Adolescents Who Listen to a Great Deal of Music with Degrading Sexual Lyrics Have Sex Sooner
RAND:
A RAND Corporation study issued today presents the strongest evidence yet that sexually degrading lyrics in music encourage adolescents to more quickly initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities.
The study found that the more time adolescents spend listening to music with sexually degrading lyrics, the more likely they are to initiate intercourse and other sexual activities.
This holds true for boys and girls as well as for whites and nonwhites, even after accounting for a wide range of other personal and social factors associated with adolescent sexual behavior.
With funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, RAND researchers surveyed 1,461 adolescents ages 12 to 17 from across the nation in 2001, asking them about their sexual behavior and how often they listened to music by various artists.
Researchers found that adolescents who listened to a lot of music containing objectifying and limiting characterizations of sexuality progressed more quickly in their sexual behavior than did adolescents who listened to less of this kind of music.
Because teenagers have more unplanned pregnancies and are more likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases, increasing rates of sexual activity among this population has serious public health implications.
Federal statistics show that about 750,000 teens around the country become pregnant each year, and an estimated 4 million contract sexually transmitted diseases.
RAND Health, a division of the RAND Corporation, is the nation's largest independent health policy research program, with a broad research portfolio that focuses on health care quality, costs and delivery, among other topics.
