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The effects of the media on sexuality
The impact of sexual content in media on teenagers
The impact of sexual content in media on teenagers
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The teenage years are difficult because of puberty. During puberty your body is going thru changes, your hormones are raging, and people who were once lifetime friends no longer want to have anything to do with you. For today's teen these challenges can be even more difficult with more pressured to have sex earlier, they face challenges with keeping up with trending fashion, and home environments that are much different then they were ten years ago. Teens also are forced to keep up with unrealistic expectations of looking like they just stepped out of a photo shoot where the skinnier you are the more excepted and attractive you become. Most young teens do not take into account that in order for there bodies to keep up with these unrealistic expectations they have to engage in not eating and could become anorexic or binging and purging by taking laxatives or making themselves vomit that could lead to bulimia. In selecting a magazine it was not too amazing to see how much things have changed since I was a teenager. I decided to pick up a magazine called “M” and read the articles inside to present in my paper. One of the things that I noticed about this magazine was an advice column. This advice column consisted of questions sent in by teenagers and then a celebrity would provide advice to the teen asking the question. As a parent this was alarming to me for a couple of reasons. The first reason I found celebrity advice disturbing is because they are not parents themselves and the second reason is because stars are not trained professionals and they could send out the wrong signals or give bad advice. One of the questions asked by a teen in the magazine was a twelve year old girl that was concerned because she had a curvy figure. ... ... middle of paper ... ...rough are going to look for these issues by television, internet, books, or friends. Teens that get advice from alternative methods get the “romantic” perception about sex without the negative consequences of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. (Berk 210) As a parent I would not allow my child to read this magazine. I am a younger mother I am 29 and my son will be nine this year and fortunately he could care less about looking like someone else. My son has been raised in a Christian home and I don't even let him watch anything besides cartoon because of the sexual implication in many television shows. The images in this magazine I find to be very disrespectful when you have a teenager or young woman parading around in a bikini and a pair of stilettos that is not appropriate in my eyes so I would not let my son buy or read this magazine.
Female beauty ideals are an overwhelming force in teen media. Approximately 37% of articles in leading magazines for teen girls emphasize a focus on physical appearance. This is none to surprising considering two of the top contenders in this media genre are Seventeen and Teen Vogue. CosmoGIRL and Elle Girl were among the ranks of popular teen magazines, but in recent years have become exclusively online publications. Add in a dash of publications Tiger Beat and Bop, and it becomes glaringly obvious that girls are charged with the prime directive of looking good to get the guy. The story becomes more disturbing when the actual audience, which includes girls at least as young as eleven years old, is considered. In a stage when girls are trying for the first time to establish their identities, top selling publications are telling them that their exteriors should be their primary concern of focus. Of course, this trend doesn’t stop with magazines. A study conducted in 1996 found a direct correlation between the “amount of time an adolescent watches soaps, movies and music videos” a...
Don't Censor Child Pornography. In November of 1997, a Williamson County, Tenn. grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble booksellers for violating state obscenity laws prohibiting the display of "material harmful to minors. " The materials in question were two books that featured photographs of nude children: Jock Sturges' Radiant Identities and David Hamilton's The Age of Innocence. Since then, Radical Right activist Randall Terry has launched a crusade aimed at forcing bookstores to remove the "criminal garbage" of Sturges, Hamilton and (recently added to his list of demons)
Today’s young Americans face strong peer pressure to be sexually active and engage themselves in risky behaviors (Merino 100-109). Anyone deciding to have sex must first think about all the risks involved. Kekla Magoon, author of Sex Education in Schools, says that “half of all teens aged 15 to 19 years old in the United States have had sex” (Magoon 64-65). It is currently not required by federal law for schools to teach Sex education and those few schools that do teach Sex education have the decision to determine how much information is allowed. Advocates from both sides of the Sex education debate agree that teens need positive influences in order to make practical decisions (Magoon 88-89). Opponents of Abstinence-only education believe it fails because it does not prepare teens for all the risks of sex (Magoon 64-65).
Firminger examines the ways these magazines represent young males and females. She reveals that these magazines talks about the physical appearance of young girls but also their sexuality, emotions, and love life. The author informs how the advice given by the magazines is negative. The author also argues that these magazines focus more on their social life than how their academic performance
Most controversy over magazines is about the images they portray. According to the writers, Amy Malkin, Kimberlie Wornian, and Joan Chrisler, "Women and Weight: Gendered Messages on Magazines Covers," women's magazines insist on dieting, exercise, and cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal body. This is in no way true. Yes, magazines show pictures of beautiful women and have articles that relate to dieting, exercise and surgery. However, magazines have no other purpose than to inform. Also, magazines do not cause women to feel inadequate; they are useful tools in which women can find informative articles on the issues at hand.
