Researchers at the RAND Corporation tell us today that “adolescents who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch few such shows.”

This is another example, in my opinion, of the backwards causality that plagues the logic of so many involved in any research that involves sexiness and young people.

The RANDy researchers’ explanation for this phenomenon was that “The amount of sexual content on television has doubled in recent years, and there is little representation of safer sex practices in those portrayals,” Anita Chandra said. “While some progress has been made, teenagers who watch television are still going to find little information about the consequences of unprotected sexual practices among the many portrayals promoting sex.”

Anita thinks that these unwitting teenagers, subjected to the laissez faire sexual mores of profligate TV characters are prompted to go out and mimic the behavior sans condoms, or the contraceptive pill, or withdrawal at just the right moment.

Did it occur to them that perhaps those teenagers who are drawn to watching sexy-tv.com are exactly those teenagers who have a higher-than-normal desire to have the sex so depicted? Could it be that what one chooses to watch is actually determined by one’s deeper desires, in this case a burgeoning sex drive?

I’m willing to bet that if you could somehow meter a teenager’s sexual drive, you’d find that those with the highest drives had the highest rates of teen pregnancy and the highest rates of watching titillating TV.

I honestly thought the that the mantra of TV being the cause of bad behavior had lost traction with scientific intelligentsia, or perhaps the RAND institute doesn’t employ any of them.

Regardless, this study is bound to generate press coverage and fuel the rhetoric of untold multitudes of family-focused political organizations for weeks to come, so stay tuned.