Sex on Television – Content Analysis Assignment
As I took notes for this essay I knew that I would find a substantial amount of sex with-in the commercials or even the show, but I was not expecting an entire two pages full of both men and women making references to sex or objects being sexualized. I have a six-year-old son, and I usually watch television with him after dinner, so I was not expecting to catch so many “sex jokes”. The majority of the jokes were not in the actual show we decided to watch, but in the infomercials, clearly sex was taught to be the most popular way to sell items, food, merchandise, and even clothes.
The first thing I thought about were those little curious questions my son would sometimes ask, like “why are they doing that?”, “why do they kiss, that’s gross!”. Of course, I don’t allow him to watch anything with adult or teen ratings, but even children’s shows or movies had those sort of messages or jokes, I couldn’t understand where the curiosity was coming from. I saw how much my son reminded me of Greta Christina’s article, Are we Having Sex Now or What, and her confusion of what sex was. I was not sure how to explain this to my son, or if I should let his school teach him about sex education, or even when I should begin to teach him about this topic.
In one of the commercials they managed to sexualize a cheeseburger, it started with an attractive woman, she was being filmed from her feet up to her face, then the camera comes back down to her chest and remains there while she eats a cheeseburger. Because of the sexualization of women’s breast, it is more accepted to see almost bare breast in a Victoria’s Secret commercial than breast feeding a child! Which is what they are intended for! Breasts were created to produce milk for their children, as cows do for calves, dogs, cats, rats, raccoons, monkeys, and so on, but we don’t see cows wearing lingerie in a dairy commercial. This has become such a great issue that now there is a gender equality campaign called “Free the Nipple” exposing the double standards between men and women.
These double standards have been an issue for hundreds of years, now with feminism they seem to be decreasing, but are still present in several countries. For example, in the reading by Pepper Schwartz, Why Is Everyone Afraid of Sex?, she actually writes about the double standards and patriarchal norms, such as in the United States and how women are still threatened by the word “slut”, but men are praised if they have several of sexual partners (Schwartz, Pg. 259). Or how women in the middle east are killed if they are discovered having sex outside of wedlock (Schwartz, Pg. 259).
This confusion, double standards, and fear of sex will continue as long as sex is used for ratings or oppression, sex is not the only thing that sells and why can’t women have sex out of wedlock just as men do? Or have their fair share of sexual encounters “before they settle on a primary sexual identity” (Schwartz, Pg. 260) It seems that the majority of the double standards are at the convenience of men, but they need to acknowledge that we are no longer living in a “man’s world”.
Works Cited:
Risman, Barbara J., Virginia Rutter. Families as they really are, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Schwartz, P. (2015). Why Is Everyone Afraid of Sex? In Families As They Really Are (2nd ed., pp. 252- 263). New York: W.W Norton and Company. doi:978-0-393-93767-1
Greta, C. (1992) Are We having Sex Now, Or What? Categorizing Sex (Chpr. 1 pp. 5- 9).
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