
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995                   TAG: 9505310047
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ANN GERHART KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STEAMY SEX ON TV LEAVES OUT ISSUE OF BIRTH CONTROL|

Look, I like to see Jimmy Smits' smooth nude flank as much as the next woman. Maybe even more. But when his ``NYPD Blue'' character, Bobby Simone, got naked and had sex with a beautiful fellow detective (after a brief negotiation at dinner), I sat up and said: ``Yo, Bobby! Aren't you forgetting something, honey?''

Excuse me, but where was the condom? Now, I'm a realist. I know TV can't sacrifice the almightly entertainment value and rating to an educational lecture, nor should it.

But couldn't two cops banter about a gun not being the only protection they pack?

Forget it. Even in a show that probes tough social issues and carries a stark warning about nudity and violence, birth control is the last taboo.

Television's executive suites are packed with hypocrites.

Here in 1995, with illegitimate pregnancy rightly a subject of outraged rhetoric, the four networks still reject all paid ads for contraceptives. They wring their hands and worry their viewers might be offended by any mention of sex and AIDS, although polls show the opposite.

Yet they smear sex all over the screen. It's usually casual and unprotected, with nary a word of the consequences.

In a study last year of soaps, a big favorite of junior and senior high school students, 50 hours of programming included 156 acts of sexual intercourse - and only five references to birth control or safer sex.

Prime-time wasn't much better. In a single hour, viewers were treated to 28 provocative references to sex, with only one reference to its often serious consequences.

Network execs utter blather like ``a very high percentage of our viewers find ads unacceptable or in bad taste,'' even though a 1987 Louis Harris poll found that 72 percent of Americans said they would not be offended by such ads.

This is backward and ridiculous. In 1971, when people thought the Rolling Stones were too sexy for TV, the first stations aired birth control product ads, in Decatur, Ill., and Honolulu, of all places.

But then the ads were banned, like those other killers, cigarettes and hard liquor. In 1982, the National Association of Broadcasters dropped the ban, but network executives unanimously maintain it. Fox alone pledged to accept condom ads, but hasn't shown any yet.

So best of luck to Planned Parenthood of New York. The agency defiantly has put together five short public service announcements around a simple theme: ``Birth Control. Try It. It Works.'' They're frank and funny and not titillating at all.

PSAs aren't paid ads. They run for free in a program sponsored jointly by TV stations and the Ad Council; you've seen them pushing literacy and a drug-free America.

But when it comes to pushing family planning, the stations don't like the PSAs any better than paid ads for contraceptives.

In New York, only the CBS station has agreed so far to run just one of the spots. Time-Warner has embraced all five for its cable channels, including MTV, which runs paid condom ads, and VH1. Next month, Planned Parenthood affiliates will try to cajole local stations into airing the spots.

PP of New York was emboldened to try this after many stations carried last year's CDC campaign pushing condoms to prevent AIDS.

So if the condom barrier was broken, then PP could promote their use for birth control, reasoned PP President Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret Sanger, who opened the country's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.

``Every child should be born wanted and loved, the result of a responsible and deliberate choice. Family planning is an American family value ... We use the word birth control; we consider rhythm and abstinence birth control, as well as artificial contraception.''

You would think any opposition to that would be indefensible in these times.

You would be wrong.

Money-grubbing is the culprit here: The station takes paid advocacy ads, like the slick anti-abortion series, ``Life. What a Beautiful Choice,'' but not advocacy PSAs.

Most stations get quite nervous at the very mention.

I don't believe that by mentioning family planning for 15 seconds here and there, whether in an ad or a sitcom, TV will wipe out ill-considered sex and its oft-sorry consequence, unwanted children.

But I'm sick and tired of deep thinkers passing around responsibility for values-shaping between parents, schools, television and Hollywood.

We all have to take responsibility for discussing family planning. If one set of glazed eyes fixes upon the image of the condom vs. the diaper, and that image takes root in the brain, and lower, that's great.

And if a hunk like Jimmy Smits would be man enough to bring up birth control before his next conquest, or even forgo the conquest because he doesn't really know her, that would be even greater.

Ann Gerhart is a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

by CNB