Teenage Sexual Behavior
Students ages 12 to 14 who view sexually explicit magazines, television shows, or movies or listen to sexually charged music are more than twice as likely to have intercourse by age 16 than those with less exposure to such content, concludes a study published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surveyed 1,017 white and African-American students when they were 12 to 14 years old and again two years later, asking them about their use of four different kinds of media and their sexual behavior. The research team also analyzed the sexual content in 308 television shows, movies, songs, and magazines seen or listened to regularly by the youths to calculate each student’s “sexual media diet.”
Vol. 25, Issue 31, Page 16