There is no argument that women in the mainstream media have been portrayed as sexualized objects for decades in an attempt for advertisement; sexualizing women has been a successful business tactic that guarantees attention and profit. As technology develops over time, it also creates more opportunities to exploit women for personal gain. In this day and age, nobody accessing the media more than today’s adolescents. A 2013 study reported that 81% of American teenagers use social media sites, and a 2015 study reported that 71% of American teens daily use more than one social network site. Teenagers using these networks have complete access to daily messages that women are expected to appear as sexual objects to be socially accepted. As more
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The Martin and Kazyak article “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” discusses the role of Disney movies specifically as enforcing gender roles at young ages. Men are portrayed as hypermasculine, but their nudity or suggestive situations were read with humor, not hypersexuality. Women in Disney movies are typically sexually pure, but still provocative to attract attention to themselves. The purpose of women’s bodies were to attract a man, because the heterosexual bond between a man and a woman is sacred. Especially in women of color, women’s bodies were aesthetically pleasing and captured a sexual standard for what every “sexy” woman should look like. As the children who watched those movies grew up, they carry those messages of social acceptability and how to value relationships with the opposite …show more content…
Since social media is a crucial cause of the appropriation of objectification of women’s bodies, relationships online reflect those expectations for women. The degradation of women allows it to be suitable for adolescent boys to ask their girlfriends for sexually suggestive or completely graphic naked pictures via social media. Popular social media applications such as Snapchat create an easy medium to transfer naked pictures, with the appeal being that after a certain number of seconds the photo is no longer accessible to the recipient. Girls today typically comply because they see these kinds of images plastered throughout the Internet and see an overwhelmingly positive reaction. They learn to objectify themselves for the same self-gratification and approval from their partner. However, smartphones today have the ability to screenshot the photo and save it as a permanent photo on the phone’s memory. Screenshotting photos directly invades young girls’ privacy the exploitation and distribution of adolescent girls’ explicit photos is a common form of
The Martin and Kazyak article “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” discusses the role of Disney movies specifically as enforcing gender roles at young ages. Men are portrayed as hypermasculine, but their nudity or suggestive situations were read with humor, not hypersexuality. Women in Disney movies are typically sexually pure, but still provocative to attract attention to themselves. The purpose of women’s bodies were to attract a man, because the heterosexual bond between a man and a woman is sacred. Especially in women of color, women’s bodies were aesthetically pleasing and captured a sexual standard for what every “sexy” woman should look like. As the children who watched those movies grew up, they carry those messages of social acceptability and how to value relationships with the opposite …show more content…
Since social media is a crucial cause of the appropriation of objectification of women’s bodies, relationships online reflect those expectations for women. The degradation of women allows it to be suitable for adolescent boys to ask their girlfriends for sexually suggestive or completely graphic naked pictures via social media. Popular social media applications such as Snapchat create an easy medium to transfer naked pictures, with the appeal being that after a certain number of seconds the photo is no longer accessible to the recipient. Girls today typically comply because they see these kinds of images plastered throughout the Internet and see an overwhelmingly positive reaction. They learn to objectify themselves for the same self-gratification and approval from their partner. However, smartphones today have the ability to screenshot the photo and save it as a permanent photo on the phone’s memory. Screenshotting photos directly invades young girls’ privacy the exploitation and distribution of adolescent girls’ explicit photos is a common form of