Smallville: More nudity this season

In a recent interview Tom Welling stated the following:

“Apparently, we’re going to see more and more nakedness this season, from what we hear,” said Tom Welling, who plays Clark Kent.

Here are Welling’s feelings about this development:

“My whole take is, if you can do the scene without it, the it shouldn’t be there,” Welling said. “But apparently there’s[sic] going to be some situations these characters find themselves in this year, that I guess they got to be naked.”

Now I understand that WB’s target demographic for Smallville is 18-34 year old adults, however this show has a HUGE teen viewership, and they bloody well know it. Why does Hollywood (yes, I know I’m using that as a generic term) seem to be intent on pushing this stuff on kids?

A study found here:

Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior

concluded that “Watching sex on TV predicts and may hasten adolescent sexual initiation. Reducing the amount of sexual content in entertainment programming, reducing adolescent exposure to this content, or increasing references to and depictions of possible negative consequences of sexual activity could appreciably delay the initiation of coital and noncoital activities.”

The short version is that if kids are exposed to sexual situations on TV (and I would add movies), they are more likely to engage in the activity.

Kids in the 90th percentile of watching programs that include sexual content were twice as likely to engage in some sort of sexual activity within the following year as those in the 10th percentile.

Of course this is one of those things that I don’t believe required a “study” to figure out.

And please don’t give me the old “the human body is a beautiful and natural thing” argument. We all know damned well that when nudity is used on a TV show the purpose (most of the time) is to titillate.

Source: Comics Continuum

Don't get sold out. Buy Dark Knight tickets now!