For Clues on Teenage Sex, Experts Look to Hip-Hop
Researchers interviewed more than 1,400 teenagers over two years, asking them about the music they listened to along with factors like peer pressure and parental supervision and how those factors have played part in their sexual behavior. They found that adolescents who were exposed to the highest levels of sexually degrading lyrics were twice as likely to have had sex by the end of the study.
The researchers defined degrading lyrics as those that portrayed women as sexual objects, men as insatiable and sex as inconsequential. One example they cited was from the rapper Ja Rule, whose song “Livin’ It Up” includes the lyrics “Half the ho’s hate me, half them love me.” Notably, lyrics that celebrated sex, like those crooned by the band 98 Degrees — “I’m dreamin’ day and night of making love” — had no effect on sexual behavior, the study found.
It may be that teenagers who are most interested in initiating sexual activity simply gravitate toward songs with edgier lyrics. But the research suggests that parents should focus less on whether their children listen to hip-hop and pay more attention to the content.
This year, another paper in Culture, Health and Sexuality titled “Representin’ in Cyberspace” studied the way black American girls used hip-hop terms like “freaks” and “pimpettes” to describe themselves on personal home pages. The research led the author, Carla E. Stokes, to form HotGirls (Helping Our Teen Girls in Real Life Situations), an Atlanta-based nonprofit group that holds workshops where girls talk about music, rewrite objectionable lyrics and even record their own music. “We’re trying to build on the empowering aspects of the hip-hop culture,” Dr. Stokes said.
Now to be completely fair, I don’t ever recall lyrics having much of an impact on me or my behavior unless I was suffering a broken heart and listening to all the broken hearted love songs as if they were each a stitch being applied to the huge wound that was left there by a departing boyfriend.
While I don’t like a lot of degrading lyrics and I CAN’T stand gangster rap, I believe proper parenting can help depleat the effect these lyrics can play on our children in the long run.
Tags: teens, teen sex, risky behavior, hip hop music, rap lyrics, hip hop lyrics
I think there are a lot of other factors that the study should have covered– socioeconomic influences to the same topic.