How Does Sex Affect Teens

Today more than ever teens are being influenced by the media. Specifically, teens are being increasingly exposed to sex on television. Top teen shows on television, such as “Shameless”, “Gossip Girl”, and “One Tree Hill”, are exposing teens to many sexual behaviors and comments at an early age. The amount of sexual behaviors and comments that appeared on the three shows previously mentioned were coded with the type of comment or behavior shown, the age of the character participating in the act/comment, and the gender of the character participating in the act/comment taken into consideration. This was done to get a better understanding of how sex is actually portrayed on teen television shows. The article “Adolescents, Sex, and the Media: Ooooo, Baby, Baby - a Q & A” by Victor C. Strasburger addressed many of the facts surrounding sex in the media and adolescents’ exposure to it. For the most part, the article was leaning towards sex in the media being a bad influence for teens. However, …show more content…
The most frequent type of sexual comment made by males and females was general sexual innuendos, however, males made more sexual innuendos than females (6 versus 3). Even though both sexes had the same most frequent type of sexual comment, males made comments of a sexual nature about a person’s body or appearance and sexist remarks or sexual slurs about the nature of women or men more than females who did not make either of those types of comments. Again, not surprising with today’s sexist culture. For example, in the show “Gossip Girl”, Chuck made a sexist remark to Serena who’s friend rejected him. He screamed, “Your life is over, slut!” When sexist comments and derogatory terms such this are consistently shown on the media, adolescents start to think that it is okay to say those types of hurtful things and consequently sexism