Plugged In
Page 19
Development helps explain these age-related differences in advertising processing. Specifically, compared with older children, younger children are less experienced and have less domain-specific knowledge that they can draw from when evaluating advertising. They are thus less likely than older children to recognize when a claim in a commercial is exaggerated or unrealistic. Younger children are also less capable than older children of developing counterarguments when confronted with advertising.61 This inability to systematically process advertising is particularly true of newer advertising formats (e.g., product placements, advergames) because the concealed content in these formats requires that viewers first consciously identify the content before they can begin to counter it.
Countering Advertising Effects with Advertising Literacy?
It seems reasonable to argue that advertising has intended and unintended consequences for youth, and that its effects are particularly pronounced among younger children and children for whom the advertised content is strongly relevant or appealing. For marketers, these findings—particularly those associated with intended effects—are encouraging. Yet many parents, caregivers, and public policy advocates are concerned about these effects. These concerned parties often question whether marketing to this younger audience is ethical, citing research that shows that children under the age of eight do not understand the persuasive intent of advertising, that is, they lack the ability to understand that advertising is meant to persuade and sell. At the same time, these parties express concern about the unintended effects of advertising and believe that efforts must be taken to help offset these effects.
Although it might seem that knowledge of persuasive intent would be sufficient to buffer negative effects by encouraging systematic and critical processing, the reality is not that simple. Otherwise, none of us would be affected by advertising. The assumption that persuasion knowledge and a certain level of cognitive development offer sufficient defense against the effects of advertising is based on a simplistic model. After all, commercials make cognitive as well as emotional appeals, and our ability to regulate our emotions with cognition (knowledge and understanding) is not always optimal. Even though we know a movie is not real, it can still make us feel scared, sad, or happy. Similarly, even though youth (or adults) know that an advertised snack being promoted to them is unhealthy, they may still feel a strong urge to eat it.
Why does this occur? Why is it that youth (and adults) are persuaded and seemingly fooled by commercials whose claims they know to be unrealistic? The answer to this question is somewhat similar to our account of the law of apparent reality (see chapter 8), which explains why viewers feel emotions and desires when watching fictional media entertainment. Like entertainment, advertising often appeals to our emotions and social needs. As with our responses to media entertainment, we may ignore skeptical thoughts that would blunt our desire for advertised brands. Moreover, sometimes we simply do not mind being persuaded, especially if the product or brand has relevance for us.
That said, some researchers believe that increased efforts to heighten consumers’ advertising literacy might help buffer some of the ill effects of commercial messages. These researchers have shown that helping youth engage in critical thinking about the message (for example, recognizing the persuasive intent) can help reduce advertising effects.62 Of course, such processes are possible only with older children (about age eight and up, which coincides with the acquisition of persuasion knowledge) and adolescents—youth who are cognitively able to engage in such processing. Yet it is important to recognize that while critical thinking can defend us against the influence of advertising, it does not necessarily do so. Advertising communicates emotions, and emotions cannot always be controlled by knowledge and understanding. Thus, while media’s youngest audiences are the most susceptible to advertising effects because they lack the ability to engage in cognitive defense strategies, older youth are not automatically protected by virtue of their advanced cognitive development. Older youth might have more cognitive tools with which to defend themselves, but getting them to use these tools is an entirely different story.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we explained why children have become such an important target group for advertisers, and why it is so lucrative to start marketing to them while they are still in the cradle. Children represent three markets (a primary market, a market of influencers, and a future market), and marketers are eager to capitalize on each one. Given the increased commercialization of childhood, it comes as little surprise that multiple studies have shown that children and adolescents are indeed affected by advertising.
Advertising can increase brand awareness, brand appeal, and product requests. Further, as a robust literature attests, advertising produces unintended effects—increased materialism, parent-child conflicts, and a heightened risk of overweight and obesity. These effects are particularly pronounced among younger children, who lack the cognitive abilities yet to defend themselves against advertising. And for older youth (and adults) who have these abilities, advertising literacy is often insufficient to blunt the effects of advertising.63
So, where does this leave us? To argue for a ban on advertising to the youth market is neither realistic nor reasonable. We live in a consumer society in which advertising plays a key role. But academic researchers can work to identify ways to limit the potential ill effects of advertising. Those efforts might include working with public policy officials to limit advertising that targets the youngest age group, or working with companies to encourage them to consider self-regulation. Moreover, working with youth to identify ways to help them effectively manage the huge amount of advertising they are confronted with is also a worthwhile direction. Taking a multidimensional approach to an issue as important as youth-targeted advertising is likely the best way to balance the needs of marketers with those of youth.
