Sexual Messages and Images Available to Teenagers Via the Media

According to the American pediatric academy, teenagers spend about 7 hours each day with various kinds of media. Those media contain sexual messages and images. Television is the most dominant medium for all adolescents and around 75% of programs transmitted contain sexual content. Advertisements frequently use sex to make more sales. Women are portrayed in suggestive clothing or nude. These ads may seem funny or harmless, but they end to degrade or devalue sex. Music is another primary source of sexual suggestiveness. Music videos display sexual feelings and impulses while others show provocative clothing and sexually suggestive body positions.

When it comes to movies, almost every R-rated film since the 19805 contains a minimum of one nude scene and regularly various scenes of sexual intercourse, for instance, the American Pie movie series teenage videos contain scenes of romance and sexuality.

Teenager magazines focus on choosing when to engage in the first sexual encounter, According to Washington Post (2013) the internet is another media that contains numerous sexual information and pornography that is impossible to commit.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram allow teenagers to present themselves publicly, at times in suggestive sexual manner. There is an increasing worry over youth’s exposure to sexual content through media and its potential impacts on sexual attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The study shows the increasing prevalence of sexual discussions and portrayals of sexual behaviors in televised media and associations between teenagers viewing patterns and their sexual activities the Media’s Effect on Teenagers’ Sexuality.

According to Mediscope (2013), social media advertising is an important technique applied to teach sexual health education.

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Socially responsible information can be transmitted through mainstream programming. Teenagers can be educated on the importance of using contraceptives or abstaining from sexual activities. Research shows that viewers of Gray’s Anatomy episode understood that HIV-positive women could be able to conceive HIV-negative infants. Media and advertising is also used to improve parent-child communication concerning sex. In North Carolina, a mass media promotion using billboards and TV and radio advertisements delivered the information. Parents were persuaded to discuss sex with their children various sex education programs have lately focused on abstinence-only. The media is currently the leading sex educator in the USA.

Adolescents often quote the media as a source of sexual information Teenagers claim that they have learned more about immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) from media sources compared to parents or school teachers. The media provides behavioral information about sexual situations, particularly for inexperienced adolescents, advertising condoms or birth control pills on TV and radio could lead to a decrease in teenage pregnancy rate. Premature sexuality is a common issue in the United States. It has the utmost rate of teenage pregnancies, birth, and abortion of any developed country. The typical teenager deals with media every day they wake up listening to the radio and spend the day with friends discussing the previous episode of the best TV program. They surf the internet at school or read the latest issues of their favorite magazine at home.

According to American Pediatrics (2013) even though sexual media content can influence any age group, teenagers are the most vulnerable. They are exposed to sexual content during a developmental phase when gender roles, sexual behaviors or sexual attitudes are being shaped. Adolescents are mainly at risk since the cognitive skills that enable them to analyze information from the media and to make best decisions based on probable future outcomes are not fully developed, there is a lot of sex in the mass media and teenagers are logging more time of exposure. There is little information concerning how teens respond to such sexual imagery. This lack of knowledge is troubling since teens accept to learn from and could copy behaviors displayed in media as normative, striking and without risk. The media portrays irresponsible and unrealistic sexual activities such as display of teenage characters engaging in promiscuous acts but not getting pregnant or contract transmitted sexual diseases media displays sex in a manner that permanently scars most teens before their teen years are ended.

Sex is sometimes viewed as the way to achieve status and contentment in life advertisements are increasingly using sex to make sales. The community is more aware of the dangers of sexually transmitted disease, yet adolescents are occasionally bombarded with sexually explicit pictures as if STDs only occur to other individuals. Sexually explicit programming and promotion is destructive to the self-esteem of adolescents, teenagers’ idols such are displayed by the media as prostitutes and vixens. Adolescents learn to view people as objects to be used for sexual pleasure. It is not startling that teenagers today act out their fantasies of sexual control and power through sexually assaulting or murdering others.

Sex should be viewed as a gift from God A man and woman should look forward to enjoying a rewarding sexual relationship after marriage. Long before teenagers marry in our community, they have been showered with pictures of cosmetically perfect bodies involved in the simulation of sexual acts. The manner in which media displays sex leaves most young people ill-prepared for life where long-term sexual joy can only exist in a relationship based on mutual love, respect, honesty, and trust. In an effective marriage, a husband and wife opted to love each other regardless of the impacts of time and gravity.  When young people grow up watching music videos and their music idols engage in casual sex with different partners in every new video, most of them will be unable to find lasting contentment and joy when they get married to a genuine person.

The internet can make teens become sexually active at an earlier age or disregard the idea of commitment when watching video clips. That is the major tragic impact and it should give you a reason to fight for your young one’s future happiness by demanding that media serve our teenager’s best interests. Parents and healthcare officers need to be very troubled by these findings, Teenagers are filled with sexual imagery. There are increased cases of teenage pregnancies and cases of sexual infections each year. The media should display decent images to teenagers to stop all these sexual behaviors and attitudes.