As skepticlawyer observed at Club Troppo, the topic of the sexualisation of young girls through advertising and fashion caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. The context for the discussion was David Jones’ law suit against the Australia Institute. While free speech was also an important theme of these recent debates, the interest and intensity show that discussions of the relationship between sexualisation of young girls and the public sphere touch some pretty sensitive spots. (It might be interesting to pause and wonder why there’s no discernible debate over the influence of advertising and pop culture on young boys’ sexuality.) One irony of such discussions is the fact that articles about the pernicious influence of pop culture on adolescent and tween sexuality often end up playing to the same celebrity hype and hyperbole that they purport to critique or dissect. A case in point is Newsweek’s piece on “Girls Gone Bad”.
Tracy Clark-Fory writes at Salon:
This time around it’s a meandering, confused cover story on how the publicized exploits of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan affect tweens and teens, and it addresses the burning question of whether we’re “raising a generation of ‘prosti-tots.’”
Reading the article proves just as painful as handing over a fistful of dollars in exchange for the issue, with its cover image of high-as-a-kite Britney and Paris paired with the headline “The Girls Gone Wild Effect.” Luckily, you become kind of numb after seeing Nancy Pelosi’s ascendancy in the House mentioned paragraphs away from a reference to Lindsay’s “fire crotch.” There’s a hasty rundown of the history of “bad girls” — complemented by a photo gallery, of course — which starts with Mae West and ends with the Brit Pack (or whatever they’re calling them these days). Ultimately — about 3,000 some odd words in — it concludes that our girls will be just fine because we adults “hold the purse strings” and, unless Paris releases a series of educational videos for toddlers, parents have a significant head start on imparting morals to our children.
She concludes:
The piece could have explored the more subtle ways that the highly publicized Brit Pack scandals affect the way girls feel about themselves (as opposed to whether it will turn them into little harlots or “prosti-tots”). The story also could have led with experts skeptical of the hysteria over the supposed proliferation of bad, mean or wild girls. Dan Kindlon, a professor of child psychology at Harvard, told the magazine plainly, “Sure, there are plenty of girls with big problems out there. Like the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos. But what percentage of the college population is that?”
Instead, the piece latches on with a vampiric thirst to parents’ worst fears and, as was probably the genesis of the piece, finds an excuse to talk about Britney’s vagina once more.
What such debates usually lack is any attempt to measure the dimension of the problems they point to (which are in turn, exaggerated out of any proportion in classic moral panic style). There’s no doubt that there are legitimate issues concerning the sexualisation of children, but they’re far too often elided behind a style of argument and writing which combines over-generalisation with dire predictions of imminent doom.
The (rather creepy) mirror image of the belief that sex has so invaded the public sphere and socialisation process of young girls that a generation of “prosti-tots” is being spawned is the obsession with purity to be found at the nether regions of the American religious right – the hardline homeschooling wing of the “Virginity Pledge Movement”. From a left or liberal perspective, the snake in the grass is materialism and advertising. From the conservative evangelical perspective, changing representations in pop culture of sexuality are the work of the demon liberalism and to be countered by traditional family values.
The odd thing, as Jennifer Baumgartner observes in Glamour, is the weird sexualisation of the relationship between Christian fathers and their virgin daughters which swirls around the invented tradition of “Purity Balls”.
In a chandelier-lit ballroom overlooking the Rocky Mountains one recent evening, some hundred couples feast on herb-crusted chicken and julienned vegetables. The men look dapper in tuxedos; their dates are resplendent in floor-length gowns, long white gloves and tiaras framing twirly, ornate updos. Seated at a table with four couples, I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he’s about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.
The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure. Pastor Randy Wilson, host of the event and cofounder of the ball, strides to the front of the room, takes the microphone and asks the men, “Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?�
The description of the daughter as her father’s “date” is not journalistic licence from Baumgartner. That’s the way that daughters are referred to when spending “daddy time” in these circles. And girls as young as four accompany their fathers to Purity Balls, though apparently it’s thought to be more appropriate just after menarche for the pledge of sexual purity and reciprocal virginal defence to be taken.
