ChickSpeak

In the 1950s, Playboy was subtly delivered in a brown paper bag. But the days when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking” are long gone.

Today, sexual images of women are plastered just about everywhere, from national advertisements to popular TV shows. Take the reality show “Girls Next Door” for example, which often fills the screen with blurred-out nude Playmates prancing around the mansion, acting oh-too-similarly like actual bunnies.

Sexualized images have entered mainstream society, whether one wants to see them or not. Society is selling sex, but at what expense? While some images portray healthy sexuality, many depict perverse perspectives on sexuality and teeter on the edge of what’s considered pornography.

Pornography is affecting women’s view of themselves, men’s view of women and the way men and women interact today, according to research.

Young women are evaluating and controlling their own bodies more in terms of their sexual desirability to others rather than their own desires, health, wellness or achievements, according to the Report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, released in 2007.

In fact, women are succumbing to what’s called “self-objectification,” in which they adopt a third-person perspective on the physical self and constantly assess their own body in an effort to conform to the culture’s standards of attractiveness, according to the report.

In our culture, self-objectification means a woman is a “good object” when she meets the ideal standard of “sexy,” the report says. Besides sexualized images, most images targeted towards women depict unrealistic and idealized standards of physical appearance.

Reports show that more than 77,000 teenage girls under age 18 have undergone plastic surgery in 2005, a 15 percent increase since 2000. Breast implants have become the new graduation gift for many high school teens.

It seems society’s standard of beauty stretches no further than the waxed, buffed, tanned, plastic perfection of the Barbie doll many of us grew up with. Our culture’s ideal standard of sexy tells us we are “hot” if we make out with another girl, participate in “Girls Gone Wild” during Spring Break or have a Brazilian bikini wax.

Yet self-worth based on one’s sexuality is nothing new. In fact, most women in the sex industry have been victims of sexual abuse.

“The sexually abused [woman] may incorporate the perpetrator’s perspective into her identity, eventually viewing herself as good for nothing but sex,” the APA report says.

Yet in the same way, it’s as if mainstream media is sexually abusing all women through the sexualized images with which they are constantly bombarded. Just like sex industry workers, women are adopting this sexualized identity.

But women are competing with a billion-dollar pornography industry that’s become more and more available with the popularity of the Internet, which provides anonymity. In fact, 96 percent of men ages 18 and older have visited pornography Web sites, according to Internet Pornography Statistics. Furthermore, there are more than 260 million pages of porn on the Internet, and approximately one-third of all Internet usage is visits to porn sites, according to recent data. ?

“[Women] can’t compete, and they know it,” author Naomi Wolf said about college women and their view on porn in her article “The Porn Myth” for New York magazine.

“For how can a real woman with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond ‘More, more, you big stud!’) possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification,” the article continued.

While some argue that pornography is an issue of freedom of expression and such images aren’t harmful, this argument disregards U.S. Supreme Court rulings that allow the public to regulate the display of offensive material of a sexual nature. Eighty-two percent of adult Americans surveyed in 2004 said that federal laws against Internet obscenity should be vigorously enforced.

Even more, many researchers challenge the idea that pornography use is a matter of free choice and argue that sexual behaviors such as pornography use are highly addictive.

Perhaps most detrimental is the effect such images are having on the way young men and women interact today.

“If girls and women are seen exclusively as sexual beings rather than as complicated people with many interests, talents and identities, boys and men may have difficulty relating to them on any level other than the sexual,” the APA report stated.

In two popular men’s magazines, Maxim and Stuff, 80.5 percent of the women in photographs were depicted as sex objects, the report said.

Notorious Playboy magazine takes it as far as relating women to an animal. Since Hugh Hefner created Playboy in 1953, the notorious bunny image has continued to symbolize women and sex. Hefner once explained why he chose the bunny as the emblem of his empire, proclaiming, “The rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning, and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping-sexy. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking.”

When women are stripped down to become nothing more than solely breasts, legs and buttocks, this is often how men, visual by nature, view them. Regarding women as mere objects justifies abusive behavior because “when one person objectifies another, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to treat that person with empathy.”

Many pornographic images of women serve as the underlying influence in promoting sexually abusive and aggressive behaviors, according to research.

This could explain why recent data suggests that one in four women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime. As the late feminist activist Robin Morgan put it, “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.”

Research suggests that pornography’s effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. Pornography is no less than an epidemic among today’s generation of young people.

Furthermore, college-aged women are becoming more tolerant of pornography, according to a recent study called “Project Ready.” The research found that 65 percent of men, 48 percent of women, 36 percent of fathers and 20 percent of mothers agreed that pornography was an acceptable way for someone to express their sexuality. Has sex become nothing more than a word typed into a search engine?

Porn gives young men a sense of “entitlement” in sexual relationships within the dating realm, Pat Trueman of the Alliance Defense Fund, said in an interview with OneNewsNow.com.

“Men don’t know how to have a relationship (and) the women wanting a relationship seem to adopt the male point of view on pornography.”

Exposure to pornography leads men to indicate less satisfaction with their intimate partners’ attractiveness, sexual performance and level of affection and to increase the likelihood they will express greater desire for sex without emotional involvement, according to the APA report.

These “cybervisions of perfection” are causing women to be viewed by men as merely “bad porn,” Wolf said.

And as long as men choose the porn star, women will continue to act like them.