5 Sexual Appeal is Entertainment: The Sexualization of Women in Music Videos

By: Aleyna Haciahmetoglu

Introduction

Do you watch the music videos of today’s era and wonder where the fun and story driven music videos have gone? Do you ever wonder why you see women in less clothing or moving provocatively throughout the course of the video? Well, you’re not alone. It’s been a trend for music videos of this generation to involve the sexualization of women. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though the sexualization of imagery in upcoming music videos is going anywhere. Seeing as revealing clothing or dancing allows for more clicks per music videos, future content creators will keep using it as a tool to get more attraction to their videos.

What Did We Do?

In our research, we set to answer our question surrounding how women are represented in the music videos 2024 within three different genres. The answer to our question would allow us to understand why certain directing and editing choices are made.

Our team set to analyze 15 different music videos from the pop, rap, and country genre. The basis of selection came from the most viewed music videos of the year 2024. We selected the samples though using a quota sampling method, which allows the team to be more selective with a representative sample and select certain samples with good reason.

We conducted a quantitative content analysis where we counted a variety of items within each of the music videos as an action to determine whether the imagery was sexualized or not.

Our findings were interesting, but not entirely too surprising. We hypothesized that the pop and rap genre would be the most sexualized, whereas the country genre would portray women in a more romantic or casual manner.

Some of the key insights that we found include:

• The rap genre featured women in sexual manners, when they are present within the video, which involve revealing clothing and provocative dancing with the inclusion of pole dancing. 3 of the 5 videos involved sexual dancing or clothing.
• The pop genre similarly featured women in sexualized manners to the rap genre, however, each of the artists of the five pop samples either were or featured a female musical artist. This indicates that the women themselves may have been accepting to being the focus of the video. 3 of the 5 videos involved sexual dancing or clothing.
• The country genre was the outlier of the three genres, as it featured women synonymous to our hypothesis. Although women were shot wearing revealing clothing or dancing somewhat provocatively in 4 of the 5 videos, these shots were not entirely too significant or of focus like in the rap or pop genres and could be attributed to the climate in American South. Teddy Swims’ The Door was the most sexualized video of the sample.

These key findings demonstrate that filming a female in a more sexual lens is more common in the two predicted genres.

Why Does This Matter?

Our research matters as it unveils the true problem with the norm of music videos today. It has become increasingly common for music videos to be more provocative, especially with music that has suggestive lyrics. However, it is odd when a song that has no true suggestive lyrics involves sexual imagery, which makes the music video itself seem out of place to the viewer.

Our research relates to the real world, societal issue of how women are portrayed as symbols of sexuality in daily life. We find that it’s a problem for women to go about their daily lives being viewed as objects of sexualization, and music videos help to establish this norm.

Seeing music videos in this manner reinforces objectification theory, which examines how women internalize the perceptions of outsiders because of their interactions with sexual content in the media, therefore causing a mental state of self-objectification. Our research looks at this theory and reconsiders whether the norm of sexualizing women in the media can be changed in the future.

What’s Next for Music Video Content Creators?

As was mentioned before, future music video creators will likely continue to use sexualization in their music videos to gain more attraction to the video itself. Our findings give insight to how normalizing sexualization in the real world adds to the issue of self-image of women in the real world. The main take away is that music video viewers should not feel as though they are minimized to their body or their appearance, despite what the media content may demonstrate to them. It is entirely possible to direct and edit a music video in a mannerly fashion that does not reduce the women involved in the video to their looks, however, the interactions and engagement of music videos who use sexualization as a tool demonstrate that it might be more worthwhile from a monetary lens.

One lingering question that our research helped to acknowledge is, is there a way for future music videos to remain as successful in views with the exclusion of sexual imagery or the sexualization of women?

Contributors:

Aleyna Haciahmetoglu, Abigail Sproule, Benjamin Xavier, Sydney Hill