VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: A look at Sexual Messages Sex plays a major role in today's society. From television, radio, music, and advertisements, to video games, the Internet, and even art and pictures, all forms of media use sex to help sell their products. With the public being exposed to so many different types, the overuse and exploitation of sex is common. Is sex a useful tool, or a ploy to get the attention of the public? Before discussing sex in the media, one must understand why it has come to be that people use sex as a gimmick. "The writing of modern history has resulted in a viewpoint that is nothing short of a stag party. The history of women is ignored, hushed up, and censored in the most literal sense of the term. This method of eliminating the social and political destiny of half of humanity is the most effective form of supremacy." (Janssen-Jurreit 189) The world as it exists today, is still man-made, no less now then in the nineteenth century. Alice E. Courtney states, "Women's self-awareness as females has until very recently reflected the world's (mostly men's) image of them; how well their personal performance matched male expectations." These individual roles, as described by Oneill and Leone in Male/Female Roles: Opposing Viewpoints as the relationship of a man or woman to society on the basis of gender, became essential in shaping male and female attitudes towards one another. Over the past twenty years remarkable changes in these traditional male and female roles have been witnessed. The subsequent impact on men, women, and families due to these changes is believed to be, by many social historians, caused by the re-emergence of the women's movement. (Oneill and Leone 138) Though a positive alteration of roles has occurred, how is it that children of this century still may obey stereotypes? "A baby is born knowing nothing, but full of potential." (Oneill and Leone 78) believe that the process by ...
