Mass media made them do it?

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2003 by Laura M. Carpenter

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).