Adoelscents and the Media
... how music videos affected adolescents’ aggressive thinking and attitudes. Researchers randomly assigned African-American adolescents into two different groups: one viewed nonviolent rap music videos containing sexually subordinate images of women and the other did not watch any music videos. When asked about their attitudes regarding women, participants who saw the music videos reported more acceptances towards the mistreatment of women, specifically teen-dating violence. Another study, sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, was conducted in order to look at the messages that young women (ages 10 to 17) were receiving from the media. Six different types of media were examined, one being music videos (the top 20 music videos ranked by MTV for the first three weeks of November 1996). The research found that media often reinforces female stereotypes. “The media favored by teenage girls often send them limiting messages about their priorities and potential. The media reinforce troubling stereotypes about the relative importance of appearance and relationships to women’s lives, while stressing that careers are more important for men than women.” Also, adolescence is the time during which an individual is looking for his/her sexual identity, and the media is a major influence. “Music Television (MTV) and other sources of music videos often display suggestive sexual imagery. Experimental studies have found that viewing music videos may, in fact, influence adolescents’ attitudes concerning early or risky sexual activity. Greater sexual content is also found in videos that depict alcohol use.” Music videos seem to depict risky behavior as being acceptable. For my own analysis, I looked at two leading music television networks - MTV and Black Entertainment Television (BET). Specifically on MTV I looked at the program “TRL” (Total Request Live), which shows the top 10 videos of the day based upon voting by viewers. On BET, I looked at the “Rap City Top 10,” which is the same concept as MTV’s “TRL” except that the music videos are solely rap videos. On both programs the messages portrayed in the popular videos were similar to those discussed in the earlier research. On TRL, half of the videos were by female artists and the other half by male artists. Although many of the female artists’ videos actually depicted women as being independent and strong-willed, many of them also portrayed females in sexually suggestive clothing and in poor relationships. Among the music videos by male artists, one was by popular rap artist Eminem. Many of his songs are very explicit in nature and a...