If a teenager or pre-teen is focused on particular celebrities and their goal is too look like them, it is not difficult to slip into acting like them as well, or at least being influenced by their behavior and perceived attitudes. The media abounds with bad examples of celebrity behavior, from Justin Bibber driving recklessly to Miley Cyrus parading around scantily clothed, and although every celebrity is not a terrible role model, a disproportionate amount of them can be found to have shaky morals and seem to have let the attention that they receive affect their behavior. In addition, the perfect bodies that most of them display are not realistic and in some cases not even naturally attainable, thanks to the modern tools of plastic surgery, augmentations, liposuction, and other cosmetic surgeries. The media too contributes to the unreal portrayal of models and famous people by using airbrushing on pictures and other editing that lead regular people to compare their bodies to images that are not even humanly possible. The Barbie-like models that girls compare themselves to and the ripped and muscled men that boys compare their bodies to are often completely unnatural and the people who have somehow attained them are,
Many fall into peer pressure that's because of the friends they come across with. Friends can influence them so much once becoming an adult it isn’t the same because your brain has grown out of it. Many also lack confidence while many look like adults their brain resembles a child’s. While their bodies are aging their brain is rearranging itself in a way that temporarily makes it act the same way it did when they were younger. Most teens are overly emotional studies have found that teens have a much harder time speaking and to other people and so they sometimes react irrationally to emotional situations. Many parents wonder what happens to the smart child they use to have many still put in the exact same effort but get different results that's because the brain losses tissue over the years. Losing brain tissue can cause a teen to act immature and not quite like an adult
Magazines are another piece of media contributing to eating disorders in teens by promoting skinny figures. One study found that constant articles such as “28 Flat Bely Tricks!” and “Sli...
Watching television programs with a high level of sexual content can shape the patterns of sexual behavior of a teenager. According to Brown (Brown, Greenberg, & Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1993) many teenagers are not able to receive useful information about sex from their parents, this is the reason they usually use the alternative way to find this information through the media. A Kaiser Family research from 1996 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 1996; 1998) shows that a quarter of all the young people have told that they have learned a lot about pregnancy from television shows and 40 percent of them have gotten ideas how to talk about sexual issues. In these modern times media is holding the power to influence the audience and most of all the youngest audience which is developing their view about sex.
"Children are influenced by media–they learn by observing, imitating, and making behaviors their own" (APA, 2001, p.1224). Girl’s as young as 4-years sees Britney Spears music clip “Baby One More Time”, who at the time was a 17-year old girl/world pop icon at the time wearing a school uniform showing off her midriff, wearing a lot of makeup and a short skirt. Disney teen icons such as Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana taking personal photos of herself in “sexy” poses and sending it to her ‘older’ boyfriend and then having it all published all over the internet for the entire world to see. Boys also face sexualization too, as has been seen in Calvin Klein ads, where pubescent-looking boys pose provocatively with perfectly sculpted six-pack abs hawking teen fashion These pop culture celebrities both female and male are always in the media, for inappropriate actions and they’re meant to be role models for children. In fact most of these sexualized celebrities are still children themselves. The sad part is it’s not just sexualization being encouraged in the media other negative things such as violence, drug and alcohol use ...
Arielle Massiah SW 7300 Sunday, March 29, 2015 Article Critique Teenage Sexuality and Media Practice: Factoring in the Influences of Family, Friends, and School Jeanne Rogge Steele Literature Review and Theoretical/ Conceptual Framework The social problem that the research addresses is the outrageously high rate of unprotected teenage sexual engagement and encounters. The problem was made apparent due to a survey that disclosed that not only had “three quarters of the 2,439 participants engage in sexual intercourse by their senior year, half of the participants reported that they did not use condoms and one third of the population failed to allocate the use of birth control at all; drastically increasing their exposure to HIV, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy”. Steele, 1999, p. 339.
Martinez, Gladys, Joyce Abma, and Casey Copen. “Educating Teenagers About Sex In The United States”. CDC.GOV. Center of Disease Control and Prevention, 15 Sept. 2010. Web. 09 Feb.2014
The glamorous side of sex is everywhere; music, tv shows, movies and social media. To a mature adult, it is easy to ignore the sexual messages in those outlets. However, to a teenager, going through mental and physical changes and peer pressure, it is extremely easy to fall for what is shown to “cool.” Everyone has fallen for half truths to be cool in their teenage life. It just so happens that teen pregnancies and STDs are not one of those things that one can simply walk away from. Babies and STDs leave a lasting effect on everyone involved. The National Conference of State Legislatures states:
During the course of my twenty plus years on this earth and witnessing the drastic change in society, music, and sexual behavior in youth is heart wrenching. As a mother of two children (boy and girl), growing up in today’s society of vulgar and sexually immoral behavior I want my kids to be educated regarding sex, and not to become a statistic. Personal reasons aren’t my only motive for choosing teen pregnancy, but also if society worked together to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancy we could significantly improve other serious social problems including poverty, child abuse and neglect, father-absence, low birth weight, school failure,
Adolescence is a time of challenge and change for both teens and parents. Teens are at a stage in life where they face a multitude of pressing decisions -- including those about friends, careers, sex, smoking, drinking, drugs and parental values. At the same time, they are confronted with profound physical, social and emotional changes.