THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603290031
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Fifteen-year-olds, be forewarned. This column could be hazardous to your TV watching health.
Whisk this page away from your parents and bury your head in it. With luck, they'll be impressed by your intellectual curiosity and find a few moments of well-deserved, if ignorant bliss.
The subject is ``Friends,'' and the Thursday-night battle over whether our daughter should honor her generational right to watch the hottest television sit-com going or her parents' generational right to be appalled.
``Parents have the worst timing,'' she complains. This after her father has wandered into the room just in time to hear Phoebe explain her formula for determining, while dancing, (a) that her still unbedded boyfriend is not gay and (b) that he finds her physically attractive.
My daughter has a point. There are at least 10 minutes in any 30-minute visit with America's cutest twentysomethings where the subject is lost jobs, pet monkeys, food or exasperating parents. Of course this leaves plenty of room for full discussion later of premature ejaculation, foreplay techniques and what not.
Excuse my brain if the wires feel crossed.
One day we have President Clinton calling teen pregnancy our nation's most serious social problem and throwing the full weight of his office behind a national, grass-roots campaign to stem the tide.
The next we have television executives solemnly convening at the White House to commit to a ratings system that will warn parents about, if not weed out, programs with a high sex and violence quotient.
And the next, it's Thursday.
With a lineup as hip as Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Chandler and Joey, couldn't we have at least one young adult who regularly uses condoms?
Abstains?
Thinks?
Ditto the show's producers and writers.
Granted, compared with much television fare, the flavor of ``Friends'' is rollicking and innocent.
When a group of Virginian-Pilot reporters and editors recently monitored a week's worth of prime time for kids, they found a Thursday lineup that included a discussion of sex slavery, a mother who'd had an affair with the father of her daughter's son, and an adulterous soap opera couple under the sheets.
The teenagers I know would far rather spend time with the ``Friends'' crowd than any of that group.
But that's precisely the point.
The guests on Geraldo and Jenny Jones have sleaze written all over them; the characters on ``Friends'' don't. If there's a debate about who's more likely to subtly impact the thinking of America's youth, Rachel and Ross win hands down.
Even if most teenagers are more thoughtful than the cast, and no doubt they are, it still goads to think that script writers can be so nonchalant about the devastating social ills that can result from casual sex. About 1 million teenage girls give birth in America each year, a rate twice as high as that in Great Britain, six times as high as in France.
Few Americans need a primer on the consequences. In far too many cases, the results are poverty, heartache and a phalanx of children whose problems multiply as they grow. And we haven't even gotten to AIDS.
Shows such as ``Friends'' may not increase that pool of problems an iota. But armed with the soapbox of popularity, the writers might at least make a passing salute at acknowledging them. At the same time they're creating this likable - if vapid - crowd, it couldn't be much harder to mix in a smidgeon or a cupful of sexual responsibility.
And that means more than the one recent episode where Rachel and Monica competed for the apartment's last condom.
``Friends'' shouldn't let friends think the world's worst problem is a bad hair day. MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB