Abstract
Music media are often studied for its content, specifically sex and violence. However, few studies have approached music media to investigate the overlap of this content, especially considering the current music streaming landscape. Our study explores the co-occurrence of violence, sexual content, and degrading terms toward women in music lyrics. In this content analysis, five coders coded lyrics of 781 stanzas of songs in the Hot 100 Billboard chart throughout 2017 for these three categories. We found that the most common category was sexual content (n = 222, 28.4%), followed by degrading terms toward women (n = 71, 9%), and violence (n = 55, 7%). Additionally, we conducted chi-square and odds ratio analyses, finding that the co-occurrence of violence and sexual content, violence and degrading terms toward women were all significant, while the co-occurrence of sexual content and degrading terms toward women was common but not significant. These results are concerning considering the heavy consumption of popular music among youth and young adults and the potential influence of such exposure. The findings imply that media literacy education may be beneficial for adolescents to recognize and question the gender stereotypic portrayals in music media.
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Couto, L., Hust, S.J., Rodgers, K.B. et al. A Content Analysis of Music Lyrics Exploring the Co-Occurrence of Violence, Sexual Content, and Degrading Terms Toward Women. Sexuality & Culture 26, 1965–1980 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-022-09978-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-022-09978-2