Of particular concern are shows that are violent, gendered, sexualised, and have advertising aimed at children.
But parents say such content is "difficult to avoid" and only half have rules on what their kids can watch, down from 80 per cent 15 years ago.
Two things leaped out at me. First, that in 50% of households children can watch anything on TV. And second, that there are parents who are concerned that TV shows are "gendered".
The concern about "gendering" is a liberal one. Liberals want us to be self-determined; our sex though is predetermined; so liberals want our sex not to matter in life. So they hold sex distinctions to be socially constructed and believe that children should not be exposed to "gendered" patterns of life on TV.
Such liberal parents should probably not take their kids to the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill. I stopped off there the other day to get money from an ATM. I passed by four or five 20-something women who had clearly been watching the TV show Mad Men. They were wearing the most beautiful and elegant dresses and looked gorgeously feminine.
And yet given the voting patterns in the area, there's a decent chance that these young women were Greens voters.
So even in trendier lefty areas, the campaign for a genderless society is not going so well. It's going to be difficult to persuade young men that gender is a social construct when young women present themselves in such a charismatically feminine way.
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