Sex in the Media

    I want to write my blog post today about the chapter from Susan Douglas's Enlightened Sexism, because I thoroughly enjoyed her writing as well as her eye opening discussion concerning sexual representation in the media.
    First of all, I had never really considered the amount of smut I was being exposed to as a kid as directly harmful to anyone or anything. I really always did see TV as a harmless extension of the things we knew were only alright for TV shows to say and do. Unfortunately, I was very wrong, and I'm sure I carried many of the obscenities to my friends and siblings. I and whoever else watched and discussed the shows were systematically putting all the smut right back into society.
    However, I had the easy end of it. The TV shows I watched didn't spend time objectifying me as a male, but rather spent time reinforcing ideas that women are simply "end goals" for men, and that women therefore must better themselves to impress men. I think back to shows like "George Lopez", which I watched every night as a child, in which the emphasis of his teenage daughter's character always seemed to revolve around her scandalous escapades with her secret boyfriend or how her outfit was too revealing for her parents' taste. Or perhaps "Two and a Half Men", in which the literal only purpose of Charlie Sheen's character was to get drunk and have sex with women… Yeah.
    There were of course shows like "Sex in the City" that seemed to empower women, but I really don't buy the whole "sex is power" argument. I do not prescribe to the idea that sex should ever be a tool of power. Sex is meant to be a mutual agreement between two people, whether in a committed relationship or not, that should not have to revolve around one member or the other being in power. It is not meant to be a weapon that people can withhold from their partners to get what they want. In this way, I think that the argument that women's ultimate power over men resides in sex is inherently flawed, because to say that reduces sex to something that I do not think it should ever be.
    Jumping to another topic, I was pretty taken aback by the analysis of the magazines like Cosmo. Obviously, I knew that to some extent the magazines focused on pleasing men rather than women, but I did not understand the extent to which the magazines are all about men. Every piece of advice is geared toward making the sexual experience better for men.Why is this the case when it is so much easier (or at least more straightforward) for a man to achieve orgasm than a woman? Perhaps the population of women reading these magazines would do better to learn how to please themselves than how to please men.
    Finally, the line that resonated with me the most from the text was concerning Little Miss Sunshine, when Douglas stated that Olive "doesn't even get it that her performance has anything to do with sex" (186). It's utterly disgusting that children can perform in such venues as Toddlers in Tiaras and have no idea that what they are doing is overtly sexualized. These children are not even old enough to understand sexual identity, and yet they are paraded around as sexual objects. Just as Douglas pointed out, the parents of these children and promoters of the show are very much behind the times, not realizing that girls now belong in other places than beauty pageants.

 
    On another note, the realization that Jamie Lynn Spears got pregnant 7 years ago made me actually feel old for one of the first times in my life… It feels like just yesterday that that happened, and I can remember talking about it with my friends very clearly.