Objectification Of Women In The Media Essay

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One constant lies within American popular culture: sexuality. Nearly all media outlets contain the sexuality in one form or another. Sometimes it’s explicitly conveyed, whereas other times it’s just casual. In particular, within the media, the objectification of women has become an increasing issue and has resulted in many controversies. This objectification is not exclusively towards women, but women are often expected to convey their sexuality in popular media in very particular ways. These issues can date back as far as the popularization of print media, preceding the era of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and the conception of international super models. Today, one of the leading video media is the music video. Almost all the top youtube.com videos viewed by the world are music videos. These videos are often a place for sexual objectification without the same regulation of other video media, such as television or film. However, there are many musical artists that try to break into this issue by promoting non-sexual behavior or even the appropriation of average sized women acting sexy. An example of the latter is Meghan Trainor’s hit track, “All About That Bass”. The problem …show more content…

The short hand answer is that sex sells. There are a handful of companies, known as the “Big Six” that dominate media internationally. The top of this list consists of Disney ($22b annual media revenue), Comcast ($19.7b annual media revenue), and Fox ($18.7b annual media revenue). The Big Six control nearly 90% of what we are reading, listening, and watching (Lulz, 2012). Shockingly, research has found that 91.6% of samples of music videos containing female artists have at least one of the following indicators of sexual objectification: close-up shots of individual body parts, self-touching of sexual body parts, ample skin exposure, or sexualized dancing. (Aubrey & Frisby,

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