Putting things in perspective. Young people’s susceptibility to the effects of sexual media content

The current media climate is highly sexualized. Images that were considered pornographic several decades ago have become part of mainstream television, and pornographic content has become widely accessible on the internet. This has led to societal concerns that young viewers encounter content on television and the internet that they are not able to put in perspective, and that they are thus negatively influenced by such content.
Despite an increasing amount of research on the effects of sexual media content on adolescents' sexual attitudes and behavior, there are still several issues that remain understudied. These include, among other things, the effects of sexual content generated by young people themselves on social media and the individual dispositions that make adolescents more or less susceptible to the effects of sexual media content.
This dissertation addresses these shortcomings, by focusing on sexy self-presentations on social media, as well as more "traditional" sexual content on the internet and mainstream media, and the influence of such content on adolescents' sexual attitudes, behavior and self-concepts. Moreover, it looks at sexual dispositions (e.g., hypergendered orientation) as variables that can make young people more or less susceptible to the influence of sexual media content. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to answering the question of whether, how and for which adolescents sexual media content has an effect.