{"id":2410,"date":"2020-12-01T06:53:13","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T12:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2410"},"modified":"2020-11-30T13:17:53","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T19:17:53","slug":"do-the-medias-sexy-girl-messages-trump-their-girl-power-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2020\/12\/01\/do-the-medias-sexy-girl-messages-trump-their-girl-power-ones\/","title":{"rendered":"Do the Media\u2019s \u201cSexy Girl\u201d Messages Trump Their \u201cGirl Power\u201d Ones?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Dimitris Vetsikas<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On average, children in elementary school watch four and a half hours of television a day: At that rate they\u00a0<\/em>see almost 80,000 examples of \u201csexy girl\u201d role models, in children\u2019s programming alone, every year. A new report details why we should we be concerned about how much more they will watch during school closures due to the pandemic.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

A new briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families examines the mixed signals the mass media sends to girls when they say \u201cGirls Rule\u201d but continue to present \u201cSexy Girls\u201d as role models. \u201cThe media want kids to do what they\u00a0say<\/em>, not what they\u00a0show<\/em>,\u201d notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research, \u201cbut as every parent knows, kids pay more attention to what we practice than what we preach. This research shows that \u2018The Talk\u2019 may be equality, but \u2018The Walk\u2019 is something else entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report,\u00a0\u201cMedia Messages to Young Girls,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0authored by Christia Spears Brown, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, spells out how children learn the desirability of \u201clooking sexy\u201d from the mass media\u2013 and the ways this undercuts their own self-confidence and the respect they get from others. For example, girl characters continue to be under-represented in the most popular tv shows for elementary school children, but when they\u00a0are\u00a0<\/em>shown, they are mostly portrayed in a sexualized way. Girls learn the rules quickly, telling Brown and her team that \u201cthe way to achieve high status and popularity is to be\u00a0sexy<\/em>,\u201d even as they also tell them that sexy girls are not very nice, smart, or athletic.<\/p>\n

Even when school is in session, Brown calculates, elementary school children watch four and a half hours of television a day, and see more than 75,000 examples of \u201csexy girl\u201d role models a year. With 21 of the 25 largest school districts in the country choosing remote learning instead of in-person classes, such exposure to sexualized images of females is likely to balloon this fall as children spend more time with media than in classrooms, playgrounds, and sports.<\/p>\n

And that is a big problem, Brown\u2019s research shows, because when girls prioritize sexualized attractiveness, they minimize traits they think are \u201cincompatible with sexiness, such as intelligence\u2026.When researchers gave some elementary-aged girls a sexualized doll (\u201cFashion\u201d Barbie) to play with for just five minutes, the career aspirations they reported afterwards were more limited than those of girls who played with the non-sexualized Mr. Potato Head.\u201d Even more disturbing, children in elementary school exposed to pictures of sexualized women rate those women as less worthy of being helped when in danger than non-sexualized women.<\/p>\n

Brown notes that the girls who buy into these media-fueled \u201csexy girl\u201d aspirations are not responding to pressure from boys their own age. \u201cWhen we ask children to tell us about the sexualized girls, it is girls who recount elaborate stories about why sexualized girls are more popular and attractive. Boys in elementary school are still pretty clueless about the different implications of a girl wearing a belly shirt or a hoodie.\u201d In other words, says Virginia Rutter, author of\u00a0The Gender of Sexuality<\/em>, who was not involved in the research, \u201cthis is not so much a kids\u2019 problem as a grown-up problem. Girls are trying to live up to what the media tells them is valued in grown-up women by grown-up men.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Further Information<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Christia Spears Brown, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky; christia.brown@uky.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

Links<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Brief report:\u00a0https:\/\/contemporaryfamilies.org\/girls-media-messaging-brief-report\/<\/a>
\nPress release:\u00a0https:\/\/contemporaryfamilies.org\/girls-media-messaging-release\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On average, children in elementary school watch four and a half hours of television a day: At that rate they\u00a0see almost 80,000 examples of \u201csexy girl\u201d role models, in children\u2019s programming alone, every year. A new report details why we should we be concerned about how much more they will watch during school closures due […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2095,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30834],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-reports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2095"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2412,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions\/2412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}