MTV Continues Crossing the Moral Line, Selling a Casual-Sex Teenage Soap-Opera to Tweeners Eager To See Themselves as "Adults"

I haven't seen it yet. (And I don't plan to; this is aimed squarely at tweeners, and I am not a tweener.)

An argument will be made that "context" saves it but no, it doesn't; you don't sell sex to tweeners under any circumstances, with any "context."

Even the old-style way of selling lascivious material, made famous by dime-store pulp magazines -- where you sell sex and sin for 30 pages, then wrap it up with a two page "and here's how everyone suffered for their sins" bit of morality-play CYA -- doesn't work, and never did work, because everyone knew (even at the time) that those last two pages were dull and obligatory and only inserted in the text to avoid obscenity prosecutions. (The bafflingly weird narrator's list of idiotic "lessons" to be learned from the lascivious doings in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seemed to be that sort of CYA sort of thing, but so arch and silly as to constitute a parody of the trope at the same time.)

So, yeah, I don't really care about context.

MTV continues to be a monstrous thing. It's evil, and CBS should be made to pay a price for being part of the MTV porn-for-tweeners company Viacom.

posted by Ace at 03:43 PM

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