The envelope is definitely being pushed. Consider shows like HBO’s Girls.

Nathan Harden of The College Fix reports.

Professor: Explicit Sex on Today’s Cable TV ‘Unthinkable’ a Few Years Ago

Cable television networks such as HBO and Showtime are making explicit sex, nudity, and violence commonplace on America’s TV screens, showing graphic content that wouldn’t have been found on the small screen only a decade ago.

Many modern shows “contain sex and violence in ways that would have been unthinkable not too many years ago,” said UCLA professor of cinema and television Richard Walter in an interview with the French news network AFP.

The AFP report specifically cites the Showtime series Masters of Sex, which includes “multiple simulated orgasms and acres of nudity, as well as sex toys/research tools like one named the ‘Ulysses,’ basically a clear plastic vibrator with a camera inside, which films what happens in orgasm.”

Mainstream critics have given Masters of Sex wide acclaim, but in a recent article at NRO, David French calls the show “boring,” and points out the moral/political propaganda behind this and other similar programs:

It’s a boring show with a tragic ending. Don’t tell the writers, of course. To them, the story ends with liberation, with the defeat of the patriarchy, and with great sex for everybody.

But for millions in the real world, the story ends with grief, heartbreak, and a baby-momma sitting at home with three kids by two baby-daddies, with one late on child support and the other occasionally abusive. It ends with a bankrupt nation struggling to support an underclass whose salient characteristic is the very liberation from the stifling bonds of family that Masters of Sex so repetitively skewers…

In other words, Hollywood is good at glossing over the real-life consequences of immorality. Hollywood functions as the cultural engine that pushes our nation toward destructive behavior, leaving a generation’s worth of children with no fathers, ensnared in a poverty both spiritual and financial.