Canadian documentary director and writer Maureen Palmer insists how young girls are depicted on Canadian TV should be a wake-up call to parents everywhere.

Palmer’s latest documentary, Sext up Kids, to air on CBC TV’s Doc Zone on Feb. 23 at 9 p.m., points to TV’s perfect storm – young girls depicted as hypersexualized objects, young boys consuming easy-to-access Internet and mobile phone hardcore porn, and social media enabling young girls to send sexually explicit photos or videos of themselves via text, or “sext,” messages.

The result, Palmer argues, is a Pandora’s Box where TV and digital technologies has young girls believing they need to look and perform like porn stars to catch and keep a boy in their lives.

“If you look at Jersey Shore, if you look at the Real Housewives franchise, if you look at The Bachelor, if you look at every depiction of women and especially young women on TV, it’s a very narrow bandwidth,” Palmer tells Playback Daily.

Young women in real-life aren’t expected to be cruel and petty, party or shop 24/7, get arrested or be skilled in self-promotion.

But thanks to Kim Kardashian and Snooki, reality TV scripts demand all that, and more.

“Bitchy, obsessed with how they look, cat-fighting, concerned about money, gold-digging,” Palmer says of values propagated by reality TV.

Talk about young women not fighting one another for a boy and preserving their self-respect sounds like a page out of 1960s feminism.

But Sext Up Kids argues a world where the internet and social media create the illusion of young tween and teen girls as hypersexualized has dire implications for when young people eventually look to fall in love in real relationships, ahead of possible marriage and parenthood.

“The experts I talk to are starting to be concerned about a growing number of young men — late teens and early 20s – who actually fall in love and meet someone they want to be with, but can’t sustain a sexual attraction for that person because they’ve been weaned on porn,” Palmer says.

Her own solution is to work on projects that avoid clichés and sexual stereotyping.

“Hold me to it, but I won’t work on any shows that help contribute to that narrow bandwidth,” Palmer declares.

She admits a catch-22 where broadcasters and marketers seek audiences, and shows like Jersey Shore and The Bachelor generate impressive ratings.

But Palmer wants to see TV break out of increasingly narrow boundaries by which it constructs its portrayal of young girls and women.

“I think we have a responsibility, if we have a choice, to give young girls especially more options about what a young woman can be,” she adds.

Sext up Kids is produced by Rick LeGuerrier and Timothy M. Hogan of indie Dream Street Pictures.