The common defense of a steamy storyline is that television only holds up a mirror. Writers show how people already live, and viewers recognize themselves. Morgan Avery McCoy, an actress who studied theater at Hampton University and earned a master’s in communications with an emphasis on film producing at Regent University, thinks that defense tells only half the story. Media reflects a culture, she argues, and it also teaches one, most effectively to people who think they are only being entertained. So the honest answer is yes. What you watch week after week shapes what you come to treat as normal about sex and love. Most of that shaping happens through the characters a story asks you to cheer for.
What does the mirror argument get right, and what does it leave out?
Part of the mirror argument is true. Writers do draw from life, and a show about adultery did not invent adultery. Audiences choose what they watch, and networks chase what audiences already want. If a series portrays premarital sex as ordinary, that may partly be because many viewers already experience it that way.
McCoy grants all of that. She says many people focus on media as simply showing what already is, and then she adds the half they skip: “But media also dictates to a culture.” In her account, a show tells you what is in and what is out, what is acceptable and what is not. She describes media as a tool that serves whoever is holding it.
Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, restated the point as a correction of the familiar line that art imitates life: “So it’s not that art just depicts life, it’s that art dictates the direction of life.” A mirror cannot prefer one reflection over another, but every script makes choices about whose feelings get close-ups, whose decisions carry consequences, and which relationships the music swells for. Those choices carry a view of the world whether or not the writers set out to argue for one.
Where does the lesson actually get taught?
The most useful insight in this conversation is about location. The teaching rarely sits in the explicit scene, because it works through sympathy.
Fields recalls her mother telling her to notice how media makes viewers root for sin. She points to one of her own favorite films, Brown Sugar. The audience spends the movie hoping the two leads end up together, and almost no one registers that one of them has already made a marriage vow to someone else. When they finally get together, the audience feels relief rather than grief. “So we’ve been rooting for sin for a long time,” Fields says.
She sees the same pattern in Scandal, a show she openly admits she watches. The romance between Olivia and Fitz is framed so that what the two of them feel outweighs the covenant of Fitz’s marriage. The show never has to argue that feelings override vows. It only has to make you want the couple to win, and by the time the credits roll you have practiced a moral judgment without consciously making one.
This is what people mean by a sexual script: an unspoken sense of how desire is supposed to unfold, what counts as romantic, and what a person owes the people they have promised themselves to. Nobody memorizes a script like this. People absorb it by rehearsing it emotionally, episode after episode, while their attention rests on a good soundtrack, a funny line or an attractive lead. McCoy names the danger directly: “it’s educating you, but you’re not even realizing that you’re being educated. And that’s the danger of it.”
Is there evidence for this, or only a strong feeling?
McCoy offers several lines of evidence, and they are not all the same kind.
The first is an illustration from her graduate thesis project on sex and the media. She says the release of Disney’s Bambi hit the deer hunting industry hard, and she gives figures of a drop from around 5.5 million to 1 million. Her reasoning runs from small to large: if one animated film could change how people felt about hunting deer, a television show watched consistently could change how a teenager or an adult thinks about sexuality. The figures are her claim and would need independent checking before anyone repeated them as fact. The argument itself rests less on the numbers than on the plain observation that stories change how people feel about things they have never examined for themselves.
The second is history. Fields notes that early television would not show a married couple in the same bed, recalling the separate beds of I Love Lucy. Her observation is about sequence: “But when it became normal in media, it became normal in the world.” McCoy goes further and argues that media helped drive the sexual revolution. She names All in the Family as an early show that took on taboo subjects, describes advertisers chasing younger audiences on the theory that sex sells, and says the birth control pill gained wide acceptance once it was promoted through magazines and commercials. These are her historical assertions, and a careful reader should hold them as such.
The third line comes from the people who make and fund media. McCoy points out that networks follow money and that profit pushed television toward sexual content. She also points to GLAAD, the LGBTQ advocacy organization, whose stated aim she describes as shaping the media narrative. She says the group rates networks on representation, and that CBS received a failing grade in 2009 and later improved its standing by adding more LGBTQ characters. Those details come from her and would need checking. McCoy is notably fair about the strategy itself. She calls it smart and says it makes sense for the group. Her complaint is about imbalance: in her experience, Christians on screen show up mostly as judgmental, hypocritical or sheltered.
How far does that evidence actually reach?
The strongest objection deserves more than a nod. Sexual attitudes are shaped by families, friendships, economics, churches, schools and personal experience, and television is one influence among many. When screens and social norms change in the same decades, that alone does not show which one moved the other, or whether both responded to the same pressures. The fact that advertisers and advocates invest in media does not settle the question either. People can bet heavily on an idea that is weaker than they think, and industry belief is evidence of what they expect, not a measurement of how much a show changes any given viewer.
