The Social World - 1413 Words

Sexualisation of the social world has become a very prominent social issue since the early 90’s. It has affected many influential individuals in devastating ways such as that of eating disorders, body image issues and mental illnesses. This essay will explore sociological explanations to understand and draw conclusions on why the sexualisation of culture has and continues to occur today. I will explore feminism and how it has influenced sexualisation of culture today and how pornography has influenced todays pornification problems. One sociological explanation for this is that of a multitude of factors related to that of feminism. In the mid-1970s child abuse was brought to public eye by a group of second wave feminists also known as†¦show more content†¦This is the most significant of the factors that laid the ground for shift of sexualisation to become a recognised social issue from its former clinical term (Fredrickson 1992). However, positioning the innocence of a child to symbolise femininity began to counter benefit the movement by setting the tone for the return of traditional family values. For example, the innocent girl was remobilized to attack the legalization of child abortion, a goal that feminists had achieved years earlier. This debacle however did provide the ideal social conditions for today’s sexualisation problem to be identified as in 1981 journalists were beginning to investigate the sudden sexualisation of young females. Sexualisation being used to describe mal socialization which in fact separates children from their natural essence causing premature entry in adult forms of sexual subjectivity. For example, that of play makeup for girls (Schiro 1981). Another sociological explanation that is provided for the pornification of media today is that of the evolution of porn. Pornographic content has always been in existence with our culture with prehistoric rock art dated before civilisation depicting sexual acts. This can also be seen in art work during the Victorian era such as that of the painting by Édouard Manet titled Olympia which was a nude picture of a French courtesan which