Two Sexy Young Girls Riding on Segway in Short Shorts Holding Hands and Laughing on a Sunny Day, Stock Footage

Choose a Girl

Sexting behaviors by adolescents and young adults are correlated with riskier sexual behaviors. The transmission (including the receipt) of sexually explicit texts may be illegal for children under the age of 18 in many states and the sending of sexually explicit photos of minors may be considered sexual exploitation or child pornography under the law. While your teen may trust the person on the other end of the conversation, it’s important that they understand the risks of sexting. Children in elementary school who were exposed to pictures of sexualized women in experimental studies rated those women as less than fully human and less worthy of being helped when in danger than non-sexualized women. In a recent meta-analysis of 59 different studies, researchers documented that the more sexualized media teens are exposed to, the more likely they are to endorse “rape myths,” such as the belief that it is okay for a woman to be raped if she is wearing suggestive clothing. The link between seeing sexualized women in the media and condoning sexual violence towards women was the strongest among White boys between the ages of 11 and 17.

Sexy clothing lines are hurting our young girls

That would totally shift our ideas of how we thought about girls and boys and sex. What was tricky was that both the thing that is held out — for college students in particular but high school students, too — as “fun,” which is getting drunk and hooking up, also facilitated assault, because alcohol is really the No. 1 date drug. We talk a lot about girls drinking and reducing girls drinking, and I think it’s very important to talk to girls about the particular effects of alcohol on their bodies, because drink for drink, we get drunker faster than boys do. [Oral sex] is considered to be less intimate than intercourse, and something that girls say repeatedly to me would be, “It’s no big deal.” There’s an argument that some of the girls have in the book about exactly what it is. It was something that they felt that they could do that boys expected — that they could do to not have to do something else. It was a way that they could cultivate popularity, it was a way that they felt — interestingly, they would talk about feeling more in control than if it was reciprocal.

Two Sexy Young Girls Riding on Segway in Short Shorts Holding Hands and Laughing on a Sunny Day

• They felt it was safer sex, which is true and not true, because the rates of STDs have actually shot up among teenagers, even though the rates of intercourse have not, because they think that oral sex is safer sex and things like gonorrhea are spreading much more quickly.
• So we really have to address both sides of this equation if we want to reduce assault.
• Some teens are sexting, and while this is usually consensual, girls are more likely to report that they were pressured into sending images of themself, and similarly, boys were more likely to respond that they would ask for sexual pictures from a partner.
• You can ask them questions such as, “Has anything happened online that made you upset?
• At 13, 70% of teens have their own smartphone; by 18 that number jumps to 93%.
• This may be because LGBTQ+ teens report feeling more pressured to sext, or, possibly due to uncomfortability or inability to be “out” and dating in real life, are creating romantic relationships online.

Once girls adopt a sexualized look, this penalizes them in their interactions with adults, who tend to assume that such girls are not just “playing dumb,” but actually are dumb. For example, when adults were shown pictures of a fifth-grade girl dressed in either a tee-shirt, jeans, and Mary Jane shoes or a short dress with a leopard print cardigan and a purse, the girl dressed in the sexy outfit was described as less intelligent, capable, competent, and determined than the girl in jeans. This held true even when the sexualized girl was described as being an honors student and the president of the student council! Given that adults also rate sexualized girls as less smart than non-sexualized girls, regardless of their academic accomplishments, girls who manage to live up to cultural ideals of sexiness face lowered expectations for their academic success from their teachers, their peers, and themselves. Researchers have shown in the past that women and teens think of themselves in sexually objectified terms, but the new study is the first to identify self-sexualization in young girls.

Media Use Facts

Nearly 100% of teens report having access to a smartphone or home computer, and nearly half of teens report that they are online “almost constantly”. Sixty percent of teens report using computers to do their homework every day. But it’s important to remember that the measure of average time includes multi-tasking time, and teens aren’t necessarily spending that long looking at a screen.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association sounded the alarm in a report on the sexualization of girls. It documented consequences of self-objectification and sexualization that have been identified in mainly college-age women, ranging from distractibility during mental tasks and eating disorders to reduced condom use and fewer women pursuing careers in math and science. Starr and her colleagues wrote that they expected similar outcomes in younger adolescents and girls. LGBTQ+ teens and young adults may be particularly at risk of participating in sexting, with 21% of LGBTQ+ youth reporting they have shared images or videos of themselves. This may be because LGBTQ+ teens report feeling more pressured to sext, or, possibly due to uncomfortability or inability to be “out” and dating in real life, are creating romantic relationships online. To understand why the young girls chose the sexy dolls, they asked their mothers about their media intake, own self-objectification and how involved they were with their daughter’s body image.

Keep reading to learn more about how it’s important to spend face-to-face time with your teens, outside of screen time. Pop singer Beyonce now has her own clothing line that introduces the red-light district to the school lunchroom. “As maternal TV instruction served as a protective factor for sexualization, it’s possible that higher media usage simply allowed for more instruction,” Starr said to Live Science.