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What is the connection between Media, Sexual Violence, and Systems of Oppression?
What is media literacy?
Media literacy is the awareness that images, social media, movies, and other forms of media are creations which have subtext and messages attached to them. They aren’t reality of life, but instead constructions. This can be confusing, as media is often made to look unstaged. For example, an Instagram photo showing a model looking flawless just waking up in the morning may appear not to be posed. In reality, a great deal of staging often takes place and many photos are taken when capturing moments which will be read as unplanned. These skewed depictions not only impact individuals, they also impact relationships. Picture perfect families on television may cause many parents to feel like they are failing if they don’t measure up.
Some may ask: “What about documentaries? Aren’t those depictions of real life?” While documentaries may not be scripted, there is still a director who decides what scenes will be included for viewers to see, and what scenes will not. Deleted scenes may have given the viewer a very different idea as to what is actually taking place.
On another level, media literacy is also the ability to decode the meta-messages (or deeper meanings and takeaways, what is communicated but not said) that are entering our minds and shaping our norms when we consume media. Since the creation of visual media, certain people and places have been consistently depicted in certain ways, which has created an expectation or stereotype about how those people and places must be in real life. For example, many people have ideas about whole continents, like Africa, despite ever visiting.
For Americans, often times these depictions of Africa are what people see in movies and media, which play upon stereotypical portrayals of foreign peoples that are highly oversimplified, inaccurate and sometimes downright offensive. Having a degree of cultural literacy allows us to read deeper into media images and debunk the underlying ideas in them which are problematic. Media literacy helps us to intervene and say "This image is playing on cliche stereotypes about Africa and does a disservice to the rich complexity of an entire continent". Movies are very strong tools in projecting an image of a country and its people which comes to define it, regardless of whether it's accurate or not. In essence, media literacy is the ability to understand that the media has the power to make some people look dangerous, even if they’re not, make some intentions look innocent, even if they aren’t, or make sexual assault look harmless, even though it isn’t.
How does the media create norms around sex?
Many people learn about the norms of sex and relationships through media. A rising number of children and teenagers’ first understanding of sex is from pornography and media, as opposed to having safe, educational conversations with parents or trusted persons. Research has shown using porn to have an impact on teens. Teenagers who consume porn become sexually active at a younger age, have an increased number of partners, and are more sexually active in general, when compared to teenagers who learned about sex from parents. The same study also reported that girls commonly felt less attractive than women they saw in porn, while boys were found to have more performance anxiety about sexual expectations they saw in porn.
Sex research journalist Maggie Jones states, "These images confound many teenagers about the kinds of sex they want or think they should have. In part, that’s because they aren’t always sure what is fake and what is real in porn. Though some told me that porn was fantasy or exaggerated, others said that porn wasn’t real only insofar as it wasn’t typically two lovers having sex on film. Some of those same teenagers assumed the portrayal of how sex and pleasure worked was largely accurate.
That seems to be in keeping with a 2016 survey of 1,001 11-to-16-year-olds in Britain. Of the roughly half who had seen pornography, 53 percent of boys and 39 percent of girls said it was “realistic.” When these norms are set, viewers might then begin to judge their own sexual experiences or relationships against what they see in media. When issues like sexual assault or consent aren’t respectfully or accurately portrayed, it perpetuates harm in many ways.
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