Sexuality+in+iCarly-+Sasha+White

In the iCarly episode iLikeJake in season 1, episode 3, Carly falls for the recently single Jake who is the popular guy that every girl wants to be with, as soon as all the girls find out he is single they start freaking out and trying to get his attention. Carly even says to Sam “He's so hot I wanna bake cookies on him”, and Sam replies, “I’d eat those cookies”. Not only is this very sexual as a joke, but one could also see it as a more adult sexual innuendo. She invites him to her house and he tells her he is a singer. To make him like her she invites him to sing at her next show, only to find out he is a horrible singer and must ask Freddie to help he by changing his voice. Because the song comes out so good Jake goes back to his ex girlfriend after she tells him how much she loved it.

The whole episode is basically Carly making a fool out of herself in order to impress a guy. She dresses up so she will be attractive to him, he gets to her house and she tells Spencer, “I have to make myself attractive!!” as she rushes up the stairs to change. She also lies to him about his singing because, “If I tell him he’s a terrible singer, it'll ruin everything between us!” she says to Sam and Freddie. She does all of this just because she wants him to like her. This is showing the woman as a sexual object who is meant to please a man. I find this image very problematic.

Carly is changing herself to appeal to a man and if this is the sort message about sexuality that young girls are getting, this can be very dangerous. This can affect girls self esteem and their imager of what they have to do in order to "seduce" someone they are interested in. The primary audience for this show are just starting to learn about sexuality and attraction between boys and girls and if they are using iCarly as a model they could be negatively affected. I think that outwardly iCarly can be seen as innocent and just displaying what kids her age are experiencing such as crushes etc, but there are some problematic scenes, actions, and phrases that can have double entendres. Many of the jokes that are made can be taken at face value or construed as a sexual innuendo. When looking on the iCarly section of the Common Sense Media page my thought seem to be confirmed by parent reviewers. The majority of the negativity from parents surrounding the show involved the character of Sam as being negative and a bad role model, or of the sexual nature and innuendos that exist in the show. Most parents even said they would not let a child of twelve years old watch the show and would have it rated as TV-PG instead of TV-G.

The question I am asking now is whether or not young viewers are understanding the sexuality that is apparent to older viewers. As I continued to read reviews on the Common Sense Media page I noticed that there were many comments from kids themselves feeling a little uncomfortable with certain elements of iCarly such as the "boobs, bras, kissing and private parts" as one 11 year old reviewer mentioned.