Stumble it!Sex, sluts, media and morality
posted in Sexuality, Society by themaiden |Sex on TV. Sluts in fashion. Filth in film. Songs about Fucking. The media is bombarding society with sin. Half the actresses in Hollywood have bared their breasts and most have pranced bare backsides across the screen. Sex is a staple, even intruding into otherwise fine space violence. Near naked bodies float through magazines and across billboards like sirens singing songs of copulation. And the web has given the world access to more nakedness than ever before in human history– well, except for most of our time on the planet. We all did run around naked for at least a million or so years before we invented clothes, and even then, much of humanity seems to have opted out of that fashion.
Still, we are bombarded by flesh, and we should worry.
Provocative images of women’s partly clothed or naked bodies are especially prevalent in advertising. Shari Graydon, former president of Canada’s MediaWatch, argues that women’s bodies are sexualized in ads in order to grab the viewer’s attention. Women become sexual objects when their bodies and their sexuality are linked to products that are bought and sold.
This media saturation carries dangers, undercutting morality and virtue and suggesting the need for censorship.
Someone continuously exposed to sexual imagery and the like is far less likely to develop sensibilities about sex conducive to wanting to develop chastity, and less likely to have the willpower to maintain this virtue even if he does want to develop it, than is someone whose environment is relatively free of such imagery. Hence conservatives’ worries about the highly sexualized character of contemporary popular culture, especially youth culture. It is hardly possible for very many freely to choose virtue when the surrounding culture denies that it is virtue at all, and heaps ridicule on those who dare to disagree.
Parents are “”very” concerned about the amount of sex (60%) and violence (53%) their children are exposed to on TV.” Apparently fearing that…
A study of 1792 adolescents ages 12-17 showed that watching sex on TV influences teens to have sex. Youths who watched more sexual content where more likely to initiate intercourse and progress to more advanced noncoital sexual activities in the year following the beginning of the study. Youths in the 90th percentile of TV sex viewing had a predicted probability of intercourse initiation that was approximately double that of youths in the 10th percentile. Basically, kids with higher exposure to sex on TV were almost twice as likely than kids with lower exposure to initiate sexual intercourse.
… teenagers will have sex. Who could have imagined a correlation between the switching on of human genitalia and the beginning of sexual experimentation? Such a thing is too absurd to imagine. Must be the TV. It must be the media.
We are creating a culture, a world, an generation of tramps and playboys.
Or not…
A great deal of public and scientific concern has been voiced regarding the links between portrayals of sex in the mainstream media and children’s sexual development (e.g., Greenfield, 2004). However, relatively few studies have closely examined relationships between adolescents’ use of, or exposure to, sexual content in the media and their sexual behaviors and attitudes (Brown, Steele, & Walsh-Childers, 2002). Studies that have investigated such issues often have several limitations. For example, past research has utilized relatively small samples, and exceptions to this criticism (e.g., Klein et al., 1993; Peterson, Moore, & Furstenburg, 1991) have either focused narrowly on one type of sexual outcome, such as incidence of intercourse (Peterson et al., 1991), or have included sexual outcomes within a more broadly-defined category of “risk behavior” (Klein et al., 1993). Additionally, while cross-sectional and correlational analyses have often limited authors’ ability to make conclusions about causality (e.g., Strouse & Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1987; Strouse, Buerkel-Rothfuss, & Long, 1995; Ward & Rivadeneyra, 1999), arguments have been predominantly framed in terms of the effects of sexual media upon children and adolescents, and less often in terms of adolescents’ sexual characteristics that may lead them to seek out more sexual media (see Ward & Rivadeneyra and Brown & Newcomer, 1991, for exceptions).
Adolescents’ contact with sexuality in mainstream media: a selection-based perspective.
There is a correlation between “viewing media with sexual content” and the “participants’ permissive attitudes toward premarital sex”, but there is good reason to think that this is because a person already interested in sex will seek sexual material just like a person interested in model airplanes will seek information on model airplanes.
With all this sex around, we have become pretty monstrous though, haven’t we? Animals? Willing to do anything it takes to get a little? Surely all this sex has turned us into little sex freaks without the self control to ask permission? Surely the saturation has created a society of sex muddled maniacs raping, pillaging and sodomizing at epic rates? Surely this “will lead to all sorts of depraved monstrosities“?
Not really.
Yet crime reports, victimization surveys and public health measures consistently reveal something else: large declines in the percentages of young women reporting violence against them, especially sexual attacks, and of young men committing rape and other violent offenses.
The U.S. Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (considered our best measure of crime because its anonymous surveys capture offenses not reported to police) reports that rape has been falling dramatically for decades. The first survey, in 1973, estimated that 105,000 females, ages 12 to 24, were raped that year. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the survey was expanded to include sexual assault and attempted or threatened offenses. Even so, the latest survey (in a young female population 1 million larger than in 1973) reported that 30,000 females, ages 12 to 24, were raped and 60,000 were victims of attempted rape or real or attempted sexual offenses (including verbal threats) in 2005.
The crime surveys further indicate that the decline in sexual violence is greater among younger females than older women. In the last dozen years, they found that sexual victimization rates among girls ages 12 to 19 fell by 78% and among women ages 20 to 24 by 70%, nearly double the drop among women older than 25.
It seems that things might not be quite so bad. I understand that people might object to sexual content on religious grounds, for example, or even upon non-religious moral grounds, but it seems that the frequently cited causal connections between this content and rampant sex mania, are weaker than generally portrayed, and despite some dire warnings, rape and associated behavior seems to have crashed in to the decades following the sexual revolution, especially in the younger population– just the group supposedly most at risk.
Interesting.
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