Hold onto your hats: A new study conducted by ultra-conservative Brigham Young University has found that pop music is more sexualized now than it was in 1959.
BYU researchers studied lyrics from the top 100 year-end Billboard Hot 100 songs every 10 years, from 1959 to 2009. Their findings: There were more references to sex in 2009 than in 1959. The artists responsible for spouting those dirty lyrics were mostly male and non-white.
Study author Cougar Hall (best name ever!) says that this spells bad news for adults who are trying to keep kids chaste:
“Considering previous research establishing an association between sexualized music lyrics and adolescent sexual behavior, our findings unfortunately offer sexuality educators a stormy forecast.”
What does hyper-sexual music mean for society as a whole? Catastrophe, judging by the researchers’ conclusions.
“Popular music can teach young men to be sexually aggressive and treat women as objects while often teaching young women that their value to society is to provide sexual pleasure for others.”
The authors go on to state that “for girls in particular, this can lead them to judge their personal worth on a sexual level only, leading to poor body image, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.”
We say: It’s highly unlikely that music alone is the culprit for everything from sexual aggression to eating disorders. Influences on teens are myriad, with the most important one being the messages that come from the home. When a 2006 study linked early sexual activity with listening to raunchy songs, sex educator Yvonne K. Fulbright, Ph.D., shared a similar opinion:
“It’s a little dangerous to just pinpoint one thing. You have to look at everything that’s going on in a young person’s life,” she said. “When somebody has a healthy sense of themselves, they don’t take these lyrics too seriously.”
Also: Didn’t adults say this exact same thing about Elvis’s gyrating hips back in the 1950s?
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