It occured to me today that we need ratings for ads on tv. They have ratings on all the shows. With these I can use the digital cable box to block programming by rating, by channel or by title. But unfortunately there is no way for me to preemptively block ads that I don’t want my kids to see. For example, I let my 10 year old son watch King of the Hill. This is a very funny show, that amazingly is made by the same guy who created Beavis and Buthead. They show re-runs of older episodes on F/X on weeknights at 6 and 6:30 pm. For some reason, they run commercials for a male-enhancement dietary supplement called enzyte during this time. They also run ads for another F/X show called nip-tuck. Nip-tuck is a really lame “drama” that runs after 10pm and is totally inappropriate for young kids. The promo is almost inappropriate. I watched about 10 minutes of one episode once. I am not a prude, but I won’t watch this show. It is just plain lame. I don’t want my kids watching it and I have it blocked. But there is no way for me to block the commercials. Another example is ads for movies. I don’t really want my kids seeing ads for crap like Doom and Saw II. These movies have absolutely no redeeming qaulities and neither one should be advertised on prime time or earlier tv. If there were ratings for ads I could readilly block this crap, but of course the networks will never allow this because it would destroy their revenue stream. But frankly I don’t care. As much as I pay for cable every month, I wan’t some way around this.
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Just this morning in the car I was listening to an NPR piece about the Conservative Advertising Association of America (or something equally stale sounding) and their protests against the Harriet Meiers appointment and shocked myself when the first thought that went into my head was, “Now there’s a conservative group I could get behind.”
I, 27 years old, am freaked out by many commercials…somehow whenever I’m flipping through On Demand in the middle of the night, all alone, I end up having to watch an advertisement for The Ring II. Since I remember my little brohter refusing to go to bed because he was too afraid of thinking about Ursula from The Little Mermaid, most kids would not react too well to these commercials. And the way sex is used to sell everything is a whole other story.
Our kids are 14 and 10 and we have always been open with them about sex. We have talked to them honestly from a young age about where babies come from. We talk to to them about relationships. We are not prudes, or opposed to sex or porn in general. However all that doesn’t mean we want the kids watching what is essentially softcore porn or the gratuitous violence in ads for movies like DOOM. What is really fucked up is that they bleep people using colorful language like fuck and bullshit on the daily show, but they show so much skin and/or violence on ads for tv shows and movies. I can already block the tv shows (but wouldn’t block it for some language) but I can’t block the commercials. The bizarre thing is they do rate trailers in the theaters but not on tv.