If You're Looking for Someone to Write Your Blog Posts About: Sex, Media Effects, & One Direction

If you like thinking about media and sex too,

If you like blog posts about Harry Styles & crew, 

If you want to know what this music video might do to you,

Baby I'm perfect, baby I'm perfect for you. 

One Direction's smash-hit "Perfect" is proof that not even Zayn can stop the British sensations. It's like they say, "nobody can drag me down." With their "Perfect" EP dropping tonight, there seems to be no better time to analyze the messages that will be broadcasted to millions of adolescent, teenage, and young adult girls around the world and think about what their effects might be. In the case of this video, gendered commitment scripts as well as sexual messages are being portrayed by 1D; this post discusses a few of the ways in which this content might affect adolescent girls.

From the first line, it's clear this song isn't about love: "I might never be your knight in shining armor, I might never be the one you take home to mother...but I can be the one, be the one tonight." This theme repeats throughout the song, stressing that the various members of 1D aren't "good at making promises," meaning they're not going to be committed or faithful to a girl. This falls closely in line with a sexual script (culturally available script for recognizing and acting in social situations) defined by Kim et al., the Masculine Commitment Script (MCS) (2007). The MCS states that "men actively avoid commitment, marriage, monogamy, or taking their romantic relationships 'to the next level," which is clearly the attitude of One Direction in "Perfect". This attitude to relationships corresponds with a needier Female Commitment Script counterpart, which craves commitment and romance; "Perfect" also hints at this script with the line "if you're looking for someone to write your breakup songs about." These scripts and the relationships they implicate reinforce male-dominant power structures in relationships between men and women by allowing the man a greater degree of freedom and subordinating the woman to his will to have a relationship or not.

In watching this music video, I was struck by how harmless One Direction was portrayed to be, despite their relatively provocative lyrics. This harmless yet playful depiction reminded me of the description of the guys that the "Intrigued" preteen girls in Brown, White & Nikopoulou's study would fantasize about: "nice," "cute," "fun" and "funny" (1993) It seems as if this music video specifically avoids being as sexual as its lyrics to attract Directioners of this age group and potentially younger by depicting 1D as such.

Targeting such a young audience with a harmless video would indeed be harmless if the lyrics weren't so clearly sexual: "And if you like having secret little rendezvous, if you like to do the things you know that we shouldn’t do...baby, I'm perfect for you." The effects of sexual content like this are likely to vary between individuals, but Brown et al. found that 12-14 year olds with heavy diets of sexual content like this tend to be at greater risk of engaging in early sexual intercourse (2006). Brown et al.'s 2004 paper also found that middle-school aged girls often turn to media as a "sexual super peer," and earlier maturing girls often perceived media as giving them sexual permission. Chia & Gunther's study found that college students tend to perceive sexual media as having a great effect on people around them and males were found to the adopt casual attitudes towards sex based on this. One of the risk factors Brown et al. identified as influencing likelihood to have earlier sexual intercourse was perceived sexual permissiveness of peers. 

If adolescents treat the media as a super peer AND young people perceive their peers as being sexually permissive as a result of the sexual media, then sexually permissive media is likely to ultimately influence the attitudes of young people towards sex. Through its lyrics, "Perfect" encourages trivial sex without commitment among a young audience, who might be ill-equipped to deal with the risks and responsibilities associated with sex. Beyond this, the media encourages young girls to allow men to set the committal terms of their relationships, promoting an unhealthy and one-sided relationship power dynamic.

References

1. Brown, J. D., White, A. B., & Nikopoulou, L. (1993). Disinterest, intrigue, resistance: Early adolescent girls' use of sexual media content. In B. S. Greenberg, J. D. Brown & N. Buerkel-Rothfuss (Eds.), Media, sex and the adolescent (pp. 177-195). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
2. Brown, J. D., Halpern, C. T., & L'Engle, K. L. (2005). Mass media as a sexual super peer for early maturing girls. Journal of Adolescent Health, 36(5), 420-427. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2004.06.003 
3. Brown, J. D., L'Engle, K. L., Pardun, C. J., Guo, G., Kenneavy, K., & Jackson, C. (2006). Sexy media matter: Exposure to sexual content in music, movies, television, and magazines predicts Black and White adolescents' sexual behavior. Pediatrics, 117(4), 1018-1027. doi: 10.1542/peds.2005-140
4. Chia, S. C., & Gunther, A. C. (2006). How media contribute to misperceptions of social norms about sex. Mass Communication & Society, 9(3), 301-320. doi: 10.1207/s15327825mcs0903_3
5. Kim, J. L., Sorsoli, C. L., Collins, K., Zylbergold, B. A., Schooler, D., & Tolman, D. L. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research, 44(2), 145-157. doi: 10.1080/00224490701263660