Relations Between Adolescents' Personal and Parental Characteristics and Gender-role Attitudes: Mediation of Sexual Media Content

• In Event: Gender and Sexuality in Context: Families, Communities, and Media

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical stage in the development of personal and sexual identity. Online media provides adolescents with a variety of information about sexuality and gender. In many cases, sexual media content contains violence or humiliation, portrayed as legitimate. Previous studies showed that adolescents who were exposed to sexual media content expressed affirmative attitudes towards objectification of women and stereotypical gender role attitudes, in comparison to adolescents not exposed to such content. Adolescents' sexual attitudes predict sexual behavior, and mediate the relation between consumption of sexual content and sexual behavior. Therefore, it is important to identify adolescents who have greater exposure to sexual media content and examine whether such increased exposure can explain the associations between personal and family characteristics and attitudes towards gender roles and sexism. The current study had two main objectives: (1) To examine the associations between personal and parental characteristics and exposure to sexual media content; and the relationship between such exposure and gender-role attitudes among Israeli adolescents; (2) To examine whether exposure to sexual media content mediates the relations between personal and parental characteristics and attitudes.
Participants were 787 eighth and eleventh grade students (451 girls and 336 boys; Mage =14.98), from both Jewish and Arab schools (n=378, 409 respectively). Participants completed questionnaires on gender-role attitudes, personal (sensation-seeking and resistance to peer pressure) and familial characteristics (family communication about sexuality and parental monitoring), and frequency of exposure to sexual media content. Results indicated that frequent exposure to sexual media content was positively associated with hostile sexist attitudes and negatively associated with egalitarian attitudes toward gender-roles and benevolent sexist attitudes. Additionally, parental characteristics directly affected adolescent gender-role attitudes, while personal characteristics were indirectly associated with gender-role attitudes through exposure to sexual media content. Structural equation modeling showed that higher levels of sensation-seeking and low levels of resistance to peer pressure associated with increased exposure to sexual content that, in turn, led to greater non-egalitarian and sexist attitudes toward gender roles. Furthermore, adolescents' gender-role attitudes were directly associated with the adolescents' biological sex, but we also found that the association between the adolescents' sex and gender- role attitudes was partially mediated by exposure to sexual media content. That is, boys' attitudes to gender roles were more stereotypical and sexist than those of girls, partly due to increased exposure to sexual content.
The results indicated that media can be a source of sexual socialization in adolescence when consumed in an increased manner and can influence adolescents' attitudes towards gender roles. It is important to note, however, that contrary to parental and sociocultural norms, which aim to educate adolescents regarding appropriate social behavior and protect them from danger based on accepted values, sexual media content might endanger adolescents by generating negative feelings and attitudes toward women, which may negatively influence the adolescents' behavior towards women, particularly in romantic relationships. Parents and professionals should take this into account when educating adolescents on sexuality.

Authors

• Suha Daw, University of Haifa, Israel
  Presenting Author

• Miri Scharf