Growing Up in a World Rated R

Jennifer Oconitrillo and her friends began their day off from school at her home in Culver City with a dose of Sally Jesse Raphael. Jennifer, a 12-year-old with a big smile and braces, defended Sally’s guest, a 14-year-old girl who had been sleeping with her 18-year-old boyfriend against her parents’ wishes. The girls then sang some songs by one of their favorite rappers, Eminem, whose lyrics include fantasies about sexual encounters, rape and murder.

Timothy Goldman, a friendly 15-year-old freshman at Dorsey High School, spent a sunny Saturday afternoon playing what he called “simulation games for killing people” in the lobby of the Magic Johnson Theatres in the Crenshaw district. Later, he went home and channel surfed, stopping briefly on cartoons and music videos.

Jake Parsons, 15, hung out Sunday at the Irvine Spectrum, where he and three friends bought tickets for a PG-rated movie at the mall’s 21-screen megaplex, then sneaked into the R-rated “The Exorcist.” Later, Jake settled in his room with his computer, his stereo and his 250-channel TV.

On the weekend after members of the U.S. Senate grilled Hollywood executives on their marketing of R-rated movies to minors, youngsters such as Jennifer, Timothy and Jake were busy living out their daily lives. And, as usual, they were absorbing, among other things, a slew of violent and tawdry images. Not only from films but also from radio, video games, computers, CD players and TV news, commercials and entertainment.

Adults long have complained that entertainment geared to adolescents has gone too far. But never before have there been so many ways to be exposed to so much explicit and graphic content--and never has it been marketed so directly and persistently to so many youngsters.

“The average young child now has got access to more information, data and mediated experience than ever before in the history of planet Earth,” says Robert Thompson, professor of film and television at Syracuse University.

“It always looks like the end of the world,” says Thompson, who is also president of the international Popular Culture Assn. “There will always be children who will use the media for what they are supposed to, and those who won’t.”

With this reality in mind, Jake’s father trusts his son to monitor himself. Timothy’s mother believes she has a limited right or ability to tell a 15-year-old what to do. And even Jennifer’s mother, who has restricted her daughter’s TV viewing to two hours a day and has taken away her computer, believes that she has limited influence over what Jennifer sees and hears. “I don’t think I can cover up the sun with my hands,” she says.

Here is a glimpse into the media-saturated worlds of three Southland youngsters:

Best Friends at a Difficult Age

Jennifer Oconitrillo invites her three best friends over to her house on Friday. Their goal is to practice a dance routine for their school’s multicultural day. The four are seventh-graders at St. Gerard Majella Elementary School in Culver City and have known each other since kindergarten.

They find themselves in that difficult, tender age when their talk is bigger than their walk; when they are only starting to figure out the tremendous power of female sexuality. One minute they are all awkward innocence, another minute is something else.

Today, they start off in the living room watching Sally. They decide that the 14-year-old girl’s father is mean and that both the girl’s parents are wrong for spying on their kids.

But they are restless and impulsively turn off the tube. “Let’s go outside and practice, you guys,” says Jennifer, dressed in denim short shorts and a blue Guess T-shirt. They settle their black CD player on the front steps, play a samba and dance for about 20 minutes. “The guys at our school, they just want to be freakin’ all the time,” explains Jennifer, waving her hand dismissively in the air. She shows the group what freakin’ is, moving her hips back and forth suggestively. Last year, the girls giggle, Jennifer got in trouble at their school’s Halloween dance for freakin’.

OK, enough dancing, they decide. The girls run inside and jump back on the couch in front of the wide-screen television set. Jennifer hustles to her parent’s room and grabs a stack of DVDs--several of them R-rated. There’s Mel Gibson’s “Payback” and “Braveheart,” Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow,” Will Smith’s “Enemy of the State.”

Jennifer can’t figure out how to hook in the DVD machine to the television. So they just sit around, with the TV blaring in the background, and munch on popcorn while talking about movies, music and soap operas. One of Jennifer’s favorite subjects is Eminem. Though Jennifer doesn’t own any of his CDs, she borrows them from her cousin. She also hears him all the time on the radio and MTV.

“I think Eminem is the cutest guy in the world,” she says, with a dreamy look. The 12-year-old closes her eyes and says breathlessly, “Ahhhh, he’s my boyfriend!” She can’t remember the title of her favorite song but she says it goes something like this: she starts reciting sexually explicit lyrics that cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

Jennifer’s mother, Marta, sighs as she stands in the kitchen. “You want to protect them and give them good examples and a religious foundation,” she says. “That’s all you can do. These are good girls.”

The Costa Rican-born Marta believes her American-born daughter is in a better environment here. When she visits relatives in Central America, she sees 12- and 13-year-olds smoking and drinking and going to nightclubs. At least in this country, she says, it’s illegal to do that until you’re 21.

