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Representation of gender in media
The impact of media on teenagers
Representation of gender in media
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The media plays a very big role in the lives of young adults today. Whether it is watching Access Hollywood, checking Perez Hilton’s blog religiously or watching fictitious TV shows and movies every night. All of the media in today’s society must add up to some influence on the teens of America. The media today mostly has lust and sex selling us products on television commercials or provocative ads in magazines, or the media just entertains us for hours on end. The media rarely has a positive influence, as it does not put sexual health messages in it’s television shows, movies, music lyrics, and magazines.
The article Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Better Be Prepared: An Analysis of the Rare Sexual Health Messages in Young Adolescents’ Media examines and critiques four different vehicles of media. The study, that took place in the year 2000, chose to look at television shows, movies, magazines, and music as the four different vehicles of media that affect adolescents today. Each vehicle of media has five different examples of that vehicle. For example, the vehicle of magazines had Co...
Today, the media plays an essential role in the Western civilization. Considering this, entertainment, social media, and the news are all intrinsically valuable media literacy devices. In addition, the media “helps to maintain a status quo in which certain groups in our society routinely have access to power and privilege while others do not” (Mulvaney 2016). For instance, both in the music and pornographic industry the female body is perceived as a sexual object. In Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video, Sut Jhally mentions that “examining the stories that music videos tell us about both male and female sexuality, about what is considered normal, allows us to do more than just understand one aspect of our culture” (Jhally 2007).
...ers, Kim. Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media’s Influence on Adolescent Sexuality. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
... The Sounds of Sex: Sex in teens’ music and music videos. Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media’s Influence on Adolescent Sexuality (p. 253)
Clark, C, Ghosh, A, Green, E, Shariff,N. (n.d) Media Portrayal of Young People – impact and influences. [Internet], UK, Young Researcher Network. Available from: [Accessed 2nd January 2012]
"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 ...
Today’s young men are increasingly being influenced by the harming mass media. Starting at a young age, these young boys are big active users of many types of media such as watching countless number of hours of television, movies, and sports programs, listening to radio programs and CDs, and playing violent video games. These boys are increasingly surfing the Internet at record numbers unsupervised. All of these forms of media are making huge influential decisions in their lives. Young males are least likely to read beneficial sources of media such as newspapers and magazines.
This report is critically analyzing the sexual content in the television shows and how it is affecting teenagers. Statistically the average teenager spends three hours of watching television a day. The typical modern television program contains an enormous quantity of sexual content from harmless kissing to scenes of intercourse. Usually sex is presented as a normal activity without any serious consequences. According to many studies it is a known fact that the stories which the immature teenagers are watching on the television can influence their lives. The media portrayals involving sexuality are contributing to the sexual socialization of young people.
The Media Practice Model, originated by Steele and Brown in their initial 1995 study on adolescent behavior, uses three of five key concepts to characterize how adolescents shape their own lifestyles in pertinence to the media: Selection, Interaction, and Application. (Steele, 1999, p.334) The effects of mass media on adolescent life practices is exceptionally important to social work research and practice because teens, similarly to adults, are influenced greatly by the media. Unlike adults, however, adolescents lack the experience and knowledge to understand that much of the media is fabricated that life practices that are detrimental to one’s health should not be influenced as greatly by the
Today I will be talking about the way the authors and creators of a television commercial and newspaper article influence us to their opinion by writing the way they do. The topic that I am studying is Teenage Pregnancy. This topic is always going to be in the media for different reasons, and occasionally you hear about a story of a young girl getting pregnant due to un-safe sex. There will always be issues with this subject within society because so many people have different opinions and views of this topic and weather or not it right or wrong.
I can recall a time when the media was influencing my life and actions. The week after I graduated high school, my girlfriends and I took a trip to Cancun, Mexico, where the MTV beach house was located that summer. As I look back on the week of drunken partying and sexy guys, I can only wonder how I made it home alive. How could any young woman find this behavior acceptable? Every young woman there was flaunting their bodies to the young men around them. They were proud to be sexual objects. Where did they learn such debauchery? This is the kind of woman that is portrayed throughout MTV and various other aspects of the media. They have even coined the term “midriff”—the highly sexual character pitched at teenage girls that increasingly populates today’s television shows—in order to hook the teen customer. Teenage women increasingly look to the media to provide them with a ready-made identity predicated on today’s version of what’s “cool.” The media is always telling us that we are not thin enough, we’re not pretty enough, we don’t have the right friends, or we have the wrong friends… we’re losers unless we’re cool. We must follow their example and show as much skin as possible. The type of imagery depicted by MTV-- as well as people like Howard Stern, the famous “Girls Gone Wild” videos, and various Hip Hop songs—glorifies sex and the provocative woman.
Teenage girls are at an impressionable time in their lives. Mass media is a key part of one of the factors of socialization that become important to teenagers. Teenagers look to the media for entertainment. Whether it is movies, magazines, or even some aspects of social media, teenagers get a lot of influence from the media’s message. The problem with this is the media has a specific way of doing things and can be negative to a susceptible teenage girl.
The teenage years: a time stereotypically characterized by stress, the physical and mental changes that accompany puberty, and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex that leads to unnecessary, risky experimentation, especially in sexually activities. But is the prefrontal cortex the only thing to blame for teens' early sexual maturation or could the copious sexual messages they receive from magazines, TV and music have an effect as well? In the article by Victor C. Strasburger, MD (2005), the topic of teen sexuality and the major influence that the media has on this age demographic is discussed. His article reveals the immense effect that the overwhelming sexual messages of America's unrelenting media has on teenagers: promoting ideals like sex
Sexually active youths tend to be more exposure to media than any other members of society. The reason behind that is because they are in charge of their own time without much interference from their parents and burdensome responsibilities. This, combined with the fact that both implicit and explicit sexual content and crime in the mass media has grown over time predisposes youths to premarital sex (Rosengren, 2000).
Sexual activity in the mass media is another negative influence on teenagers. The first example is early sexual intercourse. According to Stockwell, a research shows that teenagers who are exposed to a lot of sexual content on television are more to likely to have sex by 16 years of age than those with limited exposure.
Young people especially the teenagers are sensitive and receptive to learning new things. The media provides more than they can handle. Access to different programs, shows, and movies affect the manner that the teenagers behave. Today, it is unfortunate to say that the media is becoming more sexual and violent than the older days, resulting in similar behaviors among the teens (Craig, & Baucum, 2001). By watching programs intended for the adults, teenagers are drifting even further. They start behaving like adults without the prerequisites of becoming one. This means that they have contents that do not match with their ages. And then terrible things begin – increased college dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and increased cases of suicides. Some teenagers who had bright future ahead of them will