Tomboy is a term used for girls or young women with masculine traits. It can include wearing androgynous or unfeminine clothing and engaging in physical sports or other activities and behaviors usually associated with boys or men.
Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most commonly examined at the level of a society, but can also refer to the behavior of individuals and is a type of dehumanization.
Preadolescence is a stage of human development following middle childhood and preceding adolescence. It commonly ends with the beginning of puberty. Preadolescence is commonly defined as ages 9–12 ending with the major onset of puberty. It may also be defined as simply the 2-year period before the major onset of puberty. Preadolescence can bring its own challenges and anxieties.
The sex-positive movement is a social and philosophical movement that seeks to change cultural attitudes and norms around sexuality, promoting the recognition of sexuality as a natural and healthy part of the human experience and emphasizing the importance of personal sovereignty, safer sex practices, and consensual sex. It covers every aspect of sexual identity including gender expression, orientation, relationship to the body, relationship-style choice, and reproductive rights. Sex-positivity is "an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation." The sex-positive movement also advocates for comprehensive sex education and safe sex as part of its campaign. The movement generally makes no moral distinctions among types of sexual activities, regarding these choices as matters of personal preference.
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one's self. In Marxism, the objectification of social relationships is discussed as "reification".
Slut is an English-language term for a person, usually a woman or girl, who is considered to have loose sexual morals or who is sexually promiscuous. It is usually used as an insult, sexual slur or offensive term of disparagement. It originally meant "a dirty, slovenly woman", and is rarely used to refer to men, generally requiring clarification by use of the terms male slut or man whore.
A video vixen is a female model who appears in hip hop-oriented music videos. From the 1990s to the early 2010s, the video vixen image was a staple in popular music, particularly within the genre of hip hop. The video vixen first came around in the late 1980s when the hip-hop culture began to emerge into its own lifestyle, although was most popular in American popular culture during the 1990s and 2000s. Many video vixens are aspiring actors, singers, dancers, or professional models. Artists and vixens have been criticized for allegedly contributing to the social degradation of black women.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is a 2005 book by Ariel Levy that critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".
Lipstick feminism is a variety of feminism that seeks to embrace traditional concepts of femininity, including the sexual power of women, alongside traditional feminist ideas. The concept emerged within the third-wave as a response to ideals created by previous movements, where women felt that they could not both be feminine and a feminist.
Sexualization is to make something sexual in character or quality or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women. Sexualization is linked to sexual objectification. According to the American Psychological Association, sexualization occurs when "individuals are regarded as sex objects and evaluated in terms of their physical characteristics and sexiness." "In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner and are objectified. In addition, a narrow standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized. These are the models of femininity presented for young girls to study and emulate." According to the Media Education Foundation's, Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women, the sexualization of girls in media and the ways women are portrayed in the dominant culture are detrimental to the development of young girls as they are developing their identities and understanding themselves as sexual beings.
"Lolita" is an English-language term defining a young girl as "precociously seductive." It originates from Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita, which portrays the narrator Humbert's sexual obsession with and victimization of a 12-year-old girl whom he privately calls "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores. Unlike Nabokov, however, contemporary writers typically use the term "Lolita" to portray a young girl who attracts adult desire as complicit rather than victimized.
In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
In 2011, the average number of televisions per household in the United States was 2.5 with 31% of Americans owning four or more televisions. Research shows that the average American watches over 4 hours of television each day. Leading television networks reach approximately 60% of television viewers in the United States per week on average. A study conducted in 2005 by the Kaiser Family Foundation determined that eight- to eighteen-year-olds spend on average six and a half hours a day with media in general. American teenagers alone spend 11.2 hours watching television a week according to another market research study conducted by Teen Research Unlimited. They also found that these teens listen to FM radio 10.1 hours per week, spend 3.1 hours playing video games per week, and surf online for a total of 16.7 hours per week. MTV is the favored television channel to watch among both boys and girls in America, averaging over six hours a week viewing it. Research also shows that on any day a teenager is exposed to over 200 cable television networks, 5,500 magazines, 10,500 radio stations, over 30 million websites, and over 122,000 recently published books. Multiple forms of media can be seen throughout society in almost every facet.
Slut-shaming is the practice of criticizing people, especially women and girls, who are perceived to violate expectations of behavior and appearance regarding issues related to sexuality. The term is used to reclaim the word slut and empower women and girls to have agency over their own sexuality. Gender-based violence can be a result of slut-shaming primarily affecting women. It may also be used in reference to gay men, who may face disapproval for promiscuous sexual behaviors. Slut-shaming rarely happens to heterosexual men.
The exploitation of women in mass media is the use or portrayal of women in mass media as objects to increase the appeal of media or a product to the detriment of, or without regard to, the interests of the women portrayed, or women in general. This process includes the presentation of women as sexual objects and the setting of feminine beauty ideals that women are expected to reflect. Sexual exploitation of women in the media dates back to 19th century Paris, in which ballerinas were exposed to harassment and objectification. The ballerinas in the Paris Opera Ballet were ogled by their male audience members and often even expected to perform sexual favors for the male subscribers behind the scenes. Feminists and other advocates of women's rights have criticized such exploitation. The most often criticized aspect of the use of women in mass media is sexual objectification, but dismemberment can be a part of the objectification as well.
Internalized sexism takes the form of sexist behaviors and attitudes enacted by women toward themselves or other women and girls. On a larger scale, internalized sexism falls under the broad topic of internalized oppression, which "consists of oppressive practices that continue to make the rounds even when members of the oppressor group are not present." Internalized sexism can cause a wide range of effects, for instance problems with one's mental health and body image. Modes of internalization of sexism include early childhood inculturation and consumption of media, while language can also moderate power imbalances between groups and perpetuate internalized sexism.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham is an Indian professor of communication studies and writer. Durham was born in Mangalore, India but moved to the United States and then Canada at a young age. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa, with a joint appointment in the journalism and mass communication departments. She was previously a Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Research & Economic Development. She was also the Associate Faculty, Director of the Obermann Center of Advanced Studies, and she is a member of the board of directors for the Project of Rhetoric of Inquiry.
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image.
Raunch aesthetics is a term in feminist theory which describes the ways in which women in hip hop express their sexuality through the performance of lyrics, choreography, and staging. These aesthetics are performed by artists such as Rihanna, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion and Miley Cyrus with the intention to embrace and take control over their own bodies and sexual identities through verbal and physical expression.
Leora Tanenbaum is an American feminist author and editor known for her writing about girls' and women's lives. She is credited with coining the term "slut-bashing" in her 1999 book Slut!: Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation; the concept has since been mostly known as "slut-shaming."
