Does watching smoking in movies promote teenage smoking? In 1895, the Frenchman Louis Lumiere invented the first motion picture camera (Sargent, 346). Social media is widespread; however, it also occurs concern about the impact of motion pictures to adolescence. There are many movies and video game that focus on sex, language, and violence. Media exposure has a really big effect on adolescence behaviors.
The Merchants of Cool An undeniable paradox: “coolness” for teens coincides with the culture of media and is extremely difficult to separate. Frontline was able to open a window into the teenage world through their documentary The Merchants of Cool to attempt to decode this mystery; however, news correspondent, Douglas Rushkoff, found himself coming to the understanding that teenagers and media are chasing after each other in order to discover what “cool” really is. The popular culture formula and “Funhouse Mirror” images both grasp a hold of this concept. The pop culture formula states that something will be more popular if it reflects the society’s zeitgeist, or spirit of the era. In this film, for example, when MTV emerged onto the television scene it was popular.
Many people outside of the industry believe it affects teen’s sexual activities and violence tendencies. A recent study in the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that the display of sex on television can contribute to preadolescent sex. Rebecca Collins et al Ahmed 2 argued in their article that sex in entertainment can lead to teens having sex. She argues that when teens start to become sexually curious, the programming on television showing sexual content influences their idea about sex, specifically in regard to gender stereotype. The amount of sexual content on television is huge.
C.J. Pascoe’s Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School gives great insight into modern youth in the high school setting and how relationships between gender and sexuality may be embedded in major learning institutions. The book focuses on the male population in the high school setting and how males constantly display signs of their idea of masculinity and attacking those who do not obtain such masculinity by labeling them as a “fag”. Pascoe explains that perpetuating the ideas of masculinity in high school and other institutions leads to the formation of a defined line between what is perceived as normal masculine behavior and what is not. Pascoe’s book explicitly reveals societies obsession with masculine identity and the fear of “faggoty” behavior.
Book Review: Dude, You’re a Fag- C. J. Pascoe Dude You’re a Fag is an exploration by Sociologist C. J. Pascoe into the nature of masculinity and sexuality in the High School environment. Over the course of a year, Pascoe carried out her research in the typically American High School, River High, where her findings highlighted what many gender scholars already knew but often overlooked (Ward, 2009). Using the theoretical background of Judith Butler’s notion that gender is the product of repeated acts of repudiation and confirmation (Butler, n.d.), combined with queer theory and feminist theory, Pascoe develops further to explain the way in which the High School environment creates hegemonic masculinity. Pascoe presents, with much empirical evidence, the main themes of compulsive heterosexuality, the fag discourse and the notion of female masculinity and discusses the implications these have for the broader concepts of gender in society, culminating in the idea that masculinity is not a homogenous category, rather a configuration of “practices and discourses” that both girl and boy youths embody in different ways (Pascoe, 2012, p. 5) and that these gendered processes are encoded into the youth on multiple levels. The first significant argument that Pascoe proposes is the “heterosexualising process” that is organised by educational institutions through various performances and rituals that reiterate gendered power and develop masculine identities.
Amy I. Nathanson and Renée A. Botta, authors of Shaping the Effects of Television on Adolescents’ Body Image Disturbance: The Role of Parental Mediation, came up with a simple definition of body image: “Body image is an overall concept consisting of related but distinct dimensions addressing feelings, thoughts, and perceptions about body size and shape” (305). In other words, it is how people look at and feel about themselves. According to Deborah Schooler, author of Real Women Have Curves: A Longitudinal Investigation of TV and the Body Image Development of Latina Adolescents, the
Jonathan Cohen’s paper studies the relation between the amount and type of Israeli television programs watched (rather than foreign programs) and the level of nationalism generated from them. And through his findings, he was able to conclude that active exposure and preference to Israeli television does not relate to increased national pride. However, he does discover that national pride is evident through popular characters in these programs. For his study, Cohen chose the construct of national pride. From that, he wanted to determine whether the amount of exposure and viewing of Israeli television programming affected the level of national pride in its viewers.
The lyrics with sexual content made the teens partake in sexual activities. Since music is a big part of teen’s everyday life, the sexual lyrics in the music will encourage them to want to do the sexual behavior portrayed in the lyrics. This support the thesis because my thesis states music encourages sexual activity, and DeNoon said sexual lyrics made the teen initiate in intercourse which is sexual. In this article, “Degrading lyrics linked to earlier teenage sex,” Steve Connor talks about a study showing how teenagers who listen to degrading lyrics engage in precocious sexual activity, in the result of his study he finds, “In fact,
Today, some of top played songs contain lyrics that are about sex. The media basically disguises the words with “slang” and these songs are promoted and become so popular among the youth. Also, there are multiple magazines available to the public, with big flashy titles discussing sex tips and secrets, and scandals within the celebrities. You can find these magazines and advertisements almost anywhere. They are placed just a couple of shelves away from the popular teenage magazines, making it easy for the youth to access and read.
Many Americans are influenced to take a stand on controversial topics such as homosexual relationships, and the consistent but yet discreet degrading of women because of what they see in the media. The average American is constantly subjected to mass media influence. The media is a very powerful tool that contributes to sculpting the American society. Throughout traditional American culture, heterosexual relationships are what are accepted as the societal norm. It was not until the latter half of the 20th century that gays and lesbians started to assimilate into society.