Sexual Revolution in the Media

The idea has been advanced that the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s was actually a cultural transition that was ushered in not by women seeking greater freedom and empowerment with respect to sexual activity, but by males who dominated the mass media and who used this "revolution" as a means of furthering the objectification of women as sexual playthings (Jacketta, 2002). At issue herein is a question of how male-dominated mass media, including advertising as well as film and television, created a situation in which women in many Western cultures adopted an attitude supportive of greater sexual freedom that ultimately worked to the benefit of men more than of women.

Tom Smith (1990) notes that the sexual revolution was literally discovered by the mass media in 1963 with articles appearing in such publications as Time, Mademoiselle, Esquire, and America. These publications depicted a major social transformation in which college-aged women were depicted as participating in premarital sexual activity more openly and frequently than ever before (The sexual revolution, 2009). The work of researchers such as Alfred Kinsey underpinned the development of a new ethos in which it was argued that women were as entitled to premarital sexual activity as men, that such activity on the part of women was not immoral and was perfectly natural, and that women seeking independence were entitled to sexual freedom (Makow, 2003).

However, Fawcett (2006) believes that the 196

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inted out that the mass media tended to limit women's roles to those that were socially approved. Mary Tyler Moore, for example, played both a wife and mother and a single woman in television series, but in both cases she was not depicted as a sexually active woman. The sexually active women of the 1960s tended to be young, college educated, drawn from the middle and upper-middle classes, and involved in a very real rejection of the norms and values of their parents. Sexuality become political, emerging as an axis around which new social movements organized (Sexuality & modernity, 2008). While it is likely that a number of sexually active women in this era were not manipulated by the media and were acting out of conviction, Ware (1995) claims that the advertising industry presented a portrait of the ideal woman as one who was physically attractive, sexually liberated, available to man's gaze, and while empowered, nevertheless subordinate to men. Women in America then and now have been subjected to media images which suggest that the ideal woman is one who meets male standards of beauty. This process is so ingrained in the mass media that Streland and Hargreaves (2005) contend that women in the media have been complicit

Category: History - S