SEX in MEDIA
Since the beginning of film and television, mainstream media has been a primary vehicle for propagating norms of behavior, social conduct, even fashion trends. As media has evolved into the cultural and technological phenomena it is today, it has evolved as a finely honed tool by the male establishment to exert and enforce influence over how women are defined, viewed, and ultimately regarded – not only by men, but by women themselves!
Media is a powerful teaching tool. Its seductive, alluring, passive nature combined with high levels of repetition and frequency make it an ideal programming tool. And human history and human psychological/sociological observation have already demonstrated that human thoughts and opinions can actually be completely changed over the course of as little as three generations. Humans are very adaptive, and generally speaking we don’t learn from history, but instead each generation wants to experience the world on their own terms. So what I mean by that is, in less than three generations, we can go from a 1970s women’s lib mentality in the forefront of women’s minds, to the 2011’s, where media can and do portray women any way they want to, but almost always do so in a very particular way– as vulnerable, stereotypical, usually submissive, and often in a sexually defining way. There is often verbal or visual degradation and/or porn-ification of women in media – as well as unilateral feminine characterizations of how we women behave and typically think (or don’t think) – yet women don’t seem to even have too much to say on the topic all in the public sphere, at least that is what my research has turned up. Not even organizations like the National Organization for Women or many other countless resource agencies working for women's advancement and empowerment seem to have media indoctrination on their radar as a feminist issue.
Last night I was flipping around the Dish-network TV programming guide. They have lots of HD channels that are just that – HD channels. They vary in content, but most -- if not all -- are just mainstream TV, nothing like a pay-per-view kind of thing. You just buy the HD package and you get all these stations.
So I was flipping through those last night and found a show called International Sexy Ladies Show. I clicked on the info for the program information and it said it was rated PG-13, TV-14. In other words, totally fine for teens and no concern for parents. So I clicked on the show.
It was back-to-back, 30 minute episodes of video clips taken from TV around the world, that show outrageous, humiliating, sexual and/or semi-nude images of women, in a wide variety of situations and states of undress.
The segment when I tuned in was showing a young woman contortionist wearing a white leotard with a thong-cut, contorting her body into all kinds of unusual and provocative positions. After that, she put herself into a 2-foot by 3-foot clear plexi-glass box (or smaller – a very small box), with her head wedged down at the bottom and her thin strand of thong– briefly stretched across her vulva and anus – facing upward toward the camera, which was positioned above her. We see her hand then come up to fumble a bit with the thong material barely wedged across her privates, and the male narrator makes some joking, frivolous (and perhaps humiliating) comment about her needing to check her bikini line.
The next segment of this show was a video clip out of Czechoslovakia and showed a roomful of half-dressed women around a boxing ring sort of arrangement, which was filled to about a 2-foot level of thick grey goo. It turns out it was wet cement, and the girls were going to battle it out girl-on-girl in the ring.
I didn’t stick around to watch the humility and degradation that was no doubt soon to follow. I’ve seen similar tournaments, in other types of filthy goo. I am not sure what new angle the wet cement adds to the competition, other than males find it humorous and hilarious to watch those kind of matches between women – perhaps more so than they find it humiliating – though there is undoubtedly a huge humility factor even just in the fact that these women are willing to get in the ring at all and participate.
Keep in mind, these shows are targeting 14 year old boys or teen boys in general. I can personally guarantee that if a teen boy was alone or with a buddy or two, and they flipped across this show on TV, that they would definitely stop and watch the whole thing, or possibly all the episodes. And they would be laughing their heads off, as boys love to do, at the absurdity of it and with nervous, eye-opening titillation.
The message that this show (and many others) offers teens is to sex-educate boys with the knowledge that women are objects of sex, and men are creatures of lust and desire. Sexual images of women, including those combined with humor, humiliation and oftentimes violence, are incredibly common in media seen by countless teen boys, over and over, as a part of male indoctrination into the realities of manhood.
And while there are a lot of grown, adult men in the world who are upstanding, good men (knights, I call them), who do not necessarily see women only as they are depicted in media, many of those men did not experience such ubiquitous and prolific, single-directed messages about women, with explicit adult themes and images, coming at them from every aspect of media while they were growing up. How those influences will impact an entire generation of boys and their someday women-partners and wives, is yet to be seen.
Age 14 is a very impressionable age, as is 17/18. And likely everything in between is also. Kids don’t have the same perspective on all this human sexuality stuff as adults do, and kids learn what they live. Boys – future men – are being strongly cultivated to view women as sexual and also hilarious, willing to be humiliated – all of which are methods of establishing dominance. Whether consciously or not, boys and men use the media to teach themselves about women. And the message that is out there about what women are as human beings is incredibly limited and sexualized.
It is hard to see how this imbalance in the media will benefit women. Some say that it has empowered women to own their sexuality more, and offers opportunity for wealth and freedom of personal expression for women. None the less, if you watch endless hours of TV and film, as I do in my research, you will see the continuous stream of propaganda that is being promoted, of what defines women, how women act, what we think about, and countless images very young women sexed up, naked or in revealing underwear and bikinis. These four factors make up most of the content on TV is seems. They are in almost all the shows and almost all the commercials too.
Here’s the problem that I see: Women appear to be sitting back passively and letting these images just continue to happen, taking over absolutely every avenue of media and entertainment. Most of the time, the shows send the same messages: women are for sex, men are the “dogs” who need and seek out sex, women are very preoccupied with our bodies & appearances, and that women do not really have much personal individuality, other than being a porn-girl vs. good girl or mother. Another big message being put out there is that there is literally an endless supply of the number of girls who are willing to get naked and/or humiliated on camera, in a sexual way. Just the sheer volumes of them that we see regularly on TV, compared with seemingly few alternatives of how the majority of women actually are, sends a message to boys and men that this is reality, this is just how most girls are.
We are teaching these values about women to boys from the day they are born and particularly during the highly impressionable teen years. It is very likely that long-term attitudes about sex and girls and women are formed at this time and there is research that supports this. It is known in particular that age 14 is a very influential time sexually for boys, and I personally know that age 17 and 18 are very impressionable times for world-view cognitive shaping.
The most dangerous and frightening aspect to me about this situation is that women are so acquiescent to the fact that it is going on. I’ve yet to find any articles or discussions on this topic, and I have been looking. We sit back while this goes on in front of us and we do nothing about it, not even express opposition. This sends the greatest message of all to men about women -- that we are creatures who are submissive to male authority and desire, and that we seem to be content with things that way.
Ironically, anytime there’s even the tiniest bit of male sensuality/frontal nudity in film – or heaven forbid, on TV – it is amazing all the irate posts on the Internet that men write. They get surprisingly up in arms about even the tiniest tad-bit of perceived male sexploitation, and are often quick to point out that men are sexualized in media far more often than women are, because men are shown with their shirts off a lot more than women are. I kid you not! They are convinced that men are more sexualized in media than women are, and they get upset when men are shown naked. Check out the dialog on this topic online sometime and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Men fight their own sexualization in media, even though they have hardly any. And yet women don’t fight it at all. So who is dominant? Who is powerful? And who is weak and who is submissive? These are questions men are answering to themselves all the time about the world around them. And some of the answers to those questions are being determined on visual-media battlefield, and on any TV near you!
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