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Are You Sexy, Flirty, Or A Slut? Exploring ‘Sexualization’ and How Teen Girls Perform/Negotiate Digital Sexual Identity on Social Networking Sites
Abstract
In February 2010 The UK Home Office released a high-profile report, ‘The Sexualisation of Young People’. The UK report came rather late in the international context, following on from earlier reports, including the American Psychological Association Taskforce report on the sexualization of girls (APA, 2007), and the Australian government-led research on the sexualization of children, which generated widespread debate over ‘corporate paedophilia’ (Rush and La Nauze, 2006).
... Before the advent of social networking sites (SNSs), the traditional mass media (e.g., TV commercials and programs, magazines, etc.) consumed in Western societies were the most pervasive and powerful influence [11,12], exerting negative effects on body image [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Currently, SNSs and specially appearance-based SNSs (i.e., those involving appearance-oriented activities such as the posting and viewing of photos) are recognized as problematic in terms of body image and eating behaviors [19][20][21], given the importance assigned to physical appearance [22,23]; SNSs users selectively self-present their-and are presented with-most attractive and idealized body photos [24][25][26]. ...
Background
Previous studies testing for a direct relationship between social networking sites (SNS) addiction and body dissatisfaction (BD) have yielded inconsistent results. Here, we aimed to identify underlying processes that could mediate this relationship. Specifically, we studied the relationship between SNS addiction symptoms and BD through the awareness of appearance pressures and the internalization of beauty ideals, both individually and serially: SNS addiction → Awareness → BD; SNS addiction → Internalization → BD; SNS addiction → Awareness → Internalization → BD.
Method
A total of 368 female undergraduates with SNS accounts completed scales to assess SNS addiction symptoms (Social Network Addiction Questionnaire), BD (Body Shape Questionnaire), awareness, and internalization (Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-4; awareness and internalization scales). A theoretical serial mediation model was constructed to examine the proposed relationships. Body mass index was included as a covariate to control the influence of this important variable.
Results
The results indicated that both awareness and internalization independently mediated the relationship between SNS addiction symptoms and BD. Also, there was a significant serial mediation effect; women with more SNS addiction symptoms tended to be more aware of appearance pressure, which was associated with the internalization of beauty ideals. In turn, this internalization was positively related to BD symptoms.
Conclusions
These findings shed light on the indirect relationship between SNS addiction and BD, demonstrating independent and accumulative mediating effects of awareness and internalization.
... All women characters in our corpus further the sociosexual script of women as sexual gatekeepers, and therefore, as responsible for any deviation from sociosexual norms (e.g., being too sexual or not sexual enough are both socially punished, and the stigma is greater when women do not show sexual agency or selfcontrol; Bay-Cheng, 2015;Comunello, Parisi, and Ieracitano, 2020;Ringrose, 2011;Wiederman, 2005). Gender differences in sexual inexperience and virginity loss trajectories reflect both Carpenter's research (Carpenter, 2002(Carpenter, , 2009(Carpenter, , 2010, in which women were more likely to describe themselves as lacking agency in their experiences of virginity loss, and sexual scripts prescribing women to "save themselves" sexually (Carpenter, 2010, p. 160). ...
Despite sexual imperatives and social norms marginalizing non-sexualities – referred to as compulsory sexuality –, representations of sexually inexperienced emerging adults (SIEA) in works of fiction have been overlooked. The goal of this research was to document media representations of SIEA in popular fictional television series and movies in a contemporary North American context. We conducted in-depth analyses of fictional television series and movies that portrayed at least one lead or secondary SIEA character. Eleven characters were analyzed through a conceptual framework based on social clock, script, and stigma theories. A hybrid qualitative analysis combining tenets of dialectical team-coding, textual, narrative, and critical discourse was conducted. First, each character was assessed regarding the virginity script it best depicted. Three characters (Anastasia, 50 Shades of Grey; April, Grey’s Anatomy; Jane, Jane the Virgin) fit the gift script, five characters (Shoshanna, Girls; Charlene, F**ked Up; Brian, The Young Kieslowski; Jules, L’heure bleue; Peter, The Late Bloomer) best belonged to the stigma script, and three characters (Kala, Sense8; Chiron, Moonlight; Sam, Atypical) exemplified the process script. However, there was some script overlap in many of these representations, which were found to be insufficient to adequately capture the complexity of each characters’ situation with regards to their sexual inexperience. Second, we developed a matrix in which each character was positioned on four axes: (1) intentionality of sexual inexperience, (2) identity, (3) social skills, and (4) social integration. Third, stigma manifestations of SIEA characters were found at the individual, interpersonal, and structural levels. Gender differences were salient in our corpus: male characters’ inexperience was depicted as a by-product of extrinsic or uncontrollable factors (e.g., medical condition), whereas female characters were held responsible for their inexperience and asked to “justify” it. In fact, gender was the primary characteristic through which characters were represented, and superseded the place given to sexual inexperience in the narratives.
School bullying (SB) is a public health concern with significant sociopsychological risks. Marketing research has rarely directly addressed the role of consumption in its development among children and adolescents. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to provide an analytical framework for the study of SB linked to consumption motives related to the possession of products and brands, together with consumer culture. Thus, SB, its main characteristics, and the different peers’ statuses (bullies, victims, and witnesses) are defined. A review of the existing literature on the consumption behavior of young people provides the background for the development of an analytical framework based on relevant individual and contextual variables that give an insight into consumption-motivated SB. The resulting research perspectives are discussed, together with their implications for marketing researchers, public policies, schools, parents, and businesses that target young people.
