One researcher noted that a child's television experience, or the amount of time a child spends watching television, has some effects on his or her brain development (Winn, 1977, p. 46). Thus, the subject of sex and television and its potential effect on children has been a source of great controversy. Despite outcries from parents, both network and cable television stations continue to carry programming which depicts sexual and sexually violent acts. Author Win sets forth one theory: all the hours that disturbed children spend involved in a television experience dull the boundaries between the real and the unreal (Winn, 1977, p. 74). She thinks that the act of watching television requires viewing projections of human images and the illusion of human feelings while requiring no human response from the viewer, and thus television encourages the viewer to detach from his or her acts-including antisocial acts. Winn believes that the problem is not that children learn about sex by watching television but that viewing explicit or violent acts on television conditions children to deal with people as if they were on television screen (Winn, 1977, pp.73-74). Predictably, the effects of too much sex on television have appeared in studies of juvenile offenders. While poverty and family pathology did not appear for the first time in American society in the 1950s through 1970s, a frightening new type of juvenile criminal did. These young criminals most often came from poverty, neglect, scholastic failure, degradation, broken families, "and heavy television viewing" (Winn, 1977, p. 73). Children had begun committing serious acts, like murder and rape. The common factor characterizing this new breed of "kids who kill" was complete absence of normal feeling such as guilt or remorse. .
Yet, according to several Republicans, the main problem on television is not violence at all: It's sex, "says Senator James Exon, who suggests a return to the golden age of television: Jack Benny, Desi and Lucy, Milton Berle, Edward R.