Feeling old
Growing up I didn’t really have restrictions on what TV shows I could watch. I can remember watching The Simpsons in elementary school with my older sisters, and having nightmares after watching a segment about Bigfoot on Unsolved Mysteries around the same age. Last night, Steph and I were channel surfing before calling it a night and ended up watching that new NYC Prep show on Bravo. It’s basically a show about the lives of a handful of rich, private school kids in New York who think they are older and more important than they really are. But it wasn’t their attitudes that motivated me to write this blog post, but rather how casually they talked about drinking and hooking up. Some of the kids on this show are 17 and 18, but a few were as young as 15!
I have to admit that when I was 14 and 15, like any other adolescent boy, I gravitated toward anything on TV that had to do with sex or girls. But, I feel like TV shows aren’t the same as they used to be. In my day, this was an episode of Boy Meets World that focused on Corey and Topanga, or Shawn and blank, or if it was really juicy, something on MTV, like that show Undressed I would never admit to occasionally watching in high school. Now there are shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager on (ABC Family AND on at prime 8:00 pm time!) that portray 15 year-olds having sex as normal and without true consequences. Honestly, it frightens me to think what will be considered normal when I have kids going through adolescence. Yes, I know I sound like such an old fogey, but seriously, WHAT’S THE WORLD (of TV and media) COMING TO? At least there are some shows out there trying to tackle the same issue a little differently–shows like 16 and Pregnant, which I think is actually done in a very honest, non-spin-y way.
