The Sexuality of Adolescent Americans in 'Juno'

* The main focus of many teen dramas is sex, with each episode containing countless verbal and visual references to sexual activity. These highly sexualized portrayals of relationships bear little resemblance to the real lives of teens—and are generally not balanced by clear messages about safe and healthy attitudes towards sex.

The average American teenager watches three hours of television a day. Scientist Rebecca Collins conducted a study to see if watching sexual behavior on TV influenced teenagers’ own behavior. In her results, she found that watching shows with sexual content has a considerable

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents can do to Protect Their Kids by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is written for the parents of children and teenagers to help them understand and more effectively combat the harmful messages about sexuality that has become all too prevalent in popular media. I would recommend this book to parents and teenagers. It gives parents tools and strategies to help raise children that understand what healthy sexuality is and how to intelligently navigate a society that pushes harmful gender roles and adult behavior onto children. Older teenagers would also benefit from reading this book to gain accurate information about how toxic sexuality is marketed to them in order

When I was first given this assignment it made me a bit uneasy. I was nervous about writing an extended essay on one particular topic. Being that there are so many social issues that need to be brought to light I was having a little trouble sticking to just one. However, with some guidance and encouragement I decided to finally settle with the issue of sex in the media. Within this extended essay I will attempt to shine light on the history of sex in advertisement and examples of different ads, prove sex sells any and everything, the role the media plays in our youth’s lives and creates hyperactive sexual development in children between thirteen and seventeen years old and how the media degrade women and associate them as mere objects. I

More teens are learning sex from the media or from their friends instead of from their parents or a sexual education class taught in schools. “Nearly three fourths of television shows contains talk about sex or show sexual behavior,” (King and Regan 2). When we drive down the road we see several stores promoting sex such as Condoms to Go, Condom Sense, Sarahs Secret, and New Fine Arts. Children who have no clue to what these stores are, automatically want to know everything about it and why it

Through these two structures, the article does more than just present a problem and a solution, but she also presents the causes and effects of that problem, making a more evolved and informative article. She identifies the problem as the media portraying teen sex or sex in general as being consequence free, one solution she mentions is to have the media and the society combine forces to campaign against teen sex. Teen-age pregnancies are somewhat indirectly caused by the media’s lack of reality when promoting sex. Goodman’s article is successfully written using both of these structures however, to make her point resolute, her rhetorical appeals need to be more prevalent and more defined.

With reference to relevant cultural theories analyse the representation of sexuality in a film/television text of your choice.

This age group is generally in an age of exploration of self-identity and fulfillment, instability, and optimism of the future (Munsey, 2006). This is also the time when most people complete their undergraduate degree, and many studies on emerging adults can be applied to college students. An individual age 12-18 is generally defined as an adolescent. For the purposes of this literature review, young adults will be defined as those ages 13-25. In a little over a decade, the choices made will influence the individual for the rest of their lives, and is often referred to as the crucial years for this reason. During these years, the brain is particularly impressionable, making sexual media a concern for

From a young age, girls are put under pressure to be sexually appealing for those around her. But women, being people who still have biological needs and desires to be fulfilled, have rarely been offered a direct but safe pathway into sexual self-discovery other than through experience, which carries the risks of sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy, and STI acquisition. Men have an entire industry dedicated to fulfilling their sexual desires—the porn industry’s treatment of women is nothing to bat an eye at. Off screen, girls grow up being treated as sexual objects from a young age, surrounded by sexy women in advertising, movies, and TV. Having to deal with others’ “schoolgirl” fantasies and the idea of being “jailbait” make it hard for a woman at the apex of puberty to safely explore her developing sexuality. Girls also grow up with a ridiculous double standard telling them to avoid being sexy while avoiding prudishness: to dress conservatively if they don’t want to get assaulted, but to show some skin because nobody likes a bore. Speaking from experience, it gets tiring being told to be two things at once in order to please somebody else, and media has a powerful effect on how women see themselves, as stated by Katie Barnes in her piece, On The Importance Of Media Representation

