Week Eight: Sexuality & Identity Politics

After watching the “What A Girl Wants” film, it’s extremely shocking how so many girls are aware of media influences on them as well as their peers. The thing I find interesting about these acknowledgements influences is the negligence of their lasting effects. I think there are many times that young girls listen to music, acknowledge that there is sexism present in it (or something of that sort), and ignore those issues because music is catchy. Because of this, I think the age at which girls in particular are being influenced by music is decreasing. For instance, I remember my sister, at the age of 8, being able to explain what sex was. She didn’t learn this from family interactions, so it must have come from outside influences, such as media. I remember being 12 years old listening to Britney Spears, which puts me at the same age as the girls introduced in “What A Girl Want” (aka. that was my generation). If my little sister is understanding adult concepts such as sex at the age of 8 and I was 12 at the time, I think that says something very serious about the state of our youth and the images and concepts we’re throwing at them. After all, kids absorb everything at such young ages. My mother works in a middle school, so I also know of several stories of these young kids(ages 10-13) being sexualized and feeling the need to be sexually active.

The contemporary perfect example of this is Kesha, as we discussed in class. Kesha’s public persona and the character she plays for her audience is a party girl who is highly sexualized. I know a girl who is now 18 years old and graduating from high school who for the past two years has notoriously said that Kesha is her role model. This girl is absolutely nothing like Kesha and believes that she is able to remove herself from the ideologies that Kesha portrays through her character and her music. However, I think music that promotes sexual activity of this nature encourages its audience to follow suit. I’m not saying that Kesha is to blame for teen pregnancy or anything of that sort, but I have to wonder why no one thinks there’s something morally wrong with work of artists such as Kesha when they are socially constructed children to engage in negative behaviors.

Whiteley talks about Madonna’s portrayal of femininity by saying, “A rejection of the discourse of irony would suggest that Madonna’s portrayal of femaleness and femininity (whereby bodily attributes can be reduced to a sexuality which is simply displayed for pleasurable looking) online confirms a masculine definition of femininity” (p. 137). She goes onto explain how Madonna used shock tactics to maintain audience attention, but I think part of Madonna’s use of her femininity and sexuality within the traditional male gaze results from a reclaiming of her sexuality. From the 1980s we have seen more an more sexuality from women expressing themselves and feeling as though they have the right to flaunt of cover their sexuality any way they please, and sometimes this comes out in the form of “confirming a masculine definition of femininity" as being a sexy woman with certain physical attributes. At the end of the day, though, sex sells and men are roughly half of the popular. I would take into consideration this is change in female liberation regarding their own sexuality and femininity, however, since we see the rise of women taking this further and further through the 90s and 00s.