Chapter 3: Sexuality, Media, and the Internet Learning Objectives Sex, Media, and Pop Culture • Describe how the media can blur the boundary between private and shared sexual images. • Examine how diverse media have influenced sexual norms and expression. The Internet and Sexual Literacy • Explain the role that the Internet has played in revolutionizing human society and how it impacts our social connection to one another. • Discuss norms and boundaries as they occur online. • Define how technological advancement has altered the frequency and methods of communication between people. Virtual Sex • Explain how cybersex allows for self-exploration and has changed the ways in which people have sex. • Discuss the role of the Internet as you explore and express your sexuality. • Discuss online romance, hooking up, and sex, and their real-world consequences for your life and relationships. Adult Sexual Content • Discuss how pornography has changed the role of media in our personal sexual lives. • Explain the process of pornification and its effect on sexual conduct on- and offline. Online Communities, Rights, and Sexual Well-Being • Explain how sexual expression online may contribute to people’s sexual well-being. Chapter Outline Chapter 3: Sexuality, Media, and the Internet Learning Objectives 3.1 Discussion Topic 3.1 Discussion Topic 3.2 Discussion Topic 3.3 Learning Objectives 3.2 Discussion Topic 3.4 Discussion Topic 3.5 Learning Objectives 3.3 Discussion Topic 3.6 Learning Objectives 3.4 Discussion Topic 3.7 Discussion Topic 3.8 I. Sex, Media, and Pop Culture A. Sex in Pop Culture • Sexual content, as expressed in the media, has changed our culture in four fundamental ways: o Private sexual imagery has become public o More explicit sexual images are being shared in public o Explicit sex talk has become acceptable in diverse conversations o All this sex in pop culture has transformed public attitudes about sexuality in society as a whole B. Shared Sexual Images and Media • Sexual culture and communication in all societies involve shared sexual images, whether real or imagined, visual or auditory, the content of which contains explicit or hidden sexual messages. • Shared sexual images can range from the sublime to the ridiculous. They can be funny, sarcastic, angry, political, and even religious—all at the same time. • In the past hundred years, the media have helped to break down taboos and have created new, shared visual imagery. Some of the visual images from early media have also been transformed from something very negative to something positive, as in certain movies about vampires. C. Popular Music and Sexual Attitudes • Of all the media in pop culture that may truly transform sexual attitudes, none is more potentially powerful, holistic, and personal than popular music. It is the auditory way in which a culture fashions what is beautiful or ugly and significant of sexual love. In the United States, sex and love have been the most enduring themes of popular music and pop culture since the modern period. Music may influence people’s sexual well-being in a variety of ways, including how they feel about their own body, their sexual feelings, and an intimate partner. But visual imagery like movies and television has come to have greater influence on sexuality than music. D. From Reality TV to Homemade Video • Movies and then television have always depicted idealized versions of romance and sex, desire and pleasure, and life itself. At first, sex could only be hinted at in films, and even deep kissing was considered highly risky; nudity was taboo. Classic movies such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), and The Graduate (1967) have shattered the shared idealized images by depicting new notions of love, sex, and romance. Some films explicitly challenged taboos about homosexuality (Brokeback Mountain, 2005) and marriage (The Kids Are All Right, 2010). Cable television has broken taboos, such as a restriction on showing genitals, and has blurred the line between shared imagery of sex and pornography. Cable porn channels even show raw sex. II. The Internet and Sexual Literacy • Young people who have never known life without computers have embraced the Internet and social media to connect with existing friends and make new ones. o By 200, approximately 93% of all teens are online. o Youths between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of almost 45 hours per week in front of a computer. o 31% have searched online for information on topics they find hard to talk about with anyone in their lives, including sex and drugs. o 54% of all youth text daily, and this activity is so central to young people’s lives that 87% say they sleep next to their mobile phones. o 73% use social networking sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, to view photographs, home videos, and personal opinions of friends, family, and strangers. • The Internet allows individuals to locate others who share the same sexual desires, thus allowing them to avoid local laws and rules that prevent certain forms of sexual expression and to create, among other things, more sexual communities online. It has definitely expanded ordinary people’s access to the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that lead to healthy sexuality. • Experts believe that, in general, the Internet is a positive force that improves people’s lives. In terms of sexuality, it has opened a whole new chapter: a world of online dating, virtual relationships, virtual