Girl Power or Powerless Girl? Television, Sexual Scripts, and Sexual Agency in Sexually Active Young Women

Abstract

Both traditional gender roles and traditional heterosexual scripts outline sexual roles for women that center on sexual passivity, prioritizing others’ needs, and self-silencing. Acceptance of these roles is associated with diminished sexual agency. Because mainstream media are a prominent source of traditional gender portrayals, we hypothesized that media use would be associated with diminished sexual agency for women, as a consequence of the traditional sexual roles conveyed. We modeled the relations among television (TV) use, acceptance of gendered sexual scripts, and sexual agency (sexual assertiveness, condom use self-efficacy, and sexual shame) in 415 sexually active undergraduate women. As expected, both TV exposure and perceived realism of TV content were associated with greater endorsement of gendered sexual scripts, which in turn were associated with lower sexual agency. Endorsement of gendered sexual scripts fully mediated the relation between TV use and sexual agency. Results suggest that endorsement of traditional gender roles and sexual scripts may be an important predictor of college women’s sexual agency. Interventions targeting women’s sexual health should focus on encouraging media literacy and dismantling gender stereotypic heterosexual scripts. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index .