Ottawa, August 16, 2000 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning a promo for the late night SexTV show, broadcast by CITY-TV (Toronto) at 7:15 p.m. The promo began with the message “The average male has a sexual thought every 8 seconds”, followed by a scene in which the camera panned slowly over the body of a nude woman, lying sideways, facing the camera, with her legs and arms discretely covering her breasts and genitalia. The promo ended with the message “But who is counting?”. A viewer complained that the promo is “morally wrong, degrading to women, and harmful to children to see and think about how often their fathers, uncles, grandfathers think about sex.”
The Ontario Regional Council considered the decision under the Sex-Role Portrayal Code, as well as the scheduling provision of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Violence Code. The Council found no breach of either Code, ruling that the promo was not demeaning to either women or men, and that its broadcast prior to the 9 p.m. watershed hour was permissible.
With respect to the portrayal of the naked woman, the Council found that, while “the advertisement perpetuates to some extent the stereotype of the woman as sexual object, ... many elements of the depiction of the woman in the promo, such as the strong eye contact of the woman with the camera (and thus the viewer), go a long way to attenuating the objectification of the woman as a sexual play-thing.” On the issue of the promo’s negative or degrading commentary regarding men, the Council did not find that the promo portrayed men as “unidimensionally sex-obsessed”. It stated that
On balance, [...] it would be unreasonable to conclude that the promo suggests that there is no other side to men than their sex drive. Moreover, the promo is obviously tongue-in-cheek and attempting to solicit the interest of the viewer to plumb the male sex drive and other “mysteries” of the sexual world.
As to the scheduling issue, the Council noted CITY-TV’s acknowledgment that the promo in question had run at 7:15 pm as a result of an error in the cataloguing of the show’s two promos but it did not find that CITY-TV had thereby breached the scheduling provision of the Violence Code. The Council stated that, so long as the content of the promo is not “intended for adult audiences to the exclusion of a non-adult audience, ... a show which can itself only air in a post-watershed time frame ... in the originating time zone, can be promoted prior to the watershed.” In this case, the Council concluded that, while “it would be more appropriate not to run such promos at a time when children could be expected to be watching,” the promo’s pre-Watershed broadcast was not in breach of the Code.
Canada’s private broadcasters have themselves created industry standards in the form of Codes on ethics, gender portrayal and television violence by which they expect the members of their profession will abide. In 1990, they also created the CBSC, which is the self-regulatory body with the responsibility of administering those professional broadcast Codes, as well as the Code dealing with journalistic practices first created by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada (RTNDA) in 1970. More than 430 radio and television stations and specialty services from across Canada are members of the Council.
– 30 –
All CBSC decisions, Codes, links to members’ and other web sites, and related information are available on the World Wide Web at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the National Chair of the CBSC, Ron Cohen, at (###) ###-####.