The magic of the movies

The Guardian has a report on research from the department of the bleedin' obvious:

"A team of doctors will today accuse Hollywood of irresponsibility over its portrayal of sex and drugs after a review of some of the biggest blockbusters from the last 20 years showed that only one movie made reference to a condom.
None of the top 200 films promoted safe sex, and nobody ended up with an unwanted pregnancy or any infection. The doctors, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, say filmmakers should reflect the real consequences of unsafe sex and illicit drug use in their work.
"The movie industry influences the perception of billions of people around the world," said Hasantha Gunasekera from the school of public health at Sydney University. "With globalisation and the growth of home-based media technologies, movies are more accessible to a wider audience and there is convincing evidence that the entertainment media influences behaviour."
Dr Gunasekera and his two co-authors, Simon Chapman and Sharon Campbell, studied the top 200 movies of all time, as listed on the Internet Movie Database in March 2004. The researchers
excluded any movie filmed before 1983, the pre-HIV era.
They also excluded animated features, those not about humans and any films rated acceptable for children. That left 87 films, in which there were 53 episodes of sex. Only once in those sex scenes did a condom feature, and that was a reference to birth control, they say. In 98% of sexual episodes, which could have resulted in pregnancy, no form of birth control was used or suggested.
There were no suggestions of any untoward consequences of unprotected sex, such as unwanted
pregnancies, HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases. The doctors also looked at drug, alcohol and tobacco use in the films."

Hey guys - guess what? It's the movies - they are not supposed to be real life. Other aspects of human behaviour you will rarely see on celluloid:

• most bathroom activities;
• putting on and taking off make-up, shaving and other personal grooming activities (which does not prevent film stars from looking as if they had just stepped out of a beauty salon, even if they have just woken up);
• hoovering, dusting, emptying the washing machine/dishwasher and washing the windows; and
• wearing seatbelts, buying petrol, locking car doors