PTC: Where’s Outrage Over ‘Family Guy’ Groping?
The team behind Fox’s “Family Guy” is trying to stay one step ahead of the PC Police.
The show recently announced it will be phasing out “gay jokes” on the ribald series. It’s been part of “Family Guy’s” comedy repertoire for some time. Now, with stars like Kevin Hart suffering career setbacks for old “homophobic” jokes, it’s clear “Family Guy” wants to avoid a similar attack.
The show has a history of “crossing the line.”
Only the Parents Television Council noticed something lost in the “Family Guy” hullabaloo. The show’s most recent episode made waves for featuring President Donald Trump sexually groping Meg, the family’s high school-aged daughter.
The grope happens just out of view, but it’s crystal clear what happens. A doorbell sound effect goes off, just to make sure we know something awful just happened.
Naturally, The Resistance and media reporters, which sport significant overlap, reported on the episode sans outrage.
PTC president Tim Winter saw it differently.
“When is it appropriate to joke about the sexual assault of a teenage girl? The answer, of course, is ‘never.’ It has been several years since we last documented content on Family Guy that included jokes about sexual assault; and it was our sincere hope that the show’s producers had forever put such content in their rearview mirror. Sadly we were wrong,” Winter said in a statement.
“The fact that this program content was used for political satire doesn’t make it right. And justification that the show has similarly satirized politicians from both sides of the political aisle is equally baseless. Washington, DC may be a political circus, but the producers do not have to prove a point by depicting a teenage girl being sexually assaulted, regardless of partisan stripe.”
The rest of the episode included numerous comic attacks on the Trump family, including First Daughter Ivanka Trump.
A 2015 PTC study found similar behavior commonplace on the long-running show. The group’s research, covering “Family Guy” episodes shown from 2012-2015, found that 79 percent of all the sexually violent scenes “were perpetrated on children and teens.” The PTC adds that, according to Nielsen ratings, “Family Guy’s” audiences includes children as young as 2 and that it’s one of the most watched TV shows with kids ages 12-17.