SEX: Hypersexualization in Human Society
Persuasive Essay
Rayne O'Muineachan
September, 2015

The human body is overselxualized to the point where most people (if not all) have problems with how they see themselves and how they see others.This can make people afraid, and scared to do what they want. Living in a world where people are afraid to leave the house wearing a dress that shows their shoulders is not okay. It can’t have it be normal to be afraid of someone cat calling them. Being sexual doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and we don’t have to look at everything and everyone as something sexual. The media plays a huge part in all of this. The media is a wonderful place where you can have information at your fingertips. Figuring out why the sky is blue is just as easy as asking your phone. In ways, we have come so far in the technology we have created. But on the other hand, we have created something that ‘teaches’ people how to wear there clothes based on what other people will think. This carries over into a person's day to day life. It gives people the impression that it is okay that the male population is in the position of power. In government, relationships, and even in the work force. This also gives the impression that their opinion matters when it comes to what women do with there body, the clothing they wear, and the way they represent themselves overall. This all leads to the question of how do different aspects of human sexuality shape the way we look at different genders and races? To clarify, the definition of sexualization is “Sexualization is to make something sexual in character or quality, or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women.” Says the Collins English Dictionary. Hypersexualization in society causes people to put themselves, and others into unrealistic sexual roles which can then affect the way they interact and see themselves on a race, gender, and orientation level. In order to combat this, different social justice movements use the media and personal experiences to connect with the general public and help them understand the socialization happening in everyday life.

Being a sexual being is not a bad thing, but it has become a bigger and bigger part of our society. People can start being affected by this as early as Kindergarten, just by watching TV shows, and the commercials that are shown.The media is a huge player in why we act the way we act. The media whether it be TV, phones, the internet, obviously has a huge impact on our society. The media tells us that the more skin we show, the more slutty we are. On the other hand, there are subliminal message telling us to show more skin and act ‘sexy’. Not only that but women are constantly being told that if they have sex or are sexual, then they are sluts, but if they don’t have sex, then they must be a prude.

Camille A. Brown is a dancer. She Choreographs her own pieces, and performs them with a group of dancers. Camille is a very talented dancer who has made many pieces and most recently is working on Black Girl. The dance is about a black girl. More specifically, a black girl who is going from young girl, to adult. The beginning she is getting ready for her day maybe. Doing her hair, cleaning herself up after playing. She maybe finds herself being sad or not feeling 'pretty' then she finds music. Music is something that makes her feel at home and that she can really connect to. Through out the dance, Camille does iconic movements from black women artists. That shows how young women are so impressionable and how we really look at this ideal beauty that other women have. That can put the wrong impression on young adults. And this is something Camille A. Brown has said about her own dance as well. Camille pulled a lot from her personal experiences for most of her dance. What she wants to happen is for people to mostly just understand what's happening and to stop putting this ideal body image into young women's heads. This was a piece that I really wanted to look into for my project because of the topic, and because of the actual dance itself. I felt like it was a great look on the topic, and how she went about performing it really worked for me.

Lucky Plush is a professional dance company who creates long, story-like pieces of work that almost feel like a play. Founded in 1999, Lucky Plush has premiered over 30 original works, including 10 evening-length productions. Lucky Plush is also the recipient of multiple different awards and funds. Two of those awards being National Performance Network Creation Fund awards. Looking at a dance snippet from Cinderbox, It shows a multitude of emotions. Since this was a dance and only a small section of the dance, they don't take time to dissect and tell us what it is about. The main concept is about how impressionable people are and how that translates into the arts and other things. They talk about popular dances and how people catch on to them because of them being on the internet or on TV. This doesn’t have to do with hypersexualization as much as it shows how impressionable we are as humans and how the media is a huge player in it.

Kate Millett is an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist in the community.

She attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda's. The article talks mostly about gender. How gender has a power structure. The author actually says "the birthright control of one group by another-the male to rule and the female to be ruled." Kate makes it very clear throughout the whole article how she feels about gender and how it affects our government and day to day life. When reading, it was easy to hear a certain tone in her writing. A tone that conveyed anger or disgust with the power that some genders have over others from birth. That it almost seems like from birth, men have the birthright to be more powerful than women. "We cannot have such a change of consciousness unless we rebuild values---we cannot rebuild values unless we 'restructure personality" This basically means that to change history and be able to finally have the female population regain power or to make it equal, then we must be able to change everything. We have to change how people were conditioned to think, and how we see others and ourselves (Millett).

