Sexual Content In Television And Its Effect On Adolescents

8 Pages 1970 Words

This paper compares and contrasts the usage of rhetoric in popular and academic sources. The two articles being discussed here are “The New Kiddie Porn” by Maomi Wolfs and “Sexual Messages on Television: Comparing Findings From Three Studies” by Dale Kunkel and Kristie M. Cope. Wolfs’ article is a popular source while Kunkel and Cope’s article is clearly an academic study. Sexual suggestiveness, activities and behavior are analyzed by the way they appear in the media. In both of these articles, although structured in different ways, we see the effects of media, specifically their sexual content, on people. In Wolfs’ article, the main focus is on children, whereas in Kunkel and Cope’s article, the focus is on adolescents.
Sitting with her child in front of the television, Maomi Wolfs is astonished to see the content of her three-and-a-half year old’s favorite cartoon. “ If you pay attention to the dialogue, the images of the value-laden messages, you’ll get a queasy, dawning sense that your kids have entered into a cartoon moral warp, where everything that’s cool and inviting to children is being given and genuinely perverse underlay” (Wolfs 42). In her article, “The New Kiddie Porn”, she describes cartoon shows that appear on the popular T.V. channel “Cartoon Network” and isolates the ideas of sexual suggestiveness in them. In an article by Dale Kunkel and Kristie M. Cope, the issue of sexual content in television is also addressed but in the form of research instead of personal experience. In their article, “Sexual Messages on Television: Comparing Findings From Three Studies”, the authors discuss three different studies on television programs and how much sexual content is found.
The authors’ uses of ethos are formed in different ways, but still give the reader a feeling of confidence in the writer. In her article, Wolfs describes her experience with cartoons. She says, “[w]hen I was gro...