You know it, I know it, and the media certainly knows it--sex sells! But the real question is, who’s buying? It doesn’t take long to figure out just how important teens are to the financial bottom line. Teens are no longer the next generation of consumers, they ARE the consumers. They’ve got just the kind of impressionable minds, raging emotions and expendable cash that are ripe for the media to exploit. MTV anyone? The market is so saturated with teens that Hollywood even made a joke of the plethora of teen-focused movies in "Not Another Teen Movie." And you can’t go through a supermarket checkout without being bombarded by scads of teen magazines, almost as racy as their adult-focused counterparts.

Few parents would disagree that the media portrays a less-than-realistic view of sex and relationships, or at least it is contrary to what they would personally condone. You have teen magazines with stories of other teens and their sexual debuts and advice on "how to get that guy and keep him." There are movies that portray the "normal" life of teens, complete with beer binging parties and sexual experimentation. And then there are the sitcoms. These are the messages teens are getting from all sides, seldom countered by messages of reality. But when teens are desensitized to these types of messages maybe they don’t seem so warped after all. Maybe they seem--gasp--downright normal.

Do you ever see in any of these major media formats a teen that is emotionally distraught over having a one-night stand? Do they show the couple that used birth control and still somehow ended up pregnant? Are they really clear about how easy it is to get a sexually transmitted disease (STD), with or without vaginal intercourse, and with or without a condom? Even the consequences that they do present are trivialized. Case in point, the VALTREX commercials: You see young adults laughing and having fun as they go white-water rafting. One steps forward to tell about how VALTREX has made her life so much better, taking one pill a day instead of three. Oh no, she won’t let viral, incurable, inconvenient and embarrassing Herpes control her life. She’s got a pill that may prevent further outbreaks for 6 months or more. Never mind the fact that she can still transmit the disease to others and will have it for the rest of her life, or that they don’t know the safety or effectiveness of that drug for usage of over a year. Funny how leaving out those little details skews the picture.

Of course, it isn’t so funny if it is your child that gets fooled by the false messages of sexual invincibility presented by the media. It isn’t funny if no one tells her that what she sees and reads isn’t always completely accurate. It isn’t funny if she becomes pregnant, gets infected by an STD or is scarred emotionally because of a bad decision made on false information.

The bad news may be that we can’t depend on the media to change. After all, if sex sells, why change your marketing strategy.

The good news is studies show that the media isn’t the number one factor in influencing kids’ sexual behavior—parents are. Yes, parents. The false messages of the media can only take hold if those are the only messages a teen gets. And since parents are more influential, that should be extra motivation to combat those messages with the truth.