Blog #3 Rachel Dadas

For this blog I decided to write about how television shows on popular stations such as MTV and VH1 are prompting and advertising sexuality. MTV stands for Music Television, and they originally created to show music videos all day long. As time went on, they started slowly moving away from music and towards reality shows.

Reality television first started becoming popular on VH1 in 2003 when they dropped the "Music First" from their name. They launched their promotion of "Celebreality" with shows most pertaining to celebrities who claim to be looking for love. The idea of finding your true love from a group of random people within a few weeks is simply unrealistic. Even though all of these shows claim to be "real" and not staged, they all are. For awhile I was actually tricked into thinking these shows were real and thought these celebrities were actually looking to marry one of the 20 groupies that auditioned to be on the show. I also envied how pretty the girls were and how handsome the men were. This is exactly what MTV and VH1 wanted out of viewers like me. Their goal is to make us all think that we're supposed to be that skinny and pretty since they're "real life people in real life situations"

As this trend of reality grew insanely fast, they began running out of ideas. Love and dating shows were overdone after the first few years, so they began airing shows such as 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, and Jersey Shore. When 16 and Pregnant aired it was supposed to be a sort of public service announcement, showing teenage girls what its really like to be a teenage mother. The show showed these young girls struggling with school, relationships, and life, and how miserable they were. The whole point was to scare our generation into being safer when it comes to sex. They even had Doctor Drew interviewing the girls throughout the season and also giving sex advice. Ever since that first show all of the warning messages have disappeared and teen pregnancy has been the latest trend. Instead of showing how having children at such a young age is a bad thing, they are promoting it, almost in an empowering way. They are now showing girls that they still can get an education, a job, and live out their dreams, even if their child won't ever have a father in their life. Doctor Drew doesn't even make appearances anymore to scare young girls into abstinence. 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom have truly started an epidemic of a new baby boom with all of the young girls trying to get pregnant even in middle school.

Another one of MTV's popular hits right now is Jersey Shore. This show has no plot and no purpose, other than to have a bunch of grown adults partying as if they were teenagers. The cast of this show all live in a house together, party, drink and have sex for a living. They promote partying and sexuality as it should be an everyday thing. Similar to Teen Mom, they are putting the idea out there that having meaningless one night stands every night is typical and socially acceptable. These cast members degrade themselves by wearing provocative clothing, doing absurd and unethical things, and make all of this seem normal. Their impact on our generation is incredible, with all of the teenagers and young adults copying the things they do, say, act, and wear. Their slogan, GTL (gym, tan, laundry) also has been a catch phrase among many. They promote pure sex by their actions and daily lifestyles without enforcing any type of safety such as condoms. Even in a recent episode "Snooki" brags about having an STI (sexually transmitted infection) for the second time. This sends a horrible message to viewers, making it seem like these types of behaviors are acceptable.

MTV and VH1 are promoting sexuality is in a very negative way that is implementing poor decisions among teenagers. We are all influenced by what we watch on television, some more than others, and shows like these are leaving permanent impacts on the live's of young people with these horrible role models. The trends continue to thrive and these shows aren't getting any less popular as they influence our generation in many negative ways.