Dirty Laundry — Private Lives, Public Confessions

According to conservative critics, the media are full of people endlessly ‘doing it’. In fact, it is still comparatively rare to find explicit representations of sexual behaviour in the mainstream media — and certainly in the media most children are likely to encounter. Of course, there is plenty of mild foreplay and strategic removal of garments. But even in primetime television dramas, researchers have found that there is much more talk about sex than visual representation of it (Kunkel et al. 2001). Indeed, if anything, it is the compulsion to talk about sex — rather than to actually display or witness it — that could be seen to dominate the contemporary media. In this chapter, we consider the children’s responses to three media genres which particularly exemplify this ‘proliferation of discourses’. We focus first on television talk shows, then on problem pages in teenage girls’ magazines and finally on celebrity gossip in the tabloid press.