In life, we are always told to “keep growing.” We are told that life experiences, in general, cultivate “growth.” Any experience in a person’s life can trigger change; negative or positive, whether it be a family event, a relationship, a class you take, and texts you interact with. One of the most effective ways to look at the growth and change in a person’s life is to analyze the connections between their past and recent interests. What were their defining characteristics? Who were the people they surrounded by and associated themselves with? What books, movies, and TV shows were they drawn to and how did it correlate to their future development of character? In my experience, popular culture has a unique way of influencing people and how they develop over the years. When I was younger, I frequently watched nickelodeons’ Spongebob Squarepants. As I grew older I started watching different movies and TV shows. A movie that was a favorite for many, myself included, was The Wolf of Wall Street. Looking back now, it is quite easy to find a striking connection between the two. Both works touch on delicate topics that are frequently hidden from young children.

One of the shows I avidly watched as a kid was SpongeBob SquarePants. Like many kids growing up during the 2000s in this country, watching this program was a common pastime. I remember watching the show frequently after coming home from school. The show, which ran on Nickelodeon, was created by Stephen Hillenburg. It was one of the most popular children’s series of its time. It was a lighthearted show about a fictional animated society at the bottom of the ocean for kids. SpongeBob was always going on different adventures with his friends and sometimes perhaps teaching life lessons to the young audience. Watching this show as a kid, I would always get a good laugh out of the funny stories and whimsical adventures. On the surface, the show is very lighthearted and humorous, but when analyzing deeper into the meaning of the show, or perhaps just watching it now years later, I can uncover more meaning behind the amusing kid’s cartoon. More often than not, the events in the show have a second meaning, one that should not be intended for a children audience.

The plot of the show has a lot of subtle sexual cues. For starters, the name of the town located on the ocean floor is called Bikini Bottom. Another big red flag is that one of the characters is named Sandy Cheeks. Many critics including the likes of news stations such as ABC argue that there are characters that sexually interact with one another.  Frequently, there are scenes in the show that allude to more mature topics. It seems that children would be oblivious to this and perhaps these scenes target adult audiences such as the parents watching along. An example of when there was a blatant sexual reference in the show is when the protagonist SpongeBob, tries to get his pet snail Gary to take a bath. Gary is hesitant to get in the bath and SpongeBob entices him to get in the bath by showing him the bar soap.SpongeBob places the soap in front of Gary and proceeds to say “don’t drop the soap” and winks at a point in the scene. This is a clear reference to sexual assault in prisons and although it is the type of dark humor that adults watching along can understand, it does not fit well in a children’s cartoon. 

I personally grew up in a religious Jewish home. These types of references had no place in my family. A case can be made that society is shifting in a progressive direction in which sex can be freely spoken about and had. From a religious perspective, I disagree with this and I view the sanctity and purity of family are important moral values of mine. I don’t personally have a problem with people sexually expressing themselves in whatever way they choose. I do however feel that these concepts shouldn’t be introduced to children at a young age. 

Due to the show’s popularity, the producers of the show try to discredit the critics by arguing that the jokes are well hidden from kids and are there strictly for the entertainment of the adults watching along. The issue is that the show’s intended audience is kids anywhere between the ages of six and eleven. What can often happen is that children pick up on cues that the joke being made is not intended for them. They then tend to ask their elders and peers to explain concepts to them that they should not be exposed to at such a young age. Ultimately, Spongebob can often be

discerned as a catalyst for the way kids lose their innocence in certain areas of life. Some adults argue that it is inevitable that children will eventually be exposed to this sensitive and mature content. Although I agree that it is inevitable, the issue is that how they learn them is even more important than when they do. Learning about these matters from a cartoon in a joking setting can be harmful to the way that children eventually go on to perceive these serious topics.

As time went on and I got older, I still often watched popular TV shows and movies. As many teens and young adults have, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street and was instantly amazed. The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 film directed by Martin Scorsese starring Leonardo Decaprio. The main character in the film was Jordan Belfort who was a young stockbroker in the nineties. He started off at the bottom of wall street but soon learned that there was a ton of corruption. Instead of partaking in it at any firm as an employee, he decided to start his own firm, ultimately becoming the most corrupt of them all. The film touches on many mature topics such as manipulation, sexual misconduct, cheating, drugs, and much more. The film is brilliantly directed and portrays Jordan’s story very well. After reading the book by Jordan Belfort, I was able to appreciate the movie even more. One of the scenes which many say should have won Decaprio and Oscar on its own was when Jordan was high on quaaludes trying to make his way back from the country club. After getting off the phone with his lawyer at the country club and finding out that his home lines had been tapped, Jordan suddenly feels the effect of the drugs all at once. He stumbles down the stairs of the club and desperately crawls towards his car in hopes of making it home before it’s too late to stop his partner Dani from saying too much over the phone. He crawls to his car and has to open the door with his foot as he is almost completely immobilized from the narcotics.

Although the movie is amazing entertainment, and the story is remarkable, I feel that the way it is portrayed glorifies all of these horrible topics. The audience really sees in the film a young king of the world with all of the money and all of the materialistic pleasures of life at his disposal. The film shows Belfort and his counterpart living the life of young rich men who rule the world. It portrays them as not having a care in the world and roaming around doing all the drugs they want and getting all the women they want. They do all this while having all the money in the world. Many people watching the film are sitting and wishing that they were Jordan. They don’t care that how he made his millions was fraudulent and immoral while spending it recklessly and harmfully. It justifies these actions to its audience while glorifying drug use and the objectification of women.

In a way, SpongeBob Squarepants and The Wolf of Wall Street are very similar. They take topics that are commonly thought to be perverted and inappropriate and make light of them and glorify them. The dangerous thing about doing this is that the audiences that watch this type of content tend to be young and very influenceable. For example, it isn’t healthy for young men to be running around thinking that it’s okay to objectify women. In The Wolf of Wall Street, the young stockbrokers took objectifying women to such an extreme, that they even had a stock-related scale of how they rated prostitutes. The ones they deemed best were referred to as “blue chips,” and the worst were “pink slips.” In today’s society content creators have to be very careful about how they portray certain topics and different messages because the young generation of today is very malleable and subjective to these types of new Ideas.

After reading this essay, one might think that I have a personal vendetta against SpongeBob Squarepants and The Wolf of Wall Street though this is not the case at all. On the contrary, I personally love both of these works. Overall they are both brilliantly made respectively and are a great pastime. I don’t personally expect the realm of content creation to change drastically in the way that they bring light to some of these dark topics. What I learned from analyzing these two texts, is that it is important for me to not let the glorification and normalization of some of these topics affect my values. I still feel that I can enjoy this sort of content today, but I must remind myself to watch these things with a grain of salt and not let them change my own moral compass.