We’re All Porn Stars (In The Media)

Women’s image in the media has been sexualized ever since the beginning of advertising. The painted pin-ups were based off pictures of real women, but the paintings enhanced their curves the same way we use Photoshop and various airbrushing techniques today.

But since then, things have worsened. It seems obvious at first, but gets more shocking when confronted with numbers recently gathered by Erin Hatton and Mary Nell, two assistant professors at the University at Buffalo studying the subject. Their research shows that the portrayal of women in the popular media over the last several decades has become increasingly sexualized, almost “pornified.”

The two women based their study on over 1,000 covers of Rolling Stone magazine from 1967 to 2009.

“We chose Rolling Stone,” Hatton said, “because it is a well-established, pop-culture media outlet. It is not explicitly about sex or relationships; foremost it is about music. But it also covers politics, film, television and current events, and so offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in popular culture.”

They quickly saw that representations of both women and men have become increasingly sexualized over time but that women were portrayed as sex objects more so than men, and at a much greater scale.

In order to compare the rate of sexualization in the images over time, the authors gave a certain number of “points” to an image according to its sexual content depending on whether the subject’s mouth was open, or how much clothing he/she was wearing, or whether caption of the picture used explicitly sexual language.

In the 1960s they found that 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers of Rolling Stone were sexualized. By the new millenium, 17 percent of men and 83 percent of women were sexualized. That’s an increase of 55 percent for men and 89 percent for women over 42 years. On top of that, among those images that were sexualized, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualized.

“In the 2000s, there were 10 times more hypersexualized images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualized images of men than of women,” Hatton says. “Popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women.”

Hatton and Nell also point to previous studies that showed that sexualized depictions of women have legitimized violence against women and girls to show the dangers of the trend.

“We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy,’” they explained. “But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”

It’s also unhealthy because, in America particularly, these sexualized images are confronted with an equally vocal puritanical discourse that encourages sexual repression. The mixed messages people receive can lead to great confusion about how they should express their innate sexuality.

Nothing is sexier than a musician playing her audience, an actress owning her stage and a comedienne bringing down the house. What they do is hot, but turning them into sex objects is not.

Contact the author here: sedera@morningquickie.com