Adolescence: Sexuality & the Media

“Sex sells!” This is the trademark headline of media streaming in today’s society. Risqué dressing, explicit phrases and dialogue, and enticing eroticism help to sell some of the hottest items, from pants and shoes, to mp3 players and cell phones. Companies and brands will do whatever to expand their financial wealth, even if that means exploiting young eyes, ears, and minds to a world far more mature than their years. Dictionary.com defines media as the means of communication that reach or influence people widely. This includes youths and adolescents.

The media consists of television, music, video games, the internet, newspapers, and magazines. Advertisements, television shows, videos, and movies all embed images of violence, sex, drugs & alcohol, and sexual experimentation. But, they lack in providing information pertaining to abstinence, sexual protection, and the dangers of substance abuse. The media has a way of targeting a young audience by using subliminal advertising. An example of subliminal advertising would be placing a marketable product in a popular television show so it can be seen, but not spoken about. Marketers also use cartoons to advertise a product. This is bad in the way that it uses a popular children’s item to sell a product that is almost always for adults. A prime example of this is the camel that is used in advertising for Camel cigarettes.

Why are adolescents such an easy target? Teenage years are a time for developing individual personalities, experimentation, and discovering new horizons. It’s the years when a person wants to either fit in, or stand out from everyone else. Teenagers are discovering themselves; who they are, and what they want to be. Television and other media have a way of portraying negative images as positive. Minors can easily begin to believe that what they are seeing on television and in magazines is how you should carry yourself to be noticed. Given the fact that adolescents spend so many of their hours listening to music, watching television, and surfing the net, they tend to become enveloped by what they are seeing and hearing.

On average, American children spend more than thirty-eight hours a week using media; of those thirty-eight hours, seventeen is spent watching television (Pediatrics 191). By the time an adolescent graduates from high school, they will have spent 15,000 hours watching television, compared with 12,000 hours spent in the classroom (Pediatrics 191).

Even though television seems to be the most available form of media, the World Wide Web is coming up in ranks. On average, children between the ages of nine and seventeen years old use the internet four days a week, and spend almost two hours online at a time (Pediatrics 191). The internet gives access to music, games, chat websites, dating websites, and sex related websites. Pornographic websites are the most prevalent, and hardest to avoid. When using search engines, fifty-seven percent of teenagers reported coming across pornography while they were looking up other things (AVERT). There are several pop-up blockers, and web-blocking programs parents can put on their computers to prevent their children from have access to explicit content. But, parents can’t supervise internet access on every computer their child ever has access to; the same in saying they can’t prevent their children from seeing and hearing every advertisement that could be taken in on any given day, or every song and television show.