MEDIA AND SEXUALITY

Effect of Media on Sexuality

Effect of Media on Sexuality

Thesis Statement

The impact of media on Adolescents' sexual behavior and its consequences

Introduction

There has been an ongoing debate about the impact of media on the society. Although it has affected the society positively, but its negative impacts are more than the positive ones. One of the negative impacts of media on the society is sexuality. Apart from school, media are the source where children learn about sexuality. This is evident from the result of the survey in which teenage students have ranked media as the second source from where they get sex education (Brown, 1993). Although sexuality can affect any age group, but teenage children are the people who are most affected.

Discussion

This has impacted teenage students the most, and this is the reason why early sexual intercourse has increased. According to a recent survey done in America, about 61% of all high-school students have had sex (Greenberg, 1993). There are other countries as well, who have the same sex rate but United States has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy.

Children in the United States spend more than 38 hours per week watching television. Movies, music or television shows very clearly and explicitly express sexual messages. These messages, most of the times are inaccurate and misleading. These messages negatively impact the teenage students the affect the sexuality in the society is increasing.

Soap operas are popular with the teenage group in the United States. These operas very openly portray sexual scenes which causes teenage sexual intercourse. The 'so called' primetime (8:00-9:00 PM) contains most of the sexual content. Advertisements during this hour usually contain sexual content. According to a study, teenage girls (above 15) are fonder of watching sexual content than the teenage boys.

There is no doubt that there are other sources as well where sexual content is displayed openly, but television plays a ...