Lewd lyrics by artists like Drake and Beyoncé encourage sexting in teens, but not in teen girls, a new study shows.
US researchers monitored text messages sent between teenage girls and boys while looking for sexual lyrics in the teens’ favorite music artists.
Teens are likely to send sexts at age 18 when they’ve been exposed to hot lyrics around age 15, but teens didn’t, they found.
This could be because society makes sexting seem more acceptable to men than to women, experts suggest.
Lewd lyrics by artists like Drake and Beyoncé encourage sexting in teens, but not in teen girls, a new study shows. Pictured is Drake in September 2021
Sexting is defined as sending or receiving nude or partially nude images or sexually explicit written messages to others through text messages, social networking sites, apps, or other forms of communication, such as email. US researchers claim to provide the first evidence that hearing sexual lyrics in music is associated with future sexting behavior among adolescent boys.
The new study was led by researchers from the University of California, Davis and Brigham Young University in Utah.
“We found a strong correlation between hearing sexually objectifying or sexual lyrics and a higher likelihood of sexting in male participants,” said lead author Savannah L. Keenan-Kroff, now at Portland State University in Oregon.
“This suggests that children may be more susceptible to provocative lyrical messages due to sexual gender expectations and that exposure to such lyrics may play a role in their psychosexual development.”
Sexting, which has grown among young people with the proliferation of smartphone use, is legal if it occurs between consenting adults (over the age of 18).
But as with any sexual behavior, a dangerous line is crossed when sexual messages are not solicited or consensual.
Until now, there has been little research on the impact of the media on teen sexting, and none on the influence of musical lyrics, the team says.
This is despite the fact that music contains more sexual messages than any other media content except pornography, while sex accounts for nearly 40 percent of lyrical themes in top billboard songs, according to previous studies.
For the new study, the scholars recruited 278 adolescent boys and girls who were tested at three different times over three years.
All participants were recruited from a public school district in Texas with parental permission and had a mean age of 15 years at the beginning of the study period and 18 years at the end of the study period.
Initially, each teen was provided with a BlackBerry phone, equipped with data plans that allowed unlimited Internet access and text messages.
Investigators cited Drake and Beyoncé as artists with sexually charged lyrics. Beyoncé appears here at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2011
“Although they were not prohibited from communicating online or on other devices, participants were encouraged to use the BlackBerry as their primary cell phone,” the researchers say.
Using the BlackBerry data, the researchers were able to analyze the number of text messages sent and received at two time points: ‘Time 1’ when the average age of adolescents was 15 and ‘Time 3’ when the average age of teens was 18.
For the purposes of the study, sexts were defined solely as text-based messages, “given that sexually charged lyrics in music are not based on photographs.”
The researchers measured adolescents’ exposure to two types of letters: ‘sexual’ letters and the more offensive ‘sexual objectification’ letters.
They did this by analyzing the lyrics of the participants’ top three music artists, who were self-reported.
The software analyzed the letters for “sexual” words (such as tit, penis, erotic, fetish, screw) and “sexually objectified” words (booty, slut, handjob, pussy, vagina).
The results revealed that children who listened to more sexual lyrics were more likely to engage in sexting by the time they were 18 years old.
But there was no link between the girls’ sexting behaviors and exposure to sexually objectifying or sexual lyrics.
The researchers say there is a “sexual double standard” in which it is considered more appropriate for boys to listen to sexual lyrics than girls.
The researchers measured adolescents’ exposure to “sexual” and “sexually objectifying” music lyrics. This graph shows the effect of listening to ‘sexual’ and ‘sexual objectifying’ lyrics (heard at an average age of 15) on sexting at the end of the study period (average age 18).
Girls are often taught that sex is unacceptable outside of a committed relationship, and are encouraged to engage in less sexual behavior, likely affecting their sexting behaviors, according to the researchers.
“Kids may not only hear more lyrics from both types of music, but may internalize these lyrics more as a facet of their psychosexual development,” they say.
“Increased listening to sexually objectifying and sexual lyrics may influence teens to feel that sexual behaviors, such as sexting, are more normal or acceptable over time.
“Conversely, since girls are often discouraged or stigmatized for engaging in sexual behavior, sexually objectifying and sexual song lyrics may not fit as neatly into their perception of what is acceptable, normal, or sexually objectifying behaviors. desirable for girls, and therefore have little or no influence on their sexting behaviours.’
The team now suggests that parents take a more active role in preventing sexting, by monitoring their children’s text messages and talking to their children about their taste in music.
The new study has been published in Computers in human behavior.