The article is about Free the Nipple Campaign and was written by Radhika Sanghani.

Sanghani talks about how there are so many people in the world now trying to make the Free the Nipple campaign come to life and make sure that something is constantly happening and being helped.. "Back in the 1930s, four men were arrested for going topless to Coney Island. Willis writes: “Men fought and they were heard, changing not only laws but social consciousness. And by 1936, men’s bare chests were accepted as the norm. “So why is it that 80 years later women can’t seem to achieve the same for their chests?”(Sanghani).

Fang-chih Irene Yang is assistant professor in the department of English at the National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, Taiwan. She put everything in the article together. The pages I was looking at was about Media and Girls. It talked a lot about how the media affects young girls and how they see other women and themselves. It also takes a look at gender and how confidence can differ from male, to female. The Author talks about how young girls are being thought by the media how to look, act, and think. They believe that in media young girls are often portrayed as thin, passive, and often sexual. It even talks about stereotypes and how thoughts affect how girls see themselves depending on hair color, and character types. Yang gives multiple books, survey responses, and different experiments to talk about how she feels on the topic. I was really excited to read this and it gave me a lot of facts on the hypersexualization issue in gender(Yang).

Hyperselxualization is rapidly growing, and will not stop growing until we can realize that it’s an actual problem.What needs to happen is we need to take charge. If we don't act now, our future looks bleak. Acting on this issue can help the generations to come. I don't want my kids growing up in a world where my child will be manipulated by the ‘ideal’ beauty and what it means if there not that. I don't want my child living in a world where we shame women for wanting sex, or praising men for having sex. It needs to be equal and safe. Change how we people. Hypersexualization is a problem and I will not back down from believing that. Hypersexualization is always going to be a problem unless we do something. Get involved in these amazing campaign, educate yourself by reading the articles, watching the movies and documentaries, even just talking to the people in your community about how they see themselves, others, and how they feel sexualization has taken over our world.

You must do something, to change something. You can’t just wait for it to be done for you. The research throughout this writing shows that humans are and have been very manipulated by the media and the ones around them. This whole topic is a pattern or cycle. Starts with young children taking in all there information from the media. Media is great, but it also shows such a bad side of people. Watch, read, or listen to whatever you want, but have a good understanding of what is right, and what os wrong. It's like talking about what kind of shows you let your kid watch. Letting them watch Spongebob is alright, as long as you know they already have that understanding that it's a trash TV show, and is not how the real world works of how people should act. Those kids are constantly being introduced to thinking about body image, and how they should look because that's how the people on the TV look. That's already enough to make me cringe and I hope you feel the same.

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi

Work Cited

BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play. Dir. Camille A. Brown. Camille A Brown Dancers. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

"Excerpts from Cinderbox." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2015.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics (by) Kate Millett. London: Hart-Davis, 1971. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.

Sanghani, Radhika. "Free The Nipple: Why on Earth Do Women Want to Walk around Topless in Public?" The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 06 June 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.

Yang, Irene Fang-Chih. "From Variety Shows to Body-Sculpting Commercials: Figures of Audience and the Sexualization of Women/Girls." Asian Media Studies (2005): 4. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

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Annotated Bibliography

BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play. Dir. Camille A. Brown. Camille A Brown Dancers. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

Camille A. Brown is a dancer. She Choreographs her own pieces, and performs them with a group of dancers. Brown has gone to LaGuardia Highschool of the Performing Arts, she earned a B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. From 2001-2007 she was a member of Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, and was a guest artist with Rennie Harris’ Puremovement, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (2008 and 2011). The dance is about a black girl. What I took away from it was that in the beginning she is getting ready for her day maybe. Doing her hair, cleaning herself up after playing. She maybe finds herself being sad or not feeling 'pretty' then she finds music. Music is something that makes her feel at home and that she can really connect to. Threw out the dance, Camille does iconic movements from black women artists. That to me shows how young women are so impressionable and how we really look at this ideal beauty that other women have. That can put the wrong impression on young adults. And this is something Camille A. Brown has said about her own dance as well. Camille pulled a lot from her personal experiences for most of her dance. I think what she wants to happen is for people to mostly just understand what's happening and to stop putting this ideal body image into young women's heads. This was a pieces that I really wanted to look into for my project because of the topic, and because of the actual dance itself. I felt like it was a great look on the topic, and some of the was she went about performing it really worked for me.

