Teen sexuality on television
» Television
Jennifer Aubrey, a reseacher at University of Missouri-Columbia, has conducted a study of the emotional and social consequences of sexual acts on television.
One of the findings that was surprising, Aubrey said, was the extreme lack of positive consequences found. Of the 676 scenes Aubrey examined, only 4 percent contained a positive consequence. Aubrey also found that in all scenes where a negative consequence was portrayed, the sexual activity was initiated by female characters 60 percent of the time and by male characters 40 percent of the time.
Aubrey said that one of the implications of her study is that if adolescent girls identify with sexually punished characters, their own sense of sexual esteem could be reduced, and this, in turn, could be disempowering for them when making healthy sexual decisions.
Emotional Sexual Consequences Outweigh Physical Ones in Teen TV Programming