love, and virtual sex. People are able to connect online to maintain love and closeness across long distances, which has deepened and enriched our communication. It has also created worldwide access to pornography, accelerating the trend toward the infusion of pornography into pop culture. • Abuses occur every day on the Internet. Celebrities, politicians, and everyday people get caught violating sexual norms and rules on the Internet. Other negative influences, including cyberbullying, fake information, and online predators, suggest that sexual illiteracy is widespread on the Internet. A. Facebook, Twitter, and Sexting • Social networking sites (SNSs) have three main characteristics: o They allow people to construct a public or semipublic profile o They offer a list of other users with whom people share a connection o They allow people to view other people’s networks • Add to these SNSs the powerful connectivity of cell phones and smart phones that give portable Internet access anywhere, anytime, and the potential for sexual connectivity increases dramatically. • Facebook and Twitter provide not only the opportunities for sexual connectivity but also the means for new and faster ways of expressing sexual individuality. For example, an Australian study has found that many young gay and lesbian people use the Internet to develop six areas of their lives: identity, friendship, coming out, intimate relationships, sex, and community • Online dating provides another way for people to connect sexually and romantically, one that feels more comfortable to some people. • Sharing highly explicit sexual images of oneself through the Internet, a practice known as sexting is another easy way for people to express their sexual individuality. This sort of sharing is becoming more common among teens: in one major study of 23,000 high school students, 13% reported that they have received “sext” messages, and 1 in 10 have forwarded, sent, or posted sexually suggestive, explicit, or nude photos or videos of people they know by cell phone or online. B. Online Sexual Socialization • A recent study suggests that just as there was a decline in comprehensive school based sex education in the United States, adolescents’ use of the Internet became nearly universal. • A high percentage of young people may somehow relate what they see online to their own feelings and experiences. This is a challenge to healthy sexuality, because they may pick up ideas about sex that may be grossly inaccurate (e.g., seeing images of anatomy or bodies in sexual ways that are weird or abnormal for their age group or forms of sexual practice that are atypical), or disconnect sex from emotions in ways that may set them up for false notions or expectations about what happens later in intimate sexual relations. • Others may anonymously search the Internet to satisfy desires, especially if they do not have the opportunity or are afraid to take it in their own local community. Research shows, for example, that people may try out new sexual identities online first, because they are deprived of social support for expressing variations in sexual attraction where they live. • The Internet may have become the default institution of sexual socialization. That may be one reason why the topic of sex is searched on the Internet with greater frequency than other topics. But then it raises the question: who is watching out for such risk online? C. Sexuality and Risk Online • The risks of being sexual online include distorting personal boundaries, online pornography, the factuality of online sexual information, the authenticity of people online, and the ability to detect fakery. False information provided by others makes many parents worry about younger people meeting sexual predators or pedophiles online. • Another online risk is that information you post is available for everyone to see. It may reveal too much or it may end up attached to another website that makes you cringe with embarrassment because you never imagined it would show up there. • Without norms and personal boundaries to guide us in deciding what to share, what to make public, and what to keep private, people sometimes fall prey to fads, seduction, and shared images, such as pictures of porn stars. People may find themselves acting in ways that don’t reflect who they want to be and these actions may lead to unhealthy sexual development. III. Virtual Sex • Defined as sexual activity through communication by computer, virtual sex can be quite diverse. But its forms have in common the notion that two or more people interact online, exchanging digital information, such as text messages, pictures, videos, and audio files, with the purpose of sexual arousal or simulated sexual intercourse and orgasm. • Other forms of virtual sex are watching pornography online or playing a sexually explicit computer game. A. Sexually Individuality in Virtual Time and Space • Because of greatly expanded online connectivity, social and behavioral scientists are beginning to believe that the Internet is changing our perception and experience of the world, including how we experience time and space, and self-awareness. • On the Internet, people create virtual selves, virtual personalities, or virtual sexual identities and some people feel that these virtual selves are as real or more real than who they are in real time and space. Consider the virtual dimensions of time and space and how those changes affect people’s sexual individuality: o Time—On the