10
MEDIA AND SEX
The first picture which stands out in my memory is “The Sheik” featuring Rudolph Valentino. I was at the impressionable and romantic age of 12 or 13 when I saw it, and I recall coming home that night and dreaming the entire picture over again; myself as the heroine being carried over the burning sands by an equally burning lover. I could feel myself being kissed in the way the Sheik had kissed the girl. I wanted to see it again, but that was forbidden; so as the next best thing my friend and I enacted the especially romantic scenes . . . She was Rudolph and I the beautiful captive, and we followed as well as we could remember the actions of the actors.
—Movie autobiography of an adolescent girl
The passage quoted in the epigraph dates from 1933, when sex in the media was primarily implicit, merely suggested, in the same way that bloody or violent acts usually took place off camera. Now, however, onscreen sex is more accessible than ever before. Sexual media content is no longer relegated to television, movies, magazines, and games. Nowadays, typing “free sex” into a Google search box yields more than one million hits in less than a second. With only a few more clicks, you can quickly enter a world of explicit videos of “hot teenage girls,” MILF porn, and much more. More than any other media format, the Internet has brought sexual media content to the masses in an affordable, accessible, and anonymous manner. It is no wonder that many teens, who are in the middle of developing their sexual identities, look for sex online. And it is no wonder that there is concern about the potential consequences for these teens. Are these concerns justified? What is the influence of this vast quantity of easily accessible sex and porn on adolescents? What are the characteristics of online sex and porn, and how do these influence adolescents’ ideas about sexuality and gender roles? In this chapter, we discuss the research into the effects of sex and porn on adolescents’ sexual beliefs, sexual attitudes, and sexual behavior.
Sexualization and Pornification
Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the terms “sexualization” and “pornification” have become household words. This is du
e, first, to the increased accessibility of digital porn and the societal concerns associated with this accessibility. And second, it is a result of a series of books about the sexualization of women such as the best sellers Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy (2007); Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, by Pamela Paul (2005); and Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Society, by Patrice Oppliger (2008). These books, along with a massive report about the sexualization of girls issued by a task force of the American Psychological Association, have helped ensure that sexualization and pornification have become prominent fixtures on the political and social agenda.1
But what exactly is meant by “sexualization” and “pornification”? “Pornification” is most typically defined as the “increasing occurrence and acceptance of sexual themes and explicit imagery in popular or mainstream culture.” While there are numerous definitions for sexualization, the APA report offers perhaps the most encompassing definition, explaining that “sexualization occurs when (1) a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; (2) a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; (3) a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or (4) sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.”2
Not all four conditions need be satisfied, according to the APA report authors, for sexualization to be present. Instead, any of these conditions represents a form of sexualization. The fourth condition, according to the authors, is particularly relevant for children. Why? Everyone—girls, boys, men, women—can be sexualized, but if children are confronted with sexualization, it is often not something they have chosen, and thus it is being imposed on them. The report provides several examples of the sexualization of children: a five-year-old child in a T-shirt with the word “flirt” on it, readers of a magazine for teenage girls being advised to lose weight in order to appear more attractive to boys, and a woman in an ad who is posed provocatively but dressed as a girl with pigtails and lacy ruffles.
Although the term “sexualization” has become fashionable, neither the expression nor the phenomenon is new. At the dawn of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century, “sexualization” was used to describe people’s feelings with regard to erotic objects. And indeed, if we place sexualization in a historical context, as proposed by the sociologist Cas Wouters, there have been several shifts in sexualization as sexuality moved from public to private and back to public again. According to Wouters, the trend toward increasing sexualization in the twentieth century was mainly a response to more than two centuries of “desexualization,” that is, the elimination of sex from the public sphere.3 In the early sixteenth century, everyone, young and old alike, spoke freely about sex. Children were not hidden away when their parents (and other adults) had sex, and instead learned quickly that sex was a normal aspect of adult relationships. Through the end of the nineteenth century, however, this attitude gradually changed toward an increasing prudishness that forced youth (and adults) to repress their sexual desires. This desexualization reached its peak in the Victorian era, when sex and anything evoking eroticism were taboo in public. Until the end of the nineteenth century, there was a societal aversion to public displays of affection and physical contact.
This desexualization process gradually reversed itself in the twentieth century. People dealt with each other less formally, and emotions could be expressed again. Child rearing and the relationships between parents and children were focused more on love and affection. This process accelerated in the 1920s and again in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of collective emancipation.4 Indeed, since the 1970s, it has become more widely accepted for people to express their sexual desires and interests in public. Some scholars believe that entertainment media have played a key part in shifting sex back from the private to the public realm. This shift parallels a similar one in entertainment media, which have increasingly come to rely on reality content—lifestyles, exposés, and confessions, a phenomenon that Brian McNair has named the “striptease culture.”5
Sexual Messages in Media
As noted, many scholars believe that media played a key role in shifting sex from the private domain to the public. In fact, the APA task force report specifically argues that media provide some of the most pronounced messages of sexualization and pornification for youth today.6 The question is, what do these sexual messages look like? Content analyses offer useful insight into the sexual and pornographic messages that youth consume, but these analyses often suffer from two challenges. First, nudity is often conflated with sex; much of this work has been conducted in the United States, where the approach to sex is more conservative than that found in, say, northern Europe. Second, it is often hard to pinpoint the difference between porn and “normal” sex.