So the claim this conversation can support is about influence, not control. Nobody in it argues that one episode undoes a person’s convictions or that viewers are helpless. The argument is narrower and harder to wave away: stories invite sympathy, sympathy repeated over years forms habits of judgment, and the people who make stories act on that assumption. That is enough to make passive watching unwise, even if no one can say precisely how much any single show moves anyone.
Why does the representation argument cut against the mirror defense?
Fields raises an objection on behalf of the other side that brings the question close to home. Advocates for LGBTQ representation, she notes, make the same case Black viewers make: “When we don’t see enough black people in shows, we are offended.” McCoy agrees that the arguments share the same shape, though she disputes how the two are being weighed in practice.
That comparison exposes a tension in the mirror defense. In Fields’s framing, the frustration of not being seen on screen rests on the conviction that portrayals matter, and nobody campaigns to be shown accurately on a mirror that has no power over anyone. A person cannot easily insist that representation shapes how a group is seen while also insisting that storylines about sex shape nothing. If portrayals form how audiences see Black families, they also form how audiences see marriage and faithfulness.
The shows Fields names complicate any simple story about who is doing the teaching. Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder came from Shonda Rhimes’s production team, and Empire from Lee Daniels. Fields praises the craft of the Rhimes shows plainly. She also admits she still watches Scandal, while McCoy says she stopped for a season, so two friends with the same faith and the same concern reached different choices about the same show. That disagreement shifts the focus away from whether Black audiences as a group are being misled and toward what each viewer is practicing while the story plays.
McCoy’s own career shows the gap from the other side. “It’s difficult, especially as an African American actress,” she says, adding that “there are a lot of Christian films, but most of them do not incorporate someone like me.” Mainstream television rarely portrays believers well, and Christian filmmaking has not always portrayed Black believers at all, which is part of why she writes her own material.
Why does repetition matter more than any one episode?
McCoy stresses that television differs from film because you watch it on a consistent basis. A single movie might move you, while a series you follow for six seasons keeps you company, and its assumptions become the background against which you judge your own life.
Fields connects this to 1 John 2:16: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” John is writing to believers about what the world, set against God, offers the human heart. The phrase “lust of the eyes” names desire drawn out by what a person keeps looking at. Fields’s point is that constant images awaken curiosity, and curiosity, especially in younger viewers, can turn into wanting to try what was shown.
McCoy names what may be the most damaging script of all. Many viewers sense that “everybody’s drinking, everybody’s having sex, this is what everybody’s doing. But that’s not everybody.” Call it the false census. A young person who is waiting, or a married person who is faithful, can start to feel like an oddity when they are nothing of the kind. Television teaches what is common as well as what is good, and people tend to drift toward what they believe everyone else is doing.
Doesn’t the Bible itself depict sex and sin?
It does, and that keeps this argument from becoming a demand for sanitized stories. Scripture narrates adultery, rape, betrayal and lust without looking away. The account of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 is a well-known example, yet the narrative never asks the reader to root for David. It closes with a verdict: “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD” (2 Samuel 11:27). The next chapter shows the cost.
Describing a sin is not endorsing it. A story can show desire honestly and still tell the truth about what it does to promises and people. The problem Fields identifies is a show framing adultery as the happy ending, not a show depicting adultery at all.
McCoy’s call for Christian storytelling follows the same line. She does not want stories in which believers face no temptation. “Be real. I’m not saying be fake about it,” she says. She imagines a show depicting a couple who are abstaining from sex before marriage, so that a teenager who is waiting can see someone like them on screen. A story that shows that struggle honestly teaches a different script than one that pretends the struggle away, and a far more believable one than a sermon dressed up as a plot.
So what should a viewer actually do?
McCoy’s first answer is attention rather than retreat. Speaking to young people, she says, “I’m not telling you like to get rid of all of your secular CDs, although that would be what I prefer.” She asks them to name the message a story is delivering, warning that “if your eyes aren’t open, then you’re gonna begin thinking about things that you hadn’t even thought about before.” Romans 12:2 describes the same contrast: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Paul treats conformity as something that happens by default, while transformation needs a mind that is actively tested and renewed. Watching with questions is one ordinary way of refusing to be shaped by default. And because, as McCoy puts it, “I know that my ratings equates money, which equates a continuation of this type of content,” viewing is also a small vote for more of the same, which is why she stepped away from Scandal for a season.
Her larger answer is to tell better stories. “God is a creator and he as a creator can definitely give us creative content that will capture people’s attention and that will echo the message of Christ,” she says. She grounds Christian art in the character of God rather than in a defensive reaction to the culture, and she wants believers portrayed with the grace and honesty she sees in real Christians, because “the Christians that I see shown on television don’t represent me and definitely don’t represent my friends.” She has acted on that conviction herself, turning down well-paying roles that conflicted with her beliefs and writing the stories she wants to see.
The mirror defense fails because it treats viewers as spectators. Every story asks you to want something, and wanting is how the heart learns. Whether television shapes what you believe about sex is the settled part. What remains open is whether it does so without your consent, or whether you watch, and perhaps one day write, with your eyes open.