Gossip Girl, the American drama television series released on the CW since September, 2007, revolves around the lives of privileged teenagers from elite class in New York City's Upper East Side. According to the U.S. Nielsen Ratings, though the ratings of this show are not attractive, Gossip Girl has held excellent attention among young audiences, especially for the female teenagers. The contents, characters and fashions showed in this series gave a huge impact for teenagers, and the influence still goes on. Today, I will analyze several sexual parts of the content showed on episode 10 season three (2009, Nov 16), apply the effects theory of desensitization given by Professor Tewksbury in his CMN277 lecture to predict possible effects to teenagers.
Desensitization
According to Professor Tewksbury’s lecture (Oct 27, 2009), the basic model of desensitization is three steps: the audiences received repeated exposure; then it reduced their emotional response to the exposure; in the end, they begin to be acceptable of depicted behavior. At the beginning of this episode, Dan, one of the main heroes, was walking along the street in the morning while thinking of the threesome sexual behavior happened between him and the other two girls last night. Then the scene switched to that night: the two girls were kissing each other on the bed while Dan was lying and staring at them with a very enjoyable expression. In this example, according to desensitization theory, audiences were exposed to the scene of threesome, and they feel shocked, strange and even disgusted in the first sight. However, after these kinds of sexual scenes exposed to the audiences again and again, they will be bothered less and less. In the long term, these cumulative exposures will bring the audiences’ affective changes on their value and attitudes towards sexual behaviors. In this case, the teenagers, especial female teenagers are more likely to be affected. They are staying at the age of sex exploration: shy, sensitive and conservative, but also easy to be seduced and deluded. Female teenagers may be cautious and object to unusual sexual excitements like threesome or premarital intercourse; however, after being showed these kinds of scenes repeatedly, they may turn to believe threesome is common and not that dirty as they think before, and gradually accept people do this behavior. For instance, if a girl watches series that depict the threesome again and again, she may soon change her perceptions about the frequency of the occurrence of threesome behavior in the real world. She may also reevaluate the amount of social and psychological harm this behavior causes. And she may even believe it will be possible for her to try it in the future.
As I showed before, the basic model of desensitization contains three steps; however, in my point of view, the effect may go further: from attitude change to the behavior change. It means people accept things which bothered them before, and the affective changes may lead to their personal behavior changes in their real lives. Some researchers believe there is a strong relationship between sex exposure and behavior change among teenagers. According to Rand Corporation (2008), “Exposure to sexual content on television predicted teen pregnancy, with adjustment for all covariates”(para.4). In my example before, the girl who watches threesome scenes, desensitizes to accept them, and changes her attitudes, then may also have the possibility to change her real personal sexual behaviors further, such as attempting more irregular sexual behaviors and so on.
Conclusion and Suggestion
Through these typical examples, we can see media exposure can desensitize our attitudes, and make changes for us in the long term. As media take such an important role in our lives, appropriate media message supervision and control are essential and meaningful. However, as I showed before, media can bring us both negative and positive effects, and the effects are not easy to measure and predict; therefore, media content control could be hard and controversial. The TV series Gossip Girl have received mixed reviews since it premiered to the public: opponents claim this show contains too much sexually explicit content which will give teenagers negative effects; supporters believe Gossip Girl is derived from society and reflects the reality. In my point of view, the best way of media control is not to restrict the exposure contents or teenagers’ right to access media message. On the country, we should encourage media be more neutral and show both of the sides of the society. Like in the show Gossip Girl, the content of threesome is derived from today’s young people’ real life, it is no need to avoid facing it. Instead, we can add more contents to show how the negative effects taking this sexual behavior could be. Teenagers will learn from both of the sides, compare, and balance their behaviors.
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