Eventually the girls go out to play volleyball. Jennifer and her friend Jerica Maculam are on the school team and usually practice about three hours a day before going home and doing their homework.

Outside, Jennifer says: “I just hope Eminem never quits. I would still love him. I would still marry him, even if he wasn’t popular.”

Suddenly, a neighborhood boy around her age rides by on a bicycle, smiles and waves. Jennifer looks up and dismisses the boy to her friends. “They just want to be little pimps,” she says. The friends nod in agreement.

They are asked, do you know what pimp means?

Jennifer laughs embarrassingly. No, she confesses. She just hears Ice Cube and others say that word all the time on the radio and in interviews on MTV. She asks a friend what it means.

“How can I explain it?” the girl ponders, her cheeks flushed as pink as her T-shirt. “It’s a person who thinks they can get any girl.”

They remember one time at school when a boy came up to Jennifer and called her “a $2 ho.” Jennifer knew what that meant from listening to gangsta rappers on MTV and the radio. So she slapped him. All the boys at the school talk to girls that way, Jennifer explains.

Finally, evening rolls around and they take off for a nearby ice skating rink. Inside, there is so much electrifying teenage hormonal energy that the girls don’t even notice the cold. Jennifer skates fast, breaking away from the group, dancing to the sounds of Christina Aguilera and ‘N Sync. As they skate behind her, friends Jerica and Adriana Garcia quietly acknowledge that maybe some of the music they like is inappropriate. Maybe they are growing up too fast.

But, says Adriana, “I can’t listen to country, I can’t listen to Spanish music. I like hip-hop, rock and alternative rock. It’s our music, so I feel I have to defend it.”

‘Children’s Target Practice’

Early Saturday afternoon, the lobby of the Magic Johnson Theatres is an airy, noisy place. The bank of video games is fully engaged. Kids and grown men--one with a toddler in tow--are firing plastic guns that control the action on games like “House of The Dead,” in which shooters send bloody body parts flying in all directions. With $3 in his pocket and a blue slushie in his hand, Timothy Goldman patiently sits on a bench, waiting his turn.

A friendly freshman who plays trombone in the Dorsey High School band, Timothy is a weekend regular here. It’s where he remembers spending time with his father, who no longer lives with him and his mother.

Born 15 years ago, at about the same time home video game players were first introduced, Timothy can explain every game in the arcade, bloody or benign.

Sometimes, while he’s waiting to play, he listens to gospel tapes (one features a group called the Gospel Gangsters) on a portable cassette player.

Timothy is crazy about TV, especially cartoons and old movies, and he downloads music and games on a computer at the community center where he goes after school. He knows all about Big Boy, the Power 106 talk show host, and what Big Boy said Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky in the White House. He doesn’t believe it ever happened.

Timothy also knows what social critics say about violent video games. “The shooting in the schools,” he says, “they said the kids got it from a game. I thought that was not true at first.” Then, he says, he and his father went hunting in Mississippi and his father reminded him he could practice his aim on the video games. Now he calls the games “children’s target practice.”

Of course, he emphasizes that neither he nor the other players would ever shoot anyone. He plays video games because he’s bored.

Teachers at Dorsey High School say entertainment media are not only a way of life for many students in the neighborhood, long troubled by violence, but also offer a fantasy escape from that life.

Among Timothy’s favorite shows and heroes are ones about as far from the area’s bleak streets as can be imagined: colorful animated cartoons, silent movies, the flying aces of World War I. He says he’s so skilled at flight simulation games on the Internet that fellow players call him “the Blue Baron.” Riding home from the mall, he names every famous pilot from that era, as well as the make and model of every vintage car he sees on Crenshaw Boulevard. His teachers say he sometimes affects the courtly speech of a ‘40s movie star in a smoking jacket (“I see congratulations are in order.”) When he gets home, a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment, his mother is angry that he has no good explanation for how he spent all of the $20 she gave him that morning.

She says she doesn’t like the rappers and their misogynistic lyrics but believes she has little sway over what her son listens to. Timothy says he quit listening to Eminem--but only for a while--because he knew she didn’t like the best-selling rapper.

Timothy flips on the TV. Cartoon dogs and cats chase each other. Music videos feature undulating belly dancers. Olympians wrestle.

If he had a dog, he says, it would be his best friend. But as it is, the honor goes to a small green iguana, “Iggie,” who lives in a glass terrarium.

On the wall over the TV, he has hung a framed poster of rapper Tupac Shakur, whose lyrics centered on guns and gangs before he was gunned down himself in 1996.

