Sex and Violence in Popular Culture - Research Paper Example

The paper focuses on the influence of popular culture on the controversial societal issues like sex and violence. Before going on the discussion, the terms sex, violence and popular culture will be defined first as the meanings contribute to the understanding of the subject matter. Sex is usually equaled to gender as they are interchangeably used in everyday conversations. In reality, sex and gender are different. The former relates to physiological characteristic as the latter is a social concept.

Sex is also an act that shows physical contact for procreation. Gender depends upon sets of social norms affected by culture and tradition that set apart males from females (Wilson 1-2). The other term to define is violence. Violence responds to conflict as harm is afflicted physically, emotionally or mentally on other people as a result of human action. Violence includes social injustices such as racism and poverty (Daoust 290). Both of them are linked to popular culture. Popular culture deals with the everyday living of people as the theme reflects the lives of the common people (Browne 5).

The study deals with the negative effects of the prevailing images shown by the popular culture to the increasing cases of sex and violence as the two societal problems occur in the recent years in response to what the majority people believe. As people throughout their lives seek for learning about the world and its meanings, interactions happen as the humans in the society share experiences. People have roles to play in their lives as the society dictates as standards and acceptable behavior.

The roles do not have strict and rigid boundaries as people can have various roles that show flexibility. People can take charge of their lives and choose particular roles to play. Play is important in socialization and building of the personalities of people as personalities affect the roles that people play. In terms of personality traits, the gender is also affected. Nowadays the availability of television programs and video games are widely used by people for information and relaxation. Such popular media affect the roles of women as the video games portray women maintaining beauty and men protecting women even with the use of violence (Dietz 425-426).

The portrayals in videogames become very blatant as more people, the young and the old make use of the high technology games for their relaxation. Video games pose hazards in the view and existence of sex and violence as they portray women as sex objects and men as aggressive in nature. The games also show some gender inequality as women are underrepresented in games according to several video game magazines used in the studies done by Dill and Thill. Both the magazines and the games featured there make use of stereotypes in portraying masculinity and femininity like scanty clothes for female characters and brutal weapons for male characters (Dill and Thill 858-859).

Stereotypes generalize the categories for showing what men and women must be and what they must be not. In reality, it would be impossible to make use of those stereotypes as people are different from one another. Violence and sex were also seen in a particular videogame called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as the protagonist or the controllable in-game character is an African-American who encounters racism, violence, sex and all other societal problems on his way home. Black males were