According to a new study teenagers between the ages of 12 and 14 who use media with high sexual content are up to 2.2 times more likely to have sex by the time they are 16 than those who use less of such media.
It seems sexually charged music, magazines, TV and movies encourages youngsters into sex at an earlier age, possibly by suggesting that everyone else is doing it.
Lead author of the report, Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, says the study is the first to show that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex.
The researchers surveyed 1,017 black and white teens when they were 12 to 14 years old and again two years later, asking them about their use of four different kinds of media and their sexual behavior.
The adolescents were from North Carolina's Durham, Orange and Granville counties.
The research team also analyzed the sexual content in 308 different television shows, movies, songs and magazines used regularly by the teens and then calculated a measure of each teen's "sexual media diet."
They found that white teens in the study who had a high sexual media diet when they were 12 to 14 years old were more than twice as likely as those with less exposure to sex in the media to have had sexual intercourse two years later.
The relationship was not as strong for black teens as it was for whites.
Brown a professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, says teenagers are looking to the media for sexual information because they are not getting such information in other places, and the media is not the best sex educator as the crucial three C's: commitment, contraception and consequences are usually absent.
Previous research has been limited to television, but this study looked at teens exposure to movies, TV shows, music and magazines, which were all analysed for their sexual content.
Brown and her colleagues found that one of the strongest protective factors against early sexual behavior was clear parental communication about sex.