While the controversy on when music TV exactly began continues, it is obvious that teenage boys and girls are influenced by music TV. Inside a new study on the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, researchers discovered that after sexually active youth of both genders watch music TV, they think their peers are also sexually active. Even more, when kids identify males in music TV to be if perhaps you are, it makes boys want to watch more, and girls less.
Published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles, the research conducted research during the period of twelve months by gathering information from 515 Belgian teenagers aged between 12 and Fifteen years old at three different times of the year. They were asked three questions: just how much music television they watched, how sexually active these were, and how sexually active they thought their peers were.
The thought process behind these questions was that music TV was a popular pastime for European and American teenagers, and also the sexual content inside the videos continues to be linked to teenagers becoming sexually active at a younger age.
“Regarding the influence of music television exposure on sexual behavior, our findings claim that increased sexual activities may be triggered by media use among boys, but not among girls,” co-author Eline Frison stated. “As the portrayal of women as objects of lust reflects patriarchal values, media images that support this type of male dominance may provoke resistance in female viewers. This is especially valid among those who view such activity as a threat due to the high sexual activity rates of male peers.”
So this explains why girls proved different than boys. While both genders were influenced about how exactly sexually active their peers of the identical sex were and thought their friends were also sexually active, this fact made boys watch much more music TV and girls less. For females, they didn’t desire to be reminded of what their boyfriends may be doing, and chose to switch off the program. This defense reaction could be twofold: the girls may think that many male peers are sexually active, and they may reject music video media content that tends to belittle and portray women as sexual objects.
Knowing this, the blanketed influence of mass media on teenagers’ sexual behavior that people learn about everyday is no longer accurate, as researchers still study this subject.