Many vain attempts have been made to distinguish between sex and porn, a distinction nicely expressed in the famous statement by U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart in 1964, which has since been abridged to “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Stewart wrote this conclusion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a decision denying a motion by the State of Ohio to ban the French film Les Amants (1958) on the grounds that it contained obscene material. In Potter’s view, Les Amants was not obscene.
It is still difficult to clearly separate porn from sex in mainstream entertainment. One of the causes is—indeed—the increased presence of sex in the public sphere. The heated debate sparked by Les Amants six decades ago is an apt illustration of how our standards about sex have shifted. Les Amants was the first film in history to show a woman (Jeanne Moreau) commit adultery and not be punished. For its time, the black-and-white film had unusually “explicit” love scenes in a boat, a bed, and a bathtub (see figure 10.1). The French director François Truffaut (who did not direct the film) called it “the first love night in the cinema.” By standards of that time, many viewers considered this content pornographic—so much so that the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to vote on whether it was legal for the State of Ohio to ban the film.
Figure 10.1. The movie Les Amants (1958), featuring Jeanne Moreau, led to heated debates around the world because of its alleged obscenity. By contemporary standards, the movie seems rather innocent. (Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)
By today’s standards, however, very little in the film is offensive or shocking. Les Amants contains almost no nudity, and the “sex” in it is primarily implicit, merely suggested, in the same way that bloody and violent acts usually took place off camera at the time. Thus, while content analyses can provide us with useful information to ascertain what is in media content, it is important to consider these messages (and the critical reactions to these messages) within their broader cultural and historical contexts.7
Sex Entertains, Sex Sells, and Females Lose
Much of the content-analytic work on sexual media messages has sought to identify how much “sex” is present in entertainment media, as well as how these messages are tied to gender roles. While some of this work has looked specifically at youth-targeted content, other work has looked more generally at the entertainment media landscape. Defining “sex” broadly as sexual language and other references to sex, the majority of content analyses indicate that it is commonplace in entertainment media, whether aimed at a general audience or teens. For content aimed at a general audience, Dale Kunkel and colleagues showed that in the late 1990s, 56 percent of all American TV shows had sexual content, a figure that rose to 75 percent in 2005.8 Similarly, an analysis of the top-grossing films between 1950 and 2006 showed that 80 percent of them contained at least some sexual content.9 These high rates were not restricted to American media. British researchers analyzing more than one hundred episodes of soap operas that were popular with young British viewers
found that 79 percent of them contained some form of sexual content, and that sexual talk occurred more frequently than sexual behavior.10
In teen-specific content, sexual content is equally or more prevalent. For example, most teen-targeted films that appeared from 1980 to 2007 contained a significant amount of sexual content. This content typically took the form of passionate kissing and sexual dialogue; implied intercourse and intimate touching occurred less often.11 Interestingly, the percentage of sexual content in television programs is higher in those that feature teenage characters than in those that feature adult characters.12 And remarkably, this difference seems to hold true for teen-targeted novels, which are replete with sex-related information—including passionate kissing, romantic ideation, and sexual intercourse.13 It seems that sex does entertain this age group.
That said, across the entertainment content spectrum, content analyses show that girls and women are nearly always the losers. First, women and girls are present less frequently than men and boys. An analysis of youth programs in twenty-four different countries, including more than nine thousand programs from across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, Brazil, and India, found that—on average—male characters outnumbered female characters two to one.14 This imbalance in favor of the male sex also applies to other media such as games and films.
More worrisome, though, is that when females do appear in entertainment media, they are depicted as caricatures of femininity. Since the late 1980s, even in relatively innocent cartoons, the depictions of female characters are sexier than those of their predecessors. Compared with earlier Disney heroines such as Snow White and Cinderella, contemporary characters such as Ariel (the Little Mermaid), Pocahontas, and Jessica Rabbit feature deeper cleavage, less clothing, and sexier appearances.15 And this increased sexualization is not limited to television and film content. In video games, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to depict women in bikinis, with exaggeratedly huge breasts and round buttocks. Similarly, in music videos, which often contain sexual content, women are frequently objectified—presented in a subordinate role while their bodies (or parts of them) are emphasized.16 Women serve mainly as decoration, rather than as core characters, in these videos.