project proposal: sexuality in myspace

For my final project, I want to focus on the “culture” of many myspacers and look at how it is becoming more and more prevalent for girls as young as 13 to put provocative pictures on their pages as a way of attracting more people. I have a younger brother who is 15 and I used to go on his page and look at is friends and almost every girl who was around that age had pictures in their underwear or just a slutty pose. I don’t think I actually got a myspace until I was about 17 but even then, I didn’t find it appealing to put pictures like this up. First of all, because back then my overprotective dad seemed to have the need to search for my page to make sure it was appropriate. Secondly, because even with a normal picture of me smiling, I would, and still do, get messages and friend requests from creepy old men saying things like, “I saw your page, you are beautiful, I want to be your friend” and stuff like that. I think it’s really sad that these young girls feel the need to do this just to be accepted in the myspace community. I realize that the standards for beauty are really high these days and that girls in high school and middle school feel more and more pressure to be popular and look “hot” but it’s kind of disturbing when they are doing it to attract complete strangers, most of whom are skeezy old guys, to be their friends. I want to go through myspace and look at these profiles and try to get some statistics and decipher exactly what these girls might be thinking when they make the decisions to exploit themselves like this. I am hoping to be able to go to different girls’ pages take notes of what their pictures are like, and who and how many friends they have.