I found this in this month's issue of The Atlantic Monthly (subscriber link). It's highly interesting because it comes out at the same time as this story about music and sexual activity. The study mentioned in The Atlantic looked at different types of media (TV, movies, magazines, music) and found a correlation between salacious content and salacious conduct. Excerpt:
[T]he study found that the students between the ages of twelve and fourteen who enjoyed the largest “Sexual Media Diet” (SMD) were the most likely to engage in sexual activity within the next two years–but only if they were white. Among black teens, there was no correlation between SMD and sexual activity, even though black teens tended to be more sexually experienced, and to spend more time consuming media, than their white peers. The authors note that teens tend to base their sexual behavior on perceptions of their peers' activity, and suggest that a hypersexualized media may function as “a kind of sexual superpeer that encourages them to be sexually active.” For black teenagers, however, they speculate that the power of “real peer groups that promote early and frequent sexual activity”–particularly the cultural pressure on “urban black males who are encouraged to achieve status by having as many sexual partners as possible”–may be stronger than it is for white teens.
