biology while they have not yet learned to worry about the other person's concerns. Male teenagers especially think the other person wants what they want. They'll often take advantage of the other person because of that. The older you get, the more likely you are to respect and understand the other person's position.

When I had teenagers at home, I was more worried about the subtle messages they would pick up from PG-13 movies than about some of the more explicit images they might see in some R movies.

The rating system does not help at all in this regard because, first, the rating system has refused to have standards; second, it refuses to incorporate a lot of what we know about child psychology; and third, what you really need is responsibility and not ratings. Responsibility means that the old motion picture code, which people laugh at, said you couldn't show sex or violence in such a way that kids would want to emulate it. That did not mean that you couldn't have sex or violence-it was broadly interpreted in some cases-but it was certainly better than what we have now.

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November 2004, Vol. 48, No. 11