From Raw Story:
A new study published Monday has found that teenagers who listen to music with raunchy sexual lyrics are more likely to have sex at a younger age than those who don’t listen to sexually explicit music. Though the result appears to be obvious, the study published in the August issue of Paediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Paediatrics, claims to be the first to examine the relationship between the music that teens listen to and their sexual development.
AdvertisementThe authors tracked the sexual behaviour and musical tastes of 1,461 US adolescent participants in reference to 16 top artists whose lyrics “depicted sexually insatiable men pursuing women valued only as sex objects.”
Among heavy listeners of sexually degrading music – where men are “studs” and women are sex objects – 51 per cent started having sex within two years, versus 29 per cent of those who listened to little or none of that type of music.
“Adolescents who listen to a lot of music containing these objectifying and limiting characterizations of sexuality progress more quickly in their sexual behaviour, regardless of their race or gender,” said Steven Martino, the study’s lead author and a researcher for the Rand Corporation.
Martino said there was no correlation found between sexual behaviour and sexualized lyrics that were not degrading in tone.
Martino said that degrading lyrics teach boys to relentlessly pursue women, while girls view themselves as sex objects.
“We think that really lowers kids’ inhibitions and makes them less thoughtful,” he said.
The study abstract is available here; the full text of the study report is available here.
Martino said there was no correlation found between sexual behaviour and sexualized lyrics that were not degrading in tone.
How much you wanna bet the fundies will overlook this completely in an effort to use this research to ban all sex-related lyrics?
Sigh.
Interesting, though.
Martino said that degrading lyrics teach boys to relentlessly pursue women, while girls view themselves as sex objects.
“We think that really lowers kids’ inhibitions and makes them less thoughtful,”he said.
Or perhaps “less thoughtful” kids with lower inhibitions to begin with are more likely to select music with sexually degrading lyrics (although the authors did at least try to control for this possibility). Or maybe kids who don’t listen to music with sexually degrading lyrics are more likely to be rejected as potential sexual partners by their peers. It’s awfully hard to tell.
I’m disappointed by the fact that Table 1 doesn’t identify the artists; doing so would have made it possible for readers to evaluate the quality of the coding against their own standards of what counts as sexual and what counts as degrading.