Files
Download Full Text (854 KB)
Description
Alexis Williams, Avienne Golden and Katarina Flaig, CWP 102: Argumentation and Research
Faculty Mentors: Professor Jane E. Sullivan, English and Professor Susan Mary Paige, Academic Success Program
In the 21st century, it is humiliating to see how mainstream media in the United States of America has continued to corrupt the image of women. One may think that we, as a first-world progressive society, would have placed stronger value and respect on individuals by now; however, that is not the case. Public networks are meant to be about expression and communication, but they have slowly turned into a conduit of continued stereotypes of how women are meant to “behave” and “look.” We are still living in the past; the only thing that has changed is the saturated use of media in an effort to make money. Sexism is discreetly installed everywhere around us. In this research project, we focus solely on the music industry and how sexism is used with the intent of earning profit. Society has been programmed by the music industry to be accustomed to the objectification of women. Younger generations are especially prone to the continued message that this type of objectification is acceptable. Throughout this presentation, we demonstrate how adolescents are affected by what they see in music videos, and why women may be continuing to allow objectification to occur. To do this, we conducted a replication of the research study done by Denise Herd in “Conflicting Paradigms on Gender and Sexuality in Rap Music: A Systematic Review.” We used college students from a four-year urban college, taking the focus away from only rap music, and looked instead at multiple genres of the music industry. We find that these students may have been impacted by what they see and hear in the music industry, and that our results are correlated to the research we found throughout our literature review.
Publication Date
2020
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Recommended Citation
Williams, Alexis; Golden, Avienne; and Flaig, Katarina, "The Hidden Truth of Objectification in the Media" (2020). Communication and Humanities. 22nd Annual Student Research and Creativity Conference. SUNY Buffalo State.
https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/srcc-sp20-commhum/16
