American girls are being bombarded with sexual overtures. Our girls are becoming overly conscious of their looks much earlier. Many of them are beginning diets to be slimmer to resemble idols in movies, TV, music video and video games. Magazines, television and social media have become their reliable source for information that they seek intently and unintentionally. All because our girls are spending more time in front of technology and less time in the presence of a live person.
Musicians have been sending subliminal messages in their lyrics forever. Songs have become the gateway to the curiosity of our youth encouraging sex, drinking and drug use. Videos makers have been monopolizing the market with highly sexual displays of erotic and exotic women barely dressed all while gyrating to a beat that disguises lyrics applauding all things that we are trying to conceal from our children until they are ready.
The music industry, has taken our girls hostage, at young ages by placing before them in videos women posed as their peers as sexual objects. What they see is young beautiful girls that they want to be like showing their breast and rear ends. “Shaking it like a Polaroid picture”.
This hype in sex, being directed towards our girls is on the rise. The American Academy of Pediatrics, Sexuality Contraception and the media, 2001 says that “Of the roughly 14000 references to sex a teen will see on television each year, only a small fraction(165) will include any reference to abstinence or delay of sex, birth control, risk of pregnancy or sexual transmitted diseases. Obviously girls bear the risk of pregnancy that boys don’t, but girls are also more likely to contract STD s than boys.
Video games have our girls, looking at woman as walking talking “Barbie dolls”,highly sexualized being abused bought and sold all apart of the game. Example, GRAND THEFT AUTO some parts of the game include the depiction of woman as prostitutes and strippers. Girls are being shown how to sell their bodies for money. Sex and violence are earning them points. Boys are playing this and thinking it’s okay, because it’s okay in the game.
The body of the woman has been portrayed negatively to sell products. Our bodies have sold things we as woman will never use. We have been stripped down from what we have become in all the first of womankind and pushed back to be just sexual bodies in our undies.
Today girls are continuously being hit in the face by glamorous celebrity examples of young pregnancy. Even when they are not married, they are being shown as beautiful, young and powerful. Teenage girls see those examples as something they want. So they become pregnant to gain the same attention from their boyfriends, peers and family.
MTV has taken this to another level my including in their line up, 16 and Pregnant. This is a reality show that actually follows a teen through her pregnancy and after, to show the complication of the surreal experience.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, conducted a survey that proved to a point, that the show 16 and Pregnant, influenced at least half of their viewers positively. It made teenage girls more aware of the risk of pregnancy. And they were able to see what could happen to them in a place, where they were comfortable watching.
The media will continue to send out mature images to the immature viewer. It’s the families job to prepare teenagers for the “real world”. Media has been set up to keep the celebrity life, glamorous during all normal life experiences that’s how they keep you interested and believing in the “fairy tale”.
Times have changed. Girls no longer settle down, marry and start raising a family, right out of high school. Young woman today, are taking advantage of many opportunities available to them. Having babies today doesn’t immediately equate to marriage, it may mean, college or vocational training.
Our girls have choices. They are unstoppable. We have to teach them this, by doing the same ourselves and by leaving the door open for discussion.
The media will always attempt to keep us all in the loop. Filling us up with, the need to know everything about everyone. The need to have the latest and greatest as it hits the stores. and need to know what we should look, taste and how we should feel.
Our girls are seeing celebrities as role models. We have to take this job back. They are basing everything on what they look like. Never taking in consideration what that celebrity may be about outside of the lives they may live, in the medias eyes.
Parents must save our girls. All Social media and television must be monitored. Not rewarded with our girls innocents and youth.