Mass media made them do it?

Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media's Influence on Adolescent Sexuality. Edited by Jane D. Brown, Jeanne R. Steele, and Kim Walsh-Childers. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002, 308 pages. Paper, $29.95.

From Anthony Comstock's late 19th-century crusade against "obscene" literature to present-day parents' anxious suspicion that news reports on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal introduced adolescents to oral sex, Americans have blamed the mass media for inciting youth to ostensibly inappropriate sexual behavior. That the media powerfully shape teens' sexual lives to generally deleterious effect is widely taken for granted by politicians, parents, religious leaders, journalists, and even teens themselves. But until recently, few scholars had gathered empirical evidence to scientifically support or refute this claim. Fortunately, scholarship on teen sexuality and the media is now burgeoning; however, anthologies of this research remain rare, with most studies scattered in academic journals and monographs.

For people who long, as I do, to bring scientific rigor to popular debates over media effects on adolescent sexuality, the publication of Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media's Influence on Adolescent Sexuality is a welcome event. This valuable, if uneven, edited volume brings together 12 empirical studies concerned with the impact of diverse mass media on U.S. adolescents' sexual lives. The book's 13 chapters--each introduced with a cartoon and including its own bibliography--are divided into an introductory section of 2 chapters and three specific sections focusing on (a) television, (b) magazines, and (c) movies, music, and the Internet.

Sexual Teens, Sexual Media merits praise for its breadth of coverage, recognition of the contradictions and controversy surrounding teen sexuality, and appreciation of the complex relationships among media and their consumers. Of particular note are several fine chapters focusing on adolescents' perceptions of sexual content in mass media and on media created by young people themselves. On the downside, the book as a whole lacks a clear sense of its intended audience and several chapters suffer from dry writing, unrealistic recommendations for public policy, or insufficient attention to the effects of social structures and institutions.

Perhaps the most welcome quality of Sexual Teens, Sexual Media is its scope. The collected studies harness diverse methodologies--quantitative and qualitative content analyses, focus groups, surveys, in-depth interviews, media journals, and room tours--to address a wide range of mass media. Prime-time television series and daytime talk shows, mass-market magazines, top-grossing motion pictures, and music recordings and videos all come under scrutiny, as do "zines" and websites produced by teenage girls, two important new media which have yet to receive significant scholarly attention. The authors' disciplinary backgrounds are likewise diverse. Although most hail from communication or journalism departments, as do the three editors, psychology and human development are also well-represented. (Biographical notes are missing for several authors--an avoidable annoyance.) This mix of perspectives ensures that multiple facets of key issues are illuminated, but the book would have been stronger had it included scholars from fields that tend to emphasize macro-level phenomena (think, for example, of political science's take on state regulation of the media or sociology's insights into the industries producing mass entertainment).

Another strength of the book lies in its thoroughgoing recognition of the contradictions and controversy surrounding adolescent sexuality in the contemporary United States. From the editors' Preface and Introduction onward, the reader is encouraged to consider how the coexistence of diverse beliefs about teen sexuality--and the often contradictory mass media images resulting from them--might affect young women's and men's attitudes and experiences. Several chapters (e.g., 5 and 7) explore conflicting messages within the media; others (e.g., 2 and 8) investigate discrepancies across sources, as when information in mass media differs from that supplied by teens' peers, families, or schools.

Americans' diverse beliefs about adolescent sexuality have given rise to intense political controversy over what young people should be taught about sex. The editors and many contributors to Sexual Teens, Sexual Media clearly realize that meaningful dialogue about public policy hinges on the recognition of this controversy. Yet a number of authors recommend policy interventions that could not realistically be implemented without far greater political consensus than exists at present. Nor does the book pay sufficient attention to the structural barriers impeding innovation and change. In chapter 7, for example, Walsh-Childers, Gotthoffer, and Lepre recommend--with good reason--that magazines provide more complete and explicit information about contraception and sexual health, but fail to note moral conservatives' past success in blocking such attempts via threatened advertiser boycotts (e.g., Larsen, 1990).