“Everybody liked him,” Timothy says. “When he rapped, he related a lot of stuff. He grew up in a single-parent home. A lot of people here grew up in a single-parent home. They’re on welfare. He was on welfare. He didn’t get to go to college. People didn’t get to go to college.”

Timothy says he once had a poster of Eminem on his wall too. But it fell down when the neighbors shook the wall. Now, the last things he sees before he goes to sleep at night are Iggy and Tupac.

Easy to Get Around Restrictions

Late Sunday afternoon, Jake Parsons emerges with three buddies from the Irvine Spectrum 21 into the balmy, palm-lined terrace of the Irvine entertainment center.

At the megaplex, as in theaters everywhere, youngsters younger than 17 must be accompanied by adults to see movies rated R, according to the guidelines of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Inside, at least seven infants, toddlers and elementary schoolers have just watched the R-rated slasher movie “Urban Legends” with adults. On their own, the Woodbridge High School sophomores, all 15, sneaked into the R-rated movie they came to see, the enhanced re-release of the 1973 horror classic, “The Exorcist.”

To get in, the boys used a technique they’ve honed in the last three years. First they buy tickets for a PG movie to show the guard at the main door. Then they wait until any security guards posted at the entrances to the individual theaters stop checking. When the coast is clear, they enter.

One friend admits he was scared by “The Exorcist” but, like the rest, says that was, of course, the whole point to seeing it. In Jake’s opinion, the blasphemous vulgarities, twisting necks and spewing bile were “a little corny.”

Kids hear worse language, they say, at school every day. The boys scoff at adult fears that they might become what they watch. Does anyone really think they’re going to go home and start performing exorcisms now?

An honor student, golfer and young Republican, Jake says his favorite movie of all time is the Mafia classic “The Godfather.” He’s been watching “Married With Children” and “The Simpsons” for years on TV. Now he likes Dennis Miller.

Jake says he uses more profanity than his parents do, but that’s the only negative effect he can think of that the media have had on him.

After the movie, the boys hang at the Spectrum. They browse at Hollywood and Vine, an outdoor stand selling posters and T-shirts of movie stars and of rock artists, Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Metallica and one of Jake’s favorites from his parents’ era, Led Zeppelin. Then they saunter on over to Barnes & Noble. Jake says he owns plenty of political books, but admits he rarely gets around to reading them. He just finished a biography of Ronald Reagan and is reading a book by Rush Limbaugh.

At Jake’s home, where he is the only child, there are three TVs, two stereos and two computers. Everything in his room faces his TV, which has 250 cable channels.

Usually, when he gets home from school, both his parents are out working. His parents trust his judgment and have few rules except for downloading pornography, which Jake says he has no interest in anyway. The TV is on from the minute he steps through the door, is audible in the dining room through dinner, and stays on until he turns it off at bedtime. Then he turns on the radio. It seems to help him fall asleep.

Jake likes the news and political shows, like CNN’s “Inside Politics.” The real danger of so much media, he believes, is slanted presentations. Jake doesn’t necessarily believe what he hears and sees. “If the news says there’s a bank robbery, I don’t know that for sure,” he says. “You never really know unless you’re there.” He watches several channels to compare the news and forge his own opinions.

Jake and his friends think it’s stupid to restrict movies or shows to teenagers by age since they vary so much in their maturity and the rating criteria seem so arbitrary. Besides, it’s always so easy to get around restrictions. He has a friend, he says, who has a computer program to make fake IDs.

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The Media Picture in Numbers

In 1970, 35% of homes had more than one TV set; 6% of sixth-graders had a TV in their bedrooms. In 1999, 88% of homes had more than one TV set; 77% of sixth-graders had a TV in their rooms.

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The average American child grows up in a home with 3 TVs, 3 tape players, 3 radios, 2 VCRs, 2 CD players, 1 video game player and 1 computer.

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The TV is usually on during meals in 58% of homes with children.

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Two-thirds of children 8 and older have a TV in their bedrooms. One out of five has a computer there as well.

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Children ages 8-13 spend more time with media than those in any other age group: 6 hours a day.

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In a typical week, children spend an average of more than 19 hours watching TV, more than 10 hours listening to music, more than 5 hours reading for pleasure, about 2 hours using computers for fun, and more than 2 hours playing video games.

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On a typical day, one out of every four boys will play an action or combat game like “Doom” or “Duke Nukem.”

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85% of children are able to buy M-rated video games and recordings labeled for explicit content. Fewer than 17% of music and game store clerks ask children their age.

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Slightly more than half of movie theaters enforce the Motion Picture Assn. of America restrictions that children under age 17 must be accompanied by an adult to see R-rated movies; 48% ask children their age; 45% sell tickets to underage children unaccompanied by adults.

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Sources: Federal Trade Commission Survey May-July, 2000 and Kids & Media, a Kaiser Family Foundation Report, 1999