A massive amount of streaming TV shows aimed at small children contain sexualized LGBTQ+ content, despite efforts to create a more detailed ratings system to help parents navigate streaming content.
For instance, 41 percent of shows that are supposed to be G-rated for kids on Netflix still has blatant gay content, including transgenderism, according to a year-end report by the activist group Concerned Women for America (CWA).
The group also found that 21 percent of shows in the TV-Y category, which is meant to cover kids up to seven years, also has LGBTQ+ content. And the numbers only get worse for older kids. In the TV-Y7, covering ages seven and above, the content soars to 41 percent. Over all, across all the child-rated categories (TV-G, TV-Y, TV-Y7), 33 percent contain such content.
The group also rated how extreme the content is, as well, rating it from “meta,” to “implied,” to “queer-coded,” to “explicit,” and found that 24 percent of TVY7-rated programs had explicit gay sexual content, which included outright declarations of homosexuality and transgenderism and sexual behavior.
CWA went on to note that reboots of older series also upped the ante for gay content, even where there was no such content in the older shows.
“It is also worth noting that ‘reboots’ of older series, or later seasons of long-running series frequently introduced LGBTQ characters where none existed before. In addition to The Magic School Bus, this was observed with Power Rangers, The Baby-Sitter’s Club, She-Ra, and The Fairly OddParents, among others,” CWA said in its report.
“Any observant media consumer has been aware for some time of the increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and (in the last five years, especially) transgendered characters on television,” CWA says in it’s report. “When Ellen DeGeneres’ character Ellen Morgan came out on her primetime sitcom Ellen in 1997, it marked the first time a lead character on a network television sitcom openly identified as gay. What was a cultural flashpoint thirty years ago has become a commonplace occurrence. For decades the advocacy group GLAAD has been lobbying for increased representation in popular media, and they have tracked their progress with annual “Where We Are on TV” reports for the last twenty years. Their efforts have been overwhelmingly successful, and in its most recent report, GLAAD claims a 4% increase in representation on television in the last year alone.”
The report insists that the growing amount of gay content jammed into programing for kids coupled with the loud defense of that content issued by the creators of these shows proves that “content creators view children’s programming as a tool for cultural transformation, not merely a reflection of existing norms.”
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