How You Found Out About Sex Before 'The Talk'
Jane Brown did a study concentrating on the mass media as a sexual super peer for early maturing girls. She found that earlier maturing girls reported being more interested in seeing sexual content in movies, television, and magazines, and listening to sexual content in music, regardless of age or race (Brown 2005). These media stimuli can be especially important for girls who are maturing more rapidly than the rest of their peer groups and do not yet have friends to talk about sexuality yet. A magazine such as Cosmo, that has a large portion of it's content devoted to sexuality, could serve as a super peer by being able to provide information and models about sexuality that is not yet available in their peer group.
At the same token a steamy love scene in a movie, like Titanic, could have begun to show how relationships are formed and what love and sex look like. (I found another Buzzfeed article taking about how Titanic caused a sexual awakening that was pretty hilarious and relates to the 'Teenage Dream' talk we attended on Thursday) The 'Teenage Dream' talk focused on adolescent romantic parasocial attachments as a source of relational development for adolescent girls. These romantic attachments to celebrities offer a way to explore dating in a safe environment to experiment without consequences. It allows these young girls to accumulate knowledge, plan future behaviors, and generate and maintain social ties.
The Internet can play an extremely important role especially in situations where information is not readily available.Take for instance the work of Bradley Bond on information seeking practices during the sexual development of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. It may be more difficult to realize sexuality identity when it does not fit societal norms and therefore one may turn to other forms of media and outlets to seek information. He found that the Internet plays a critical tole in the development of LGB sexual identities and that that heavy users of media during the coming out process are significantly less likely to communicate openly with their families later in life (Bond 2009). While many heterosexual experiences are mirrored in TV, movies, music, and magazines, LGB individuals are often underrepresented in those mediums. The Internet can provide a safe anonymous space for these individuals to explore their sexual identities.
Bibliography
Bond, B. J., Hefner, V., & Drogos, K. L. (2009).
Information-seeking practices during the sexual development of lesbian, gay,
and bisexual individuals: The influence and effects of coming out in a mediated
environment. Sexuality & Culture: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 13(1),
32-50.
Brown, J. D., Halpern, C. T. & L'Engle, K. L. (2005). Mass
media as a sexual super peer for early maturing girls. Journal of Adolescent
Health, 36(5), 420-427.
'Teenage Dream'
Charlotte,
ReplyDeleteReally nice post! I think this is a really relevant and important topic that has larger implications for sexual behaviors and sexual health. It made me really think back to my own experience with this and the "It goes both ways" article discussion when we talked about the fact that our own individual lived experience factors into our interpretation of media. Here's why: I found it interesting that the title is "How You Found Out About Sex BEFORE 'The Talk.'" Implicit in that is the idea that you actually end up getting the talk...and some kids never do. I might be wrong but I'm guessing kids that grow up with parents of higher SES get a better, more well-informed version of the talk rather than less educated families, as was the case with me. In my experience, I think I took in a lot of highly sexualized media (telenovelas) with very low parental debriefing of the sexual practices. I wonder how things like these also factor into this for other people as well who might have media as the main "coach" for sex.