Rock Music and Confined Sexual Repression in the 1960's

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In the 1960s, rock music had an increasing impact in teen culture. According to teenage girl response to the confined sexual repression, rock music created many controversial consequences. Music became a commodity that served escapism from reality instead of creating options and choices and brought the teen cultures to go against the mainstream culture to bring forth identities that are more coherent and ideal. Rock and roll was the most compelling commodity to enter the teen consumer culture. Gender roles being unequal created a sexist double standard and women were the object of needs and desire of men. Teen peer groups became incomparable in terms of language and style as sexual release and freedom were available to girls and women. In the teen culture, girls were using their music as an escape from the predictable life paths, as music becomes a commodity that serves escapism from the real world. In a male dominant teen culture, girls were part with societal limitations and that gender hierarchies and a sexual double standard were absolutely bounded up with the sexual ideology of ‘rock and roll’ in the 1950s and 1960s.

Rock and roll was the most compelling commodity to enter the teen consumer culture. Rock operated as both a form of sexual expression, and a form of sexual control which privileged the presentation and marketing of masculine styles. Music genres and idols such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles shaped the sexual ideology of adolescents. Frith states that “Elvis Presley’s sexuality, for example, meant different things to his male and female fans”, enforcing the idea of a double standard by creating tension between male appropriation and female appropriation such that male and female sexuality were organized in qui...

... middle of paper ...

...many teenage girls, creating ways for different options and choices. As well, the music industry was characterized by male domination. Brought on mainly by musical influence, teen culture rebels against mainstream culture in order to produce identities that were more expressive and representative. Rock music contributed to ordering and normalizing certain codes of gender and sexual behaviour as women finally found an aesthetic and erotic niche of their own within the narrow sexual confines of rock music.

Sources

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess & Gloria Jacobs. “Beatlemania: A Sexually Defiant consumer culture,” The Subcultures Reader, eds. Ken Gelder & Sarah Thorton. NY: Routledge, 1997. 523-536

Frith, Simon. “Rock & Sexuality,” Common Culture, eds. Michael Petracca & Madeleine Sorapure. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 258-269

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