Advertising is everywhere. Advertisements follow us at every location and manipulate our minds to believe the product is more reliable, trustworthy, irresistible, and even sensual. In recent decades advertisements have progressively become more erotic and have appealed more to our natural desires for relationships than to the need for the product itself. It is not uncommon to see a perfume advertisement with a naked woman holding her breasts, a denim commercial with a man and woman making love, or a fast food ad with young women prancing around in small bikinis. Despite this outward media on sex, society runs into the contradiction of sexual repression. With the increase of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among teens, many people are quick to blame the media for the “forbidden” acts that are taking places. However, as we observe the morals and practices of sexual repression it reveals the possibility that the contradiction between both events cause more harm to our culture. The contradiction between sex in the media and repression in society is making teenagers more susceptible to sexual confusion, unplanned teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases. In order to reduce the damaging outcomes that are caused by media and abstinence programs, schools should incorporate more sexual education programs and promote contraceptive. Advertising companies should also get their minds out of the gutter and decrease the amount of sexual advertisements that are

Our sex saturated media is also generating conflict in young girls’ development. The portrayal of women as sexual objects is discussed in the article “The sexualization of Girls is Harmful” by Olivia Ferguson and Hayley Mitchell Haugen. The article cites statistics of “prime-time television shows popular among children” remarking that “12% of sexual comments involved sexual objectification toward women” and “23% of sexual behaviors involved leering, ogling or catcalling at female characters”.(par 6) The feature provides www.aboutkidshealth.ca/ as an “online resource for information about areas of children’s health and family life”. (Par 1) This web site states “depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders” as consequences for media sexualizing women. (Par 2) The research defines “the objectification theory as a psychological theory explaining the

There is a great debate on whether or not mass media has an influence on teenage pregnancy. A study done by the RAND Corporation shows that teens are twice as likely to have sex or engage in sexual acts if they see similar sexual behavior in the media. Many objects in the media that involve sex target teens. Reality TV shows and teen dramas often portray the "cool kids" as the ones who are having sex (Chandra).Today’s teens are highly influenced by what they see in the media and this can change their behavior and choices. Some will argue that the media doesn’t influence teenagers, but how can we be sure of that? Today, the media portray teen pregnancy in movies, television shows, magazines, music, news reports, and books. The problems

Due to the effects of sexuality in the media, more teens are open to sexual acts and at a younger age now. Adolescents are now open to "hook-ups" or friends-with-benefits, where they have "casual sexual encounters at parties and clubs between youngsters who are not emotionally involved with one another" which are influenced by new techology and take away the "first date" which would help put safe sex into the teens minds (Friedman). Some folks are worried that the sex in the media will counteract sex education and do not include problems that having sexual intercourse can bring about. In his article "Sex, Violence and the Media", Charles S. Clark explains:

At the non-profit organization known as RAND Corporation researchers performed three surveys on about 2,000 teens between the ages of 12 to 17 from 2001 to 2004. The results were published in the November edition of the journal Paediatrics, in the publication they focused on 700 participants nationwide who had engaged in sexual intercourse by the third survey. (Landau E, 2008, November 03) The researchers determined that even with the other related factors such as demographics and risk-taking behaviours put into play the connection between television sexual content and teen pregnancy still remained. (Landau E, 2008, November 03) In another survey published in Paediatrics more than 1,000 public middle school students in North Carolina were surveyed at the ages of 12-14 years old and were surveyed again two years later at the ages of 14-16 years old. They measured the students exposure to sexual content in television, movies, music and magazines and were divided into five equal-sized groups ranging from the lowest exposure to the highest exposure. The research showed that white teenagers even after taking into account other factors known to reduce the likelihood of teen sex, like parental disapproval of sex at that age and getting good grades, still increased. In fact each increase in grouping of sexual media exposure increased the likelihood of them being involved in teen sex by

The best way to promote teenage sexual health is to create a supportive environment with a wealth of accurate, holistic information. If students do not receive accurate information about sexual health from reliable institutions such as schools, they will find such information, albeit inaccurate, elsewhere. Adolescents often rely upon peers and mass media for sexual information (Igras et al. 558), which poses problems because peers are equally uninformed and the media presents distorted or inaccurate portrayals of sexual activity. Like abstinence programs, television, movies, and the Internet perpetuate gender stereotypes, but by demonstrating how the genders are supposed to act in sexual situations rather than teaching about it (Kittleson and Howard-Barr 73). Additionally, the media includes abundant sexual references without the necessary health information to back them up. The average teenager encounters over 14,000 sexual references each year, but only 1 in 85 discuss serious matters such as “abstinence, contraception, or marriage” (Kittleson and Howard-Barr 73). Abstinence only education programs and the media may be on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as attitudes toward sex, but are both equally uninformative because they