Sexual Teens, Sexual Media should also be commended for its efforts to unpack the complex processes through which teens selectively attend to and actively employ the mass media messages to which they are exposed, in ways patterned by social background and circumstances. Many of the studies in the book draw explicitly or implicitly on editor Steele's media practice model, introduced in chapter 1 and applied effectively in chapter 11. This model valuably recognizes the ongoing interaction between media and their consumers (who actively adopt and resist media messages), the contingency of media choices on individual identity, and the importance of social and cultural context, which Steele calls "lived experience" Yet, in my opinion, Steele's framework does not differentiate sufficiently between structural social inequalities, such as those tied to race, gender, and social class, and the idiosyncrasies of individual development and happenstance. Both aspects of social context are indisputably important, but they operate in different ways and with potentially different consequences.

The pervasiveness of Steele's model and similar models throughout the book may be one reason that relatively few chapters go beyond detailed analyses of specific media products to examine how social structures and institutions shape media content and people's interpretations thereof. (This tendency is also likely related to the disciplinary backgrounds of the contributors.) Chapters 3 and 4, for example, explore in depth the content of prime-time TV series and daytime talk shows, respectively, but pay little attention to the broader sociohistoric circumstances that have helped produce that content.

The editors' expressed commitment to improving understandings of the ways gender, race-ethnicity, social class, life stage, and sexual orientation shape young people's experiences with mass media also remains incompletely fulfilled. Gender is the most extensively treated aspect of social identity, followed by racial-ethnic background. In contrast, sexual orientation receives meaningful attention in only four chapters (4, 9, 11, and 13). One might generously attribute this oversight to the heterosexist bias of mass media and the fact that data for several chapters (e.g., chapter 3) were collected too early to capture recent increases in the visibility of gay teens in mass media.

Another stated goal of the editors that goes partially unfulfilled is the desire to reach an audience beyond fellow scholars, including policy professionals and parents. In practice, the contributors seemed to have differing, and at times vague, visions of whom they wished to reach. Most authors favored accessible language and eschewed excessive jargon; many concluded their chapters with concrete suggestions for policy makers or parents. Several chapters were, however, too dry and pedantic to appeal to non-specialist readers, college students included; the absence of specific, detailed examples was a typical problem (e.g., Greenberg and Smith on daytime talk shows). Others featured policy suggestions that the relevant professionals might find overly simplistic. The desire to reach policy makers and parents may also underlie the (to me, disturbing) complaints of several contributors that mass media too often depict "sex that rarely has dire consequences" (p. 43). While it would be inappropriate to deny the real risks of sexual activity, these authors do not seem to consider the possibility that, in depicting the majority of sexual encounters as neutral or positive in outcome, the media may be reflecting reality (e.g., chapters 2 and 3). Many of the contributors also downplay or even ignore the place of sexual desire and pleasure in young people's lives.

Sexual Teens, Sexual Media makes its most important contributions to the literature on media and adolescent sexuality in the chapters examining teens' own interpretations and uses of mass media and in those exploring teens as creators of new media with sexual content. Six chapters merit special mention.

In chapter 5, psychologists Ward, Gorvine, and Cytron explore young women's and men's perceptions of sexual relationships on prime-time TV series, based on the responses of 314 socially diverse college students to video clips from four programs popular among teens. (The authors themselves acknowledge that relying on data from college students, who bring greater life experience and psychosocial development to their interpretations of media images than do adolescents, is a shortcoming of the study.) Study participants interpreted each scene in various ways, suggesting that media content analysts ought to be wary of proposing a "dominant 'read'" of any one text (p. 120). Gender and beliefs about sex predicted students' approval of characters' behavior, with women rating relationship-maintaining activities (e.g., jealousy) more favorably and men voicing greater approval of recreational stances (e.g., contemplating cheating).

