Media, The Body and Link to Gender/Sex(uality)
Media
Teenage girls also express their sexuality through how they dress for example school girls wearing mini-skirts or tight jeans trying to reveal the sexy part of their bodies. This is highly influenced by media, named how media portrays certain celebrities. Ho argues that the magazine Venus(Taiwan) had an effect on young girls as they saw empowered by seeing fellow teenagers portrayed as sexual being on the covers. Such a platform of sexual expression shows the effect of modernization on how one can express themselves. The teenage girls who consume/d these magazines would see this as a chance to rise to stardom by making X-rated movies or removing X-rated pictures following the examples of icons like Vivian Hsu, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. These images present in the magazines could be easily used by the girls to make a footprint in expressing themselves as Ho claims “… manipulating such media images and commodities and becoming themselves subjects of desire, teenage girls are beginning to arrive at a new self-consciousness.”
The Body
Body Modification
How youth view their own body is a bye product of media consumption as it is from certain popular images that teenage girls try to emulate. As teenage girls become more aware of their bodies based on the images they get from the media they are bound to take part in body modification practices such as cosmetic surgeries. This may be influenced by the desire to please the consumers needs (middle aged men in this case). There is an example of a 17 year old girl who spent $30, 000 on breasts implants in Taiwan (Lam) Such shows the extent to which media affect the image of one’s body.
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