Made it better, pointing out just how insignificant a person's exposure to the show really is.
While I realize this issue has been done to death, one thing I've noticed here is that the people who do complain about the content of the Fiends show don't really explain why it's offensive, dangerous, or even if the content at the park will even cause effects on children. I've tried to ask many times to no avail, so I did what any good science geek would do and look up studies to try to find the answers myself.
The main complaints I've noticed are A) The outfits themselves B) The dancing in the show and C) the nurses selling shots. To the best of my ability, the best I can guess that the implications of such content are that the show would leave to increased sexual activity in teens and drunken sexual violence. In order to address these, I looked for studies looking at the affects of sexual content on teens. I've also looked at studies of violence caused by different types of alcohol, in this case it would be spirits versus beer. I'm going to link all studies below for reference. For this, I'm not going to address that the shows are not intended for kids and it is clearly noted that it isn't.
I'm going to address issue “A” and “B” first, since I was lucky enough to find both of them in a single servery. I found a study [1] from the University of North Carolina (I choose one from a state with similar geographical and political statistics as Virginia to try to get it as close as possible) called “Linking Exposure to Outcomes: Early Adolescents’ Consumption of Sexual Content in Six Media”. In it, students from three public schools districts, a total of 3,261 Seventh and Eight graders were polled exactly what media they take in. For example, the study asked if you had seen “Toy Story” as well as “Big Mamma's House” and from there determined how much and what type of sexual content was in those movie. They broke the content from Movies (both viewed at home and in theaters), TV shows, Music, Magazines, Internet sites, and Newspapers into measurable units. For example, they noted exactly how long a movie had kissing, dating, nudity, ect.
After they listed what they watched, the students where then asked the level of current sexual activity as well as intention to engage in sexual activity. The results are actually fascinating. They do indicate that exposure to sexual content does increase sexual activity in teens. What was fascinating that the two types of media that have the largest responsibility are movies first and music second. I would have been certain that TV would be the worse due to it's exposure, but it's only third overall (but it's interesting to point out that magazines are more likely cause heavy sexual activity). For the distribution of the percentage of the sexual content across media, the sexual content of movies (in relation to the subject matter on hand here is) 46% partial/full nudity (this was the most relevant type of content listed to the outfits themselves, but I will admit the outfits are a long cry from even partial nudity) and 11% innuendo. TV is 63% nudity and 5% innuendo. When you break it down into specific characteristics, Movies are 55% sexual body parts, TV is 68% sexual body parts, and music is 35% sexual body parts. What I find really interesting is that genuinely unhealthy sexual messages (including sexual violence), Music (the form of music that's second most likely to cause sexual activity in teens) is at 9% while movies is only at 3% and TV is at 2%.
So where does a show at a theme park fall into place in all of this? That's a good question that I'm not 100% sure how to address. I really wish this study had Broadway shows
. I don't think that comparing it to movies, for this purpose at least, is good due to the length of the show (20 minutes) and the venue of the show, which is a large open area that's brightly lit and has other stimulation for people (not in /that/ way) such as eating and being at a theme park, as opposed to a movie theater where it's dark and there's less stimuli for people. The difference in venues can easily change the amount of focus one has on the media, which might explain why movies cause more activity than TV. I would really think that the show is most comparable to a TV show because of the focus and external stimuli in the viewing area as well as the length of an average TV show is 22 minutes with commercials in between. I don't think trying to compare the show to the music stats is good because but none of the complaints have been about song selection. If you do compare the show to a TV show, then ultimately, yes, the show could cause an increase in sexual activity, but no worse than movies, music, or any other media that exists out there.
The fact that they didn't look at stage performances leads me to think that stage performances are such a small part of the media somebody consumes, that it's not worth researching. This speaks as to how little the affect that the show would have on kids. Let's just take your average kid, we'll call him Little Billy, who can watch hundreds of hours of TV a year, let's also assume that he's watching Disney Channel, Nick, Cartoon Network, stuff that's popular with kids. Even though the content isn't as explicit as the Nurse outfits all the time, there still being exposed to plenty of sexual content including kissing, dating, and swimsuits. Keep in mind, sexual content isn't just girls in skimpy outfits, sexual content can be a lot more subtle, as described in the study. The channels I mentioned above have no problem making kissing and dating glamorous, so this situation is very possible. According to this study [4], your average high school teenager watches TV 20 hours a week on TV and internet. That's 1,040 hours a year on average. Let's also just say that 2% (a very conservative number, IMO, but we'll go with that) contains some form of sexual content, which is a total of 21 hours a year. When Little Billy's family misses the warnings, watches the Fiends show, and never goes back to the show again during the season because they're upset for reasons “X” “Y” and “Z”. That means the Little Billy just got exposed to 20 minutes of sexual content from the show. When you look at the 20 hours a year of sexual content from TV and 20 minutes a year of sexual content from the show, it kind of seems rather insignificant in the long run looking at the numbers.
For the third complaint, that the shots the employees sell is going to cause more violence as well as violence of a sexual nature, I looked at a few studies. I'm not going to go deep into the fine details of the studies because I don't think they're that interesting. The first of which I looked at a study [2] about whether alcohol causes violence in general. The ultimate conclusion was, “Alcohol apparently may increase the risk of violent behavior only for certain individuals or subpopulations and only under some situations and social/cultural influences.” Not a really big surprise there, but what it does say is that alcohol doesn't cause violence for everybody. With that being established, I decided to look to see if the type of alcohol made any difference. I unfortunately did not find any free comprehensive studies, but I did find an abstract (or overview) of a study [3] which says “The findings suggest that the assault rate is related to consumption of beer and spirits in bars and restaurants, while the homicide rate is linked to consumption of spirits in private contexts. “ Without looking at the violent rates, I can't be for sure, but I do seem think that it means there's not a notable difference between the assault rates between those who consume beer and those who consume liquor. It also states that even though liquor is more responsible for murder, it's in a private home area. With the those two studies, I think it's safe to say that having shots at the park does not lead to anymore violence than the park would have if it just sold beer.
One other question I had is do provocative outfits themselves lead to increased violence? Every single article I find out there seems to suggest that sexual assault has very little to do with the outfits and is more about the offender's desire to control. So it doesn't look like there's any additional risk with the park having employees in those outfits.
So where does that leave us now? These studies have shown that the show won't cause any problems that won't happen to a person if they weren't exposed to the Nurses. If you want to look into what I found, the links are below.
[1] http://teenmedia.unc.edu/pdf/Mass.pdf
[2] http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm
[3] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1360-0443.1998.9356895.x/abstract
[4] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080312172614.htm
