Is the depiction of nudity or sex harmful to minors?

Question

In other words, are the censorship & ratings of movies and other forms of art based on something more than nothing? ;) Or, in a broader sense, I am questioning the very widespread belief that kids should not be allowed to watch anything sex-related.

I am talking only the ratings/censorship based on the nudity, sex, explicitness, etc., i.e. not violence, profanity, drugs and other things movies can get bad MPAA rating (or an equivalent).

Please no anecdotal evidences, nor any discussions about whether kids should be interested in these things, or do they (should they?) understand them, and so forth. I am only interested in the direct and measurable harm aspect.

Answer 1

It seems that all of the answers have gravitated towards depictions of sex. Either because nudity equals sex (while in Hollywood, this appears to generally be the case - it's extremely rare to see a nude scene that isn't purely for titillation, rather than because someone just woke up or got out of the shower), or because it hadn't occurred to them that they might be separate.

If you want to know if social nudity - namely nudity that is purely nonsexual - has any effect on children, just ask a nudist.

This document explains one nudist club's stance on the effects of social nudity on children, and cites several studies. The conclusion they reach is that there is absolutely no negative effect, and there may be a positive effect on the psyche. The basic nudist philosophy is that the extreme modesty of the Victorian era was in fact harmful (which was proven by many studies before and since), and as such, perhaps its inverse - a total lack of modesty - is beneficial.

Studies aside, nudists themselves have observed no obvious negative effects in children - very young children especially like to be naked, and generally the idea that there's nothing inherently wrong with the human body in its natural state promotes better body image in older children as well. See the bottom of the document above about Casler's study, and the older children's reactions in his interviews.

It's generally parents' negative reactions to nudity in TV and film that are most harmful to children. Especially if that reaction is particularly unhinged and panicked - see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_show_controversy

Edit:

There was a paper written on this subject (actually, of children witnessing parental nudity and sexual activity, which of course, is different from what you see on TV, since parents have such a central and authoritative role in a child's life) in the Journal of Sex Research. The paper can be found on Scribd.com: http://www.scribd.com/doc/30328730/Childhood-Exposure-to-Parental-Nudity-Parent-Child-Co-Sleeping-and-Primal-Scenes

This is very likely the kind of thing (historically speaking, of course, which the paper touches on) that the MPAA and the government bases such things upon. Mostly this seems to harken back to Freud and early students thereof, who assumed that nearly every psychological disorder originated from witnessing such things as a small child. The paper linked above questions this assumption and tries to find actual clinical research to support the claim.

Answer 2

According to the Rand Corporation and the American Academy of Pediatrics, watching sex on TV is correlated to earlier sexual activity.

From 1:

The results showed that heavy exposure to sexual content on television related strongly to teens’ initiation of intercourse or their progression to more advanced sexual activities (such as “making out” or oral sex) apart from intercourse in the following year. Youths who viewed the greatest amounts of sexual content were two times more likely than those who viewed the smallest amount to initiate sexual intercourse during the following year (see figure) or to progress to more-advanced levels of other sexual activity. In effect, youths who watched the most sexual content “acted older”: a 12-year-old at the highest levels of exposure behaved like a 14- or 15-year-old at the lowest levels.

From 2:

Results. Multivariate regression analysis indicated that adolescents who viewed more sexual content at baseline were more likely to initiate intercourse and progress to more advanced noncoital sexual activities during the subsequent year, controlling for respondent characteristics that might otherwise explain these relationships. The size of the adjusted intercourse effect was such that youths in the 90th percentile of TV sex viewing had a predicted probability of intercourse initiation that was approximately double that of youths in the 10th percentile, for all ages studied. Exposure to TV that included only talk about sex was associated with the same risks as exposure to TV that depicted sexual behavior. African American youths who watched more depictions of sexual risks or safety were less likely to initiate intercourse in the subsequent year.

Answer 3

There are two things about studies that should be taken into consideration when reviewing any studies that claim to find a correlation between sex and nudity and their impact on minors: the results of the study and the beliefs of those who conducted the study in the first place, specifically as pertains to their own attitudes towards sex outside of a marriage.

With these two factors in mind, there are four potential outcomes of any potential study on this matter:

1. The study will find that there is a link between depictions of sex, and younger sexual activity, which, according to those who ran the study, is not a bad thing.

2. The study will find that there is a link between depictions of sex, and younger sexual activity, which, according to those who ran the study, is a bad thing.

3. The study will find that there is no link between depictions of sex, and younger sexual activity, which, according to those who ran the study, would not be a bad thing if there were.

4. The study will find that there is no link between depictions of sex, and younger sexual activity, which, according to those who ran the study, would be a bad thing if there were

So there is likely going to be a continuum or range that could influence the plausibility of such a study. Simply said, the study that meets the criteria of scenario number 2 above is the least likely to be reliable, and the study that meets the criteria for number 3 is the most likely to be reliable.

There's an interesting and related set of studies that also bear mentioning: those studies that maintain that either (1) abstinence education is sufficient education, or (2) comprehensive sex ed is the way to go.

It's important to recognize that the type of sexual education children receive can be a factor in helping to determine which studies about depictions of nudity or sex in art and entertainment might be more or less reliable. A truly effective study would have weighted the results appropriately by the kind(s) of education provided to the children who are part of the study (if any).

You can find studies that maintain just about anything with regard to the influence of sexual imagery and promiscuity among children. In the end, very few of them are likely to be truly reliable; instead, the question of what is right and wrong about adolescent sexuality should be debated by ethicists and not the statistics of a study whose flaws become immediately obvious the moment they are examined through an even remotely critical lens.