Jane, M: Sexual Binaries

In contemporary U.S. society, young women are bombarded with mixed messages about their sexuality. Abstinence-only sex education programs warn teenage women against sexual activity, but contemporary teenage popular cultures are saturated with images of sexualized female empowerment. In this book, I have examined two abstinence-only sex education curricula (Sex Respect and True Love Waits) and three media sources that promote female hypersexuality (a Girls Gone Wild film and music videos from Britney Spears and Lil? Kim). I argue that these sources are consumed simultaneously by young female audiences and that the mixed messages that can be received from these sources encourage problematic binary thinking about teenage female sexuality. This book focuses on how gendered and racialized stereotypes in both education and media support intergender (male vs. female) and intragender (virgin vs. whore) binary logic in the United States. By deconstructing and comparing these educational programs and media images, this thesis-turned-book hopes to offer some ?solutions? to these mixed messages given to teenage women about their sexuality.