{"id":40241,"date":"2011-12-30T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T17:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=40241"},"modified":"2015-09-19T23:16:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T04:16:48","slug":"gender-sexualization-and-rolling-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/12\/30\/gender-sexualization-and-rolling-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender, Sexualization, and Rolling Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

You often hear that everything is sexualized nowadays, and not just women but men too. In the September 2011 issue of Sexuality & Culture<\/em>, we examine this idea in an analysis of Rolling Stone<\/a><\/em> magazine covers.\u00a0 Specifically, we wanted to know if men and women are equally sexualized, and if they have become either more frequently or more intensely sexualized over time.\u00a0 To do this, we analyzed every cover from the first issue of Rolling Stone<\/em> in November 1967 through 2009, minus a few (such as those that featured cartoons rather than people, etc.). You can read more about our methods in the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In order to analyze these 1000+ images of men and women, we developed a \u201cscale of sexualization.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This scale was composed of 11 different variables to measure different aspects of sexualization.\u00a0 For instance, a cover model was given \u201cpoints\u201d for being sexualized if their lips were parted, if they were scantily clad (more points if they were naked), if the text describing them used explicitly sexual language, or if they were lying down on a bed or otherwise posed in a sexually suggestive way.\u00a0 Images could score anywhere from 0 points (and 176 did) to 23 points (though 20 was our highest score).<\/p>\n

Once all of the images on all 43 years of Rolling Stone<\/em> were scored, we divided the images into three groups:\u00a0 those images that were generally not sexualized, those images that were sexualized, and those images that were so sexualized that we dubbed them \u201chypersexualized.\u201d<\/p>\n

The graph below shows our findings:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking first at images of men (represented by dotted lines), we see that the majority of them– from 89% in the 1960s to 83% in the 2000s — were nonsexualized.\u00a0 Men are<\/em> sometimes shown in a sexualized manner (about 15% in the 2000s), but they are rarely hypersexualized (just 2% in the 2000s). In fact, only 2% of the images of men across the entire dataset — all 43 years — are hypersexualized.<\/p>\n

But, again, the vast majority of men — some 83% in recent years — were not sexualized at all.\u00a0 So, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone<\/em> in the 2000s, you would most likely see men portrayed in a non-sexualized manner, such as in these images:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In contrast, women, especially recently, are almost always sexualized to some degree.\u00a0 In fact, by the 2000s, 61% of women were hyper<\/em>sexualized, and another 22% were sexualized. \u00a0This means that, in the 2000s, women were 3 1\/2 times more likely to be hypersexualized than nonsexualized, and nearly five times more likely to be sexualized to any degree (sexualized or hypersexualized) than nonsexualized.<\/p>\n

So, in the last decade, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone<\/em> that featured a woman on its cover, you would most likely see her portrayed in a sexualized manner, since fully 83% of women were either sexualized or hypersexualized in the 2000s. Here are a few examples of hypersexualized images:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In our article, we argue that the dramatic increase in hypersexualized images of women — along with the corresponding decline in nonsexualized images of them — indicates a decisive narrowing or homogenization of media representations of women.\u00a0 In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture<\/a><\/em>, journalist Ariel Levy (2005:5) describes this trend in this way:\u00a0 \u201cA tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular.\u00a0 What we once regarded as a kind<\/em> of sexual expression,\u201d Levy writes, \u201cwe now view as<\/em> sexuality\u201d (emphases in original).\u00a0 In this article, we offer empirical evidence for this claim.<\/p>\n

So what explains this trend towards women\u2019s hypersexualization?\u00a0 We don\u2019t think it\u2019s just the idea that \u201csex sells.\u201d<\/a> If that were true, we\u2019d see many more images of women on Rolling Stone\u2019s<\/em> covers (only 30% of covers feature images of women) and we\u2019d also see more sexualized and hypersexualized images of men.\u00a0 We\u2019d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.<\/p>\n

Mary Nell Trautner<\/a> and Erin Hatton<\/a> are Assistant Professors of Sociology at SUNY Buffalo<\/a>. Trautner is the author of many articles on the relationship between law, culture, organizational practices, and social inequality (and has written a fantastic Soc Images Course Guide for Sociology of Gender courses<\/a>). \u00a0Hatton, a sociologist of work, is the author of\u00a0The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 You often hear that everything is sexualized nowadays, and not just women but men too. In the September 2011 issue of Sexuality & Culture, we examine this idea in an analysis of Rolling Stone magazine covers.\u00a0 Specifically, we wanted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[279,55,2093,129,120],"class_list":["post-40241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-objectification","tag-gender","tag-gender-objectification","tag-media","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40241"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67910,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40241\/revisions\/67910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}