Internet, people can log on at any hour of the day and find people to connect to, erasing the sense of our actual time zone. Virtual interaction can create a feeling that time does not matter in the real world. o Space—People can interact with people in multiple places around the globe simultaneously. Because the Internet and its technological devices are extensions of the self, people are able to play and work anywhere in the world at any time: the tablet or laptop computer or mobile phone is the office and personal space. o Sexual individuality—The Internet allows people to change their sexual individuality if they want to, because individuals can create new and even multiple online identities, desires, and relationships that are distinctive from real life. In fact, they may contradict or be the opposite of the individual’s real identity. • Our changing sexual individuality may also affect how we perceive others. B. Online Boundaries • Boundaries are important in relationships between people. As social networking sites and smart phones have grown technologically more sophisticated, the boundary between virtual and actual reality has blurred. • Boundaries help people to know what is unique about their own sexual individuality, to support sexual well-being. These limits can range from being very rigid and even malicious to being flexible, nurturing, and negotiable. • Boundaries help us all to keep our own attitudes and tastes in perspective. C. Online Romance, Dating and Hooking Up • The Internet has allowed millions of adults in the United States to turn online dates into long-term relationships or marriages. So it is not surprising that the sexual norm is changing to accept online relationships as real dating in real time. • What men and women look for in partners appears to be changing with the Internet, too. Research shows that older women are not looking just for long-term commitment; they are also looking for independence in relationships. Today, men want partners to be educated and women want equality with partners in terms of being career oriented, intelligent, and emotionally available. • The Internet allows people to find romance and sex online, whether to find a potential mate or for the purpose of hooking up, defined as casually engaging in a sexual encounter with someone outside of a romantic or committed relationship. People may use the Internet to locate mates because they do not always have the time to go out to meet others. For example, a major study has found that in three key cities around the world, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Stockholm, young male “techies” have a lot of money but little time to meet people and some turn to higher-end sex workers they meet online and pay for their “girlfriend experience” with no strings attached. • While using the Internet for dating poses challenges, and is not for everyone, the majority of research suggests that virtual relationships can be beneficial for some people. Of those who first met on the Internet, a majority of people reported forming a close relationship. Additionally, 50% and more of these participants had moved from an Internet relationship to one in real life, and nearly a quarter of them became engaged, married, or lived together. Other studies have discovered that people who met on the Internet liked each other more than those who met face-to-face first. D. Sexual Avatars and Gaming • Literally hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously play these games together as they socialize, market products, create friendships, and find potential sex partners. One study revealed that people may spend as much as 8 hours per day, 7 days a week online, often with an online romantic partner whom they have never met before in real life. Their shared time ultimately led to intense sexual relationships in the actual world for some of them who spent a huge amount of time online getting to know each others’ minds, hearts, and interests. • In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson popularized a new way of thinking and talking about online personalities and collective images, using the term avatar. An avatar is an online representation or alter ego (literally “another self”) for someone playing a computer game. Research and Sexual Well-Being The Sexual Life of Avatars in Second Life • Tom Boellstorf’s book, Coming of Age in Second Life, supports the notion that sexual connectivity and animated online activity are changing how we perceive sexual individuality. • Most people who log on to Second Life seek nonsexual friendships, so this cyber world is much more than a sex stop. • The people who play the Second Life game often report that their avatar experiences and relationships are more immediate, exciting, and intense than they would be in the real world, where they have to be more cautious. • Second Life reveals sexual situations, characters, and spaces where, for example, virtual bars and discos, cater to particular sexual tastes. • Through various animations, avatars “engage in a wide range of sexual practices, from embracing and kissing to oral, vaginal, and anal sex.” • Sexual individuality may motivate people to use avatars to extend their sexual attractions and relationships online. • The online venue may provide a “safe” space to try out new desires or roles and figure out what feels “right” to them. • Avatars can connect to others who share in their arousal or pleasure, associated with parts of the body, such as penis or