How do Young People Experience Sexualisation Based on Their Gender? How has the Rise of the Instant Messaging Services, in Particular MSN Impacted on These Differences?

Sexualisation as an academic term has been used by gender scholars for a number of years. However more recently it has started to enter the public lexicon and discussions of the effects of sexualisation have become more and more frequent within the mainstream media. (Egan and Hawkes, 2008:308.) A recent campaign on the petition website “Change.org” sought to stop the Daily Mail sexualising young women which saw over thirty five thousand signatures. The Guardian declared a “fight against the sexualisation of children,” and mentioned many campaigners seeking to “put a stop to the practice [of media sexualisation].” (Cochrane, 2014.) In addition, the British government has commissioned two separate reports into sexualisation, the first a Home Office commissioned report, which was written by Linda Papadopoulos in 2010; then a year later a Department for Education report by Reg Bailey in 2011. It is a topic therefore that has had a large amount of interest within the academic, the public and the government spheres and one worthy of further investigation. MSN was a service used by millions of young people as one of their key methods of communication, allowing young people to talk to other young people in an unregulated environment and before mobile phones became something which most teenagers had. (Kaare et al, 2011.). At its peak MSN messenger had 320 million daily users many of them under the age of sixteen and was used by many young people to talk to the opposite sex more freely than they could do in face-to-face conversation, providing a new platform for sexual conversation and education. (Kaare, 2011.) This paper aims to explore the debate around sexualisation in order to establish the idea that the sexualisation of children is gendered, and sets out to examine the ways in which people who identify as male and female actually experience these gendered differences. Through interviews the paper establishes the ways in which MSN Messenger contributed to the sexualisation of a group of 19-21 year olds and argues that young women found themselves to be pressured and perused by men and therefore in this arena experienced sexualisation differently to young men.