Sex in the Media Essay -- Papers

Sex plays a major role in today's society. From television, radio, music, and advertisements, to video games, the Internet, art and pictures, all forms of media use sex to help sell their products. With the public being exposed to so many different types of media, the overuse of sex is common. Is sex a useful tool, or a ploy to get the attention of the public? Before discussing sex in the media, one must understand why it has come to be that people use sex as a gimmick. "The writing of modern history has resulted in a viewpoint that is nothing short of a stag party. The history of women is ignored, hushed up, and censored in the most literal sense of the term. This method of eliminating the social and political destiny of half of humanity is the most effective form of supremacy." (Janssen-Jurreit 189) The world as it exists today, is still man-made, no less now then in the nineteenth century. Alice E. Courtney states, "Women's self-awareness as females has until very recently reflected the world's (mostly men's) image of them; how well their personal performance matched male expectations." These individual roles, as described by Oneill and Leone in Male/Female Roles: Opposing Viewpoints as the relationship of a man or woman to society on the basis of gender, became essential in shaping male and female attitudes towards one another. Over the past twenty years remarkable changes in these traditional male and female roles have been witnessed. The subsequent impact on men, women, and families due to these changes is believed to be, by many social historians, caused by the re-emergence of the women's movement. (Oneill and Leone 138) Though a positive alteration of roles has occurred, how is it that childr... ...New York. Thousand Oaks. 1994 Davis, Simone Weil. "Living up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s." Conn. Durham Dike Press. 2000 Dines, Gail and Jean M. Humez. "Gender, Race, and Class in Media: a Text Reader." California. Thousand Oaks. 1995 Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Boston: University Press. 1974 Holtzman, Linda. "Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach us about Race, Sex, and Gender Roles." New York. Sharp. 2000 Impoco, Jim. (1996 April). Tv's frisky family values. U.S. News & World Report 120 no 15, p. 58-62. Janssen-Jurreit, Marie Louise. (1982). Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History & Thought. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Oneill, M. Teresa, Leone, Bruno. (1983). Male/Female Roles: Opposing Viewpoints. St. Paul. Greenhaven Press.