breasts, in fantasy and reality. • A whole sexual community can form around such shared interest, which may be defined as a form of kinky sex, a form of sexual interaction that may involve pain and ritual rules, pushing sexuality to the extreme. • Avatars and virtual world like Second Life are potentially liberating for people, but they also pose ethical issues about such basic matters as how we think about ourselves as humans. o In fact, some individuals assign such deep meaning to androids, avatars, and their avatar’s words and actions, that they may no longer seem human. IV. Adult Sexual Content A. Pornography • Pornography is any form of media created to sexually arouse the user, especially for commercial purposes. Pornography may be as old as civilization and it exists in many cultures of the world. • It was first mass-produced in print in the late 1800s, when French pornographers began to market inexpensive sexual material featuring “artistic” poses of women. Mass-produced soft pornography which features nude images but no actual penetrative sex scenes began with Playboy magazine in 1953. • Hard-core pornography, which depicts penetrative sex and aggressive, raw sexual interactions between adults, followed the first issue of Playboy by about 10 years. Hustler, the iconic magazine of hard-core pornography, was produced for heterosexual men who wanted more explicit sexual material than was offered in Playboy. It became the focus of: o Highly publicized censorship battles and lawsuits to prevent it from being sold o A government commission on pornography o Court decisions that upheld the right to publish hard-core porn under the First Amendment of the Constitution protecting free speech. • Highly sexualized forms of animated pornography have also become part of the digital format, further erasing the line between actual and virtual collective sexual fantasy, as seen in the “Manga” comics, which are pornographic representations, virtual or actual, of comic book characters having sex. • Today people access pornography through magazines and videos, but now also through millions of websites and peer-to-peer (p2p) sites called torrents. • Sexual behavior in commercially distributed movies resembles soft pornography now more than it did a few years ago. • Making everyday sexual images available to anyone, even when the material is not for sale or is not strictly pornographic, is known as pornification. B. Adult Sexual Entertainment Online • In the 1990s, as the online pornography revolution was underway, a whole new form of the sex industry emerged: online live adult sexual entertainment. Some people confuse this live, pay-for interactive type of sexual interaction between individuals with pornography in general, but they are quite different. • Pornography is static, mass-produced images or videos, and the commercial product is not made for or connected to individuals. With adult sexual entertainment, clients actually pay females and males, some of whom are porn stars of these websites (by the minute), to have online sexual communications and interactions, to satisfy their own sexual individuality. V. Online Communities, Rights, and Sexual Well-Being • Just as the Internet has brought new sexual boundaries, roles, and norms for individuals, it has also created controversy about the political control of these boundaries through regulation of online sexual communities. • Online sexual communities have flourished and gone global. Of all of the developments, what has happened to the online transgender movement suggests a historic change. Transgender people express gender behavior that varies from the norm. They live all over the world, but often in isolation from one another, and the Internet has enabled individuals to join online communities to meet and strengthen their identities and their common cause. Experts believe that without the Internet, the transgender community would not exist in the same way today. Key Terms Sexual consumerism—the use of sexuality to market and sell products to consumers Shared sexual images—content that contains explicit or hidden sexual messages, whether real or imagined, visual or auditory Social networking sites (SNSs)—sites that allow people to form online relationships, for business and pleasure, creating networks that encompass friends and sexual and romantic interests Sexting—sharing highly explicit sexual images of oneself through the Internet Virtual sex—sexual activity through online communication Hooking up—meeting a partner online or in a physical setting for a casual sexual encounter outside of a romantic or committed relationship Avatar—an online representation or alter ego for someone playing a computer game Pornography—sexual images sold for personal titillation; any form of media used to create sexual arousal, especially for commercial purposes Soft pornography—nude images that do not depict penetrative sex scenes Kinky sex—a form of sexual interaction that may involve pain and ritual rules, pushing sexuality to the extreme Hard-core pornography—nude images that depict penetrative sex and aggressive, raw sexual interactions between adults Pornification—the use of sexual images from popular culture as pornography even when they are not pornographic Transgender—a person who expresses gender behaviors that vary from the norm Instructor Manual for Human Sexuality: Self, Society, and Culture Gilbert Herdt, Nicole Polen-Petit 9780073532165, 9780077817527
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