The advent of Instagram has driven women to desire stereotypical notions of beauty and higher self-esteem. Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and other members of the South Asian diaspora living outside of their countries are often looked up to for their empowered and 'superior' personas. However, this classed, neoliberal, aesthetic representation of NRIs might have plethora of impacts on the discourse of empowerment, and rather, widen this gap for subaltern groups. While previous studies have focused on the impact of Indian diasporas on lower-classed populations, the beauty representations of NRI women on Instagram and its influence on empowerment is yet to be studied. Therefore, this essay aims to study how the young upper-class NRI diasporas utilise post-feminism on Instagram as a framework to sell empowerment to women as an enhanced version of self-styling, self-confidence, and self-love. This essay critically analyses the South-Asian activist trend on Instagram by delving into the rise of postfeminist beauty, and the role that confidence and privilege play therein. I further study how beauty is integrated into the psyche of life and a state of mind, through twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews. This essay demonstrates that with the appropriation of postfeminist activism, discursive politics of confidence and its relationship with desi cultural politics of appearance, elitist NRI women actively replicate and reinforce oppressive patriarchal and colonialist mentality under the guise of modern feminism. Although post-feminism constructs a tight-knit community on Instagram for desi women, it provides the subjects with a double-edged sword as they practice new femininities, with a newer set of terms and conditions.
This article explores the nexus between digital literacies and identity in the online graphical chat environment of the ‘palace’. With a focus on the adolescent cybergirl, it examines how girls use words and images to create a digital presence, and in so doing, ‘write’ their bodies and their selves. I discuss how the cybergirl is discursively constructed as well as self-produced within discourses of sexuality and idealised beauty. A grammatical analysis of both words and images is presented to describe the resources girls are using to construct their identities. In doing so, I highlight the particular ways that girls are creating cyberbodies that are encoded surfaces of the girls' fantasies and desires. I argue that the palace is a site that produces new forms of femininities through allowing girls the space to explore, experience a sense of empowerment and find new ways of reinventing themselves.
This article addresses girls' dress, which has become controversial, especially in contemporary multicultural Europe. Using the Dutch public debate about the headscarf, belly shirts, visible G-strings, and other forms of ‘porno-chic’, the authors show that these seemingly separate debates are held together by the regulation of female sexuality. Through their analysis of the headscarves and porno-chic debate, the authors argue that women's sexuality and girls' bodies in particular have become the metonymic location for many a contemporary social dilemma: of the multicultural society when it concerns the scarf, of feminism and public morality when it concerns porno-chic. They conclude that despite the widely different appearance of girls wearing headscarves or porno-chic, both groups of girls are submitted to the meta-narratives of dominant discourse: the state, school, public opinion, parents and other social institutions ‘resignify’ their everyday practices as inappropriate, and reprieve them from the power to define their own actions.
Are children today growing up too soon? How do they - and their parents - feel about media portrayals of sex and personal relationships? Are the media a corrupting influence, or a potentially positive and useful resource for young people? Drawing on an extensive research project, which investigated children's interpretations of sexual content in films, TV and print media, this book considers how young people (aged 9-17) use such material to understand their experiences and build their identities, and how they and their parents respond to public concerns about these issues. The book offers a clearly written and entertaining insight into children's and parents' perspectives on these difficult issues - perspectives that are often ignored or trivialised in public debate.
Congratulations to Dr. McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA).These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now 'mainstreamed' in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed. McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including - the UK government's 'new sexual contract' to young women, - popular TV makeover programmes, - feminist theories of backlash and the 'undoing' of sexual politics, - feminism in a global frame- the 'illegible rage' underlying contemporary femininities.
Michelle Fine argues that the anti-sex rhetoric surrounding sex education and school-based health clinics does little to enhance the development of sexual responsibility and subjectivity in adolescents. Despite substantial evidence on the success of both school-based health clinics and access to sexuality information, the majority of public schools do not sanction or provide such information. As a result, female students, particularly low-income ones, suffer most from the inadequacies of present sex education policies. Current practices and language lead to increased experiences of victimization, teenage pregnancy, and increased dropout rates, and consequently, ". . . combine to exacerbate the vulnerability of young women whom schools, and the critics of sex education and school-based health clinics, claim to protect." The author combines a thorough review of the literature with her research in public schools to make a compelling argument for "sexuality education" that fosters not only the full developmen...
This international overview of how pornography--from softcore to hardcore, gay to straight, female to male, black to white--infiltrates and proliferates through various media. Porn is everywhere; from the suggestiveness of music videos to the explicit discussions of popular magazines; from the erotica of advertising to the refashioning of sex acts into art works; from a small garage industry to an internet empire. The media immerses us in the pornographic aesthetic. Now integral to popular culture, porn is part of our everyday lives. Sexual desire is commodified, pornified and the media leads the way. Exploring music videos, alt porn sites, Cosmogirls and Gaydar online forums, H&M's street advertising, retro pin-ups, film and educational sex videos alike, Pornification analyses the transformation of porn in today's media and its impact on our culture.