Chapter 8, by advertising scholars Treise and Gotthoffer, investigates the lessons young women and men learn about sex and reproductive health from magazines. The authors' grounded theory analysis draws on data from seven focus groups stratified by gender and age. Participants, who came from diverse social backgrounds, saw magazines as useful sources of information about sexual health, which, if not as credible as doctors, were nonetheless vital means of learning about topics that are difficult to broach with friends or parents. The women in the study believed that magazines could be improved by covering more topics (e.g., STDs other than HIV) in greater detail, emphasizing personal empowerment over "pleasing-your-man syndrome" (p. 182), and offering more practical suggestions for sexual self-protection (i.e., negotiating condom use).

In chapter 9, undergraduate journalism student Wray and her advisor Steele introduce the reader to a cadre of creative young women who have resisted the images of teen women in mass-market magazines by self-publishing zines, small not-for-profit magazines. The 33 zine editors interviewed (all girls ages 11 to 20) saw their creations as offering a crucial alternative to unrealistic portrayals of teen women in mainstream publications. "Zinesters" critiqued Seventeen (the leading commercial magazine) and its ilk for depicting girls as obsessed with boys, uniformly heterosexual and monogamous, and fixated on shopping and appearance. In contrast, they sought to challenge traditional gender norms and depict a greater diversity of women. The zinesters' interpretations are supported by the authors' qualitative content analyses of 30 zines and 16 issues of Seventeen magazine.

Chapter 11 offers a multilayered account of teens' interpretations and uses of mass media, especially movies. Author/editor Steele's data are unusually rich: She conducted eight focus groups with racially diverse adolescent men and women, of whom a subsample kept media journals or took part in "room tours" or in-depth interviews. Although gender and race shaped study participants' movie preferences and the social activities surrounding movie viewing, Steele found that one film--Higher Learning, directed by John Singleton--resonated across social groups. She deftly uses this explosive tale of race relations and sexuality at a fictitious college as a case study for showing how teens use movies not only to reaffirm their existing beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality, but also to question those beliefs and to entertain new perspectives. Many participants saw movies as one of the few means they had for initiating discussions of controversial social issues with their friends.

In chapter 13, communication professor Stern analyzes how teen girls represent sexuality on their personal World Wide Web pages. Based on her qualitative content analysis of ten homepages created by girls ages 13 to 18, Stern argues that girls use the Web as a forum for trying out different sexual selves. Rather than presenting a "coherent, uniform sexual self throughout their home pages" (p. 270), girls used sections of their home pages to speak in different ways about wide-ranging sexual topics, including their own experiences, the sexual double standard, contemporary beauty standards (of which they were typically critical), and various aspects of sexual morality. Noting the public nature of the Web, Stem surmises that girls such as these are "eager for an audience to see what they have to say about being female, adolescent, and sexual" (p. 283).

Finally, in chapter 10, journalism scholar Pardun scrutinizes scripts for romantic interactions as depicted in the 15 top-grossing movies among teens in 1995. These films featured far more talk about romantic and sexual relationships than explicit images of sexual activity, depicted marriage as mundane and boring, and indicated that women and men frequently have difficulty communicating with one another (Pardun limited her sample to scenes depicting heterosexual interactions, which she notes as a shortcoming). The author's clearly written and detailed description of the grounded theory procedures she followed to code and analyze these films would provide an excellent example for advanced students intending to undertake qualitative media content studies.

In conclusion, Sexual Teens, Sexual Media provides a welcome overview of the field of adolescent sexuality and the mass media. The book would serve as a good reference volume for scholars interested in these areas, and its strongest chapters would be well-received in the college classroom. More politically minded readers might even find themselves citing certain studies in support of activist positions. (For instance, local school boards might be relieved to learn that most mass media content seen by teens contains little explicit sexual content, most of which is relational in nature.) Sexual Teens, Sexual Media represents one commendable step toward answering a pressing need for quality research on teen sexuality and the media. I hope similar volumes, addressing some of the concerns raised here, will appear in the future.

REFERENCE

Larsen, E. (1990, July/August). Censoring sex information: The story of Sassy. Utne Reader, 96-97.

Laura M. Carpenter, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, Department of Sociology, Box 1811-B, Nashville, TN 37235; e-mail: [e-mail].