"Excerpts from Cinderbox." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2015.

Lucky Plush is a professional dance company who creates long, story-like pieces of work that almost feel like a play. Founded in 1999, Lucky Plush has premiered over 30 original works, including 10 evening-length productions. Lucky Plush is also the recipient of multiple different awards and funds. Two of those awards being National Performance Network Creation Fund awards. Since this was a dance and only a small section of the dance, they don't take time to dissect and tell us what it is about. What I got from it though was that it is about how impressionable people are and how that translates into the arts and other things like that. They talk about popular dances and how people catch on to them because of them being on the internet or on TV. They also touch on reading and writing and how some people don't really ever take the time to get into writing, reading, or speaking out loud in front of people or how with encouragement they can become better at it. The dancers show with there words how they feel about themselves and about others. How they like a dance move that another does and then they will repeat that dance move with them. They also show how when put in the spotlight, not everyone is comfortable right away and needs something else to step up and help them get comfortable with it. For me this was interesting to look at as a dancer myself. It gave me a lot of ideas on how to present our dance and writing. We want to make sure to include some of the same things that Lucky Plush has put into a lot of their dance pieces.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics (by) Kate Millett. London: Hart-Davis, 1971. Web. 5 Oct. 2015.

The author is Kate Millett. Kate Millett is an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist in the community. She attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda's. The article talks mostly about gender. How gender has a power structure. The author actually says "the birthright control of one group by another-the male to rule and the female to be ruled." Kate makes it very clear throughout the whole article how she feels about gender and how it affects our government and day to day life. When reading, it was easy to hear a certain tone in her writing. A tone that conveyed anger or disgust with the power that some genders have over others from birth. That it almost seems like from birth, men have the birthright to be more powerful than women. "We cannot have such a change of consciousness unless we rebuild values---we cannot rebuild values unless we 'restructure personality" This basically means that to change history and be able to finally have the female population regain power or to make it equal, then we must be able to change everything. We have to change how people were conditioned to think, and how we see others and ourselves.

Sanghani, Radhika. "Free The Nipple: Why on Earth Do Women Want to Walk around Topless in Public?" The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 06 June 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.

This article is is written by a woman who collected all the research. She herself doesn't have any background in Free the Nipple campaign, but wanted to inform people of what has been happening regarding it the past couple of years. In the article Radhika gives examples of websites, and companies that have had problems with female nipples being shown, and websites/companies that have been okay with showing a woman's nipples. This article doesn't really have much of the writer's personal views. she does however say at the end that she much rather not see a man or a women topless. She rather have everyone keep their clothes on. The author talks a lot about how there are so many people in the world now trying to make the Free the Nipple campaign come to live and make sure that something is constantly happening and being helped. This text helped stultify how I feel about this topic. I am excited to get started because this is very interesting to me. One part in the text that really was shocking to me was when the author said, "Back in the 1930s, four men were arrested for going topless to Coney Island. Willis writes: “Men fought and they were heard, changing not only laws but social consciousness. And by 1936, men’s bare chests were accepted as the norm. “So why is it that 80 years later women can’t seem to achieve the same for their chests?” Well..."

Yang, Irene Fang-Chih. "From Variety Shows to Body-Sculpting Commercials: Figures of Audience and the Sexualization of Women/Girls." Asian Media Studies (2005): 4. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

Fang-chih Irene Yang is assistant professor in the department of English at the National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, Taiwan. She put everything in the article together. The pages I was looking at was about Media and Girls. It talked a lot about how the media affects young girls and how they see other women and themselves. It also takes a look at gender and how confidence can differ from male, to female. The Author talks about how young girls are being thought by media how to look, act, and think. They believe that in media young girls are often portrayed as thin, passive, and often sexual. It even talks about stereotypes and how thoughts affect how girls see themselves depending on hair color, and character types. Yang gives multiple books, survey responses, and different experiments to talk about how she feels on the topic. I was really excited to read this and it gave me a lot of facts on the hypersexualization issue in gender.