“It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are those good… “It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are those good old family values?” — OK, enough of that.

A study done by Rand Corp. and published in the journal “Pediatrics” has found that teen-agers who watch sex-saturated television were twice as likely to have sex earlier than those who didn’t, a result that shouldn’t really shock anyone.

Of course, no one’s saying that watching sex is going to make you have sex. It’s a correlation, not a cause-and-effect sort of thing. Television can’t make you do anything.

But it can suggest it, over and over and over.

Apparently, that suggestion works quite well. Television, that great nurturing parent-substitute for many, advertises sex during the programs just as much as it advertises cell phones during the commercials. And with good reason: Teen-agers are a huge, image-conscious consumer market with money to burn. So, in addition to buying McDonald’s — and, by the way, we really aren’t lovin’ it — teens are buying into sex in a big way.

But that doesn’t mean that the gap between sexual maturity and actual maturity has closed. Parents should be explaining the difference between the images on television and the reality of sex, since television and abstinence-only sex education certainly aren’t going to. There’s a long time between a kid’s first “good touch, bad touch” lecture and high school health class. Television shouldn’t be providing all the sex-related information during that period.

Last we checked, we all still had free will. Just because teens play Doom doesn’t mean they’re going to shoot someone. And just because they watch “Sex and the City” doesn’t mean they are going to bang someone.

But the fact remains, that the more they’re shown these images, the more likely it is that they’re going to emulate them.

This isn’t a call for censorship. It’s a call for taste. It’s a sad day for our culture when even shows aimed at tweens resort to sex jokes, for lack of better comedy.

We may not be as sex-obsessed as television portrays us, but then television-watching teen-agers are having the sex we wish we were having at their age. So, it’s chicken-and-egg time: Is television reflecting current sexual culture or creating it? No one can answer that immediately, but it’s time we asked it.

Teens are already consumers; maybe it’s time we started treating them like smart consumers and educate them about sex, before a box full of wires does.