Sex violence and crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Sex violence and crime - Essay Example Furthermore, popular magazines form a part of the communication of language as seen through the Freud/Marxist theories which â€Å"reproduces sexuality as the male gaze toward a woman/object† (Keddie 1996). Carrette, in a critique of Foucault, however, believes that he has left the female perspective out of the discussion of sex, his history on the topic male centered without the feminine point of view. In examining the concept of what is true, discovering how truth is defined provides some substance to the topic. Truth is a concept that suggests that there is a sense of the absolute somewhere within the greater historical perspective. However, according to Foucault, it is all perspective and indefinable through a notion of reality versus illusion. What is presented to the readership of popular magazines is a perception of truth that can neither be confirmed nor denied as the possibility exists that it is someone’s truth (Taylor 2008). The plausible deniability of compl ete falsehood makes the representations have validity. Despite the desire to rail against the overwhelmingly illusionary editorial elements of the imagery and rhetoric within popular magazines, the reality of the world that is created has the prospect of reflecting the truth somewhere, thus they can be said to be true. The Discourse of Sex within Magazines Sex is a rudimentary element of life which has a biological function of procreation, but sexuality is an extended element of culture, complicated and confusing as it has become a focus that extends far beyond its founding purpose. Sex is mediated by culture, described, commented upon, and distorted in a never ending search for identification, classification, and perfection. According to Paris (2011), sexual behaviors are a learned process in which the ways in which sexual identity is displayed in order to find a mate is defined by the norms of a culture. In observing each other, the members of a society discover how to behave in o rder to become a part of the social groups that are divided by gender. Gender ideals are defined by mimicking the feminine or masculine of older generations, children looking to their role models in order to find their position in the sexual framework of their culture. In this age of communication, however, the focus has shifted from members of familial groups and their communities towards the images and discourse that is provided through the popular media, magazines providing a great deal of the images that affect the perception of female and male sexual roles. Little girls no longer focus their attention upward towards their mothers as much as downward into their hands a they peruse the magazine and forward to the screen of the television or their computer, these images impressing upon them an unattainable perfection through which they seek their own position within the framework of their gender. The hegemony of culture infected by the conceptualization of truth that is brought fo rth through a discourse of untruths that are presented as realistic reflections of a cultural script that is imposed rather than developed through social interaction (Norris 1996). In other words, rather than the dialogue happening through interactions with others within a community, interactions are now constructed between a person and the power of the magazine in dispersing ‘truths’ and designing dominant knowledge. The pressure on little boys is just as profound, their mandate to