Airline Apologizes for Showing Explicit Movie on All Screens, But Is Damage Already Done?
By Movieguide® Contributor
A 10-hour Sydney to Japan flight turned “super uncomfortable” when the same sexually explicit movie DADDIO played on every screen with passengers unable to choose a different movie.
“It featured graphic nudity and a lot of sexting – the kind where you could literally read the texts on screen without needing headphones,” one passenger posted on Reddit r/QantasAirways saying that the movie was “impossible to pause, dim, or turn it off.”
The passenger added that the movie played for almost an hour, and it was “super uncomfortable for everyone, especially with families and kids onboard.”
Qantas stated that a technical issue kept passengers from being able to select their own movies. Eventually, they changed to a family-friendly selection after trying to resolve the issue.
According to a statement by Qantas, there were a limited number of movies that could be shown, and “based on the request from a number of passengers, a particular movie was selected for the entire flight.”
Why a more appropriate movie was not initially selected in that scenario is not clear, as one person’s response to the passenger’s post read, “That is actually insane, like surely when you get the list of movies available you choose the least likely to offend. Like FINDING NEMO or DESPICABLE ME. How do you choose a movie that’s for mature audiences?”
“The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience,” a Qantas representative told Fox Business. “All screens were changed to a family-friendly movie for the rest of the flight, which is our standard practice for the rare cases where individual movie selection isn’t possible.”
While this incident might seem trivial, research has shown the effects on exposure to sexually explicit material does have a negative effect on children. For example, one longitudinal study called the Taiwan Youth Project found that adolescent children who were exposed to sexually explicit media were more likely to become sexually active earlier, have more sexual partners and engage in other risky sexual behaviors — all increasing the chance of contracting STIs and unplanned pregnancies.
“Exposure to sexually explicit media in early adolescence had a substantive relationship with risky sexual behavior in the emerging adulthood. Knowledge of this causal like effect provides a basis for building better preventive programs in early adolescence,” the study concluded and also called for an “early education on media literacy.”
Movieguide®’s founder Dr. Ted Baehr has spoken extensively about the effects on media and children as one previous article reads:
A study by the Rand Corp. in 2001 and 2002 of American children aged 12 to 17, reported by the Associated Press, found that those children who watch a lot of television with sexual content are about twice as likely to start having unmarried intercourse during the subsequent years as those with little such exposure. “Exposure to TV that included only talk about sex was associated with the same risks as exposure to TV depicting sexual behavior,” the Rand. Corp. said (Associated Press and Seattle Times, 09/08/04). A more recent study led by Dr. Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina of children aged 12 to 17 had similar findings that exposure to media sex leads to increased sexual promiscuity among teenagers. “The media are also important sources of sexual norms for youth,” this study reported (Reuters, 04/03/06).
All of these studies about the negative effects of the media are incredibly disturbing. This is especially true in light of studies by the Parents Television Council in 2006 and by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in 2005 showing that the amount of violence and sexual content on television has doubled since 1998 and a 2005 study by the think tank Third Way that the number of pornographic pages on the Internet has risen more than 3,000 percent since 1998 (Parents Television Council, 2006; Los Angeles Times, 11/10/05; and, Associated Press, 07/27/05)!
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