Though these balls are very much an invented tradition, and I doubt also that pledges to “save my first kiss for my wedding night” were ever encouraged in actually existing traditional families, there’s something genuinely traditional about the notion that a father owns his daughter’s sexuality:
The older girls at the Broadmoor tonight are themselves curvaceous and sexy in backless dresses and artful makeup; next to their fathers, some look disconcertingly like wives. In fact, in the parlance of the purity ball folks, one-on-one time with dad is a “date,� and the only sanctioned one a girl can have until she is “courted� by a man. The roles are clear: Dad is the only man in a girl’s life until her husband arrives, a lifestyle straight out of biblical times. “In patriarchy, a father owns a girl’s sexuality,� notes psychologist and feminist author Carol Gilligan, Ph.D. “And like any other property, he guards it, protects it, even loves it.�
The antiParis pledge movement is relatively mainstream in America now – some studies suggest up to 10% of American teens have taken virginity pledges. Other longitudinal studies on the pledgers show that 88% of them have sex within three years of pledging. Disturbingly, std rates are much higher for pledgers than the general population – a reflection of the fact that any discussion of safe sex is thought just to encourage sex. There are as yet no studies on those who’ve gone through the whole Purity Ball ritual.
So what do we have here? Two ostensibly politically opposed groups within society both believing that sex and sexualisation are massive problems for adolescents and pre-adolescents. On the left, the Australia Institute crew believe that materialism and capitalism are to blame. On the right, it’s the decline of morality and the evils of liberalism, and the lack of religiosity. In both instances, the target of the critique is individualism and choice – though it’s choice expressed through consumption in the first instance, and choice expressed through adolescent sexuality in the second. While these positions are somewhat polarised (and, as I’m arguing, the hype over the influence of advertising and pop culture is often talked up precisely to sell magazines and newspapers and thus more advertising space), there’s a strange parallelism going on.
I’m not meaning to suggest that cultural mores regarding children, adolescents and sexuality haven’t shifted. I’m not suggesting that advertising and pop culture don’t have a role to play. What I am suggesting is that in order to have an informed debate on these issues, and to think about their implications, is that we need less hype and more evidence and judicious discussion. One of the interesting things about Baumgartner’s article is the way that she allows girls at the Purity Balls to speak for themselves. There’s a danger in assuming that children lack autonomy and agency – obviously they require protection in many instances but that’s not to say that their own beliefs and choices should just be legislated or proclaimed out of existence. And if we’re not to fall into the trap of seeing only evil everywhere as the Religious Right do, we need to know much more empirically what the situation as it stands is.
Interesting post, Mark. I’ve been somewhat bemused at the turns this discussion has taken. FWIW, I thought the AI’s hack at DJ’s was gratuitous given that virtually any retail/media outlet in the land could have been declared similarly “guilty” on Hamilton’s criteria; obviously, DJ’s is conveniently emblematic of everything that Hamilton hates and as some of the LP commenters made clear on the earlier thread: DJ’s is clearly “guilty” (of something) simply by being “a large corporation.” .
However, DJ’s lawsuit was ill-judged IMO. 99.9% of Australians remain entirely ignorant of the Australia Institute’s highly selective take on the sexualisation of children and I’m absolutely unconvinced that there is something “new” about this phenomenon anyway. It may be framing in 21st century ways, but as you and Catherine Lumby have pointed out (and she’s been roundly excoriated for doing so) this does play into an interesting conflation of Left/Right moral panic. The very mention of “paedophilia” was enough to spin DJ’s into a response that was – in my view – completely OTT. But why did the AI use that terminology?
For one thing, we know that there’s nothing new under the sun.
There was a similar moral panic-driven series of programs in the US in the 1950s to teach adolescents, especially girls, the “right way” to behave. As ever, Australia had its own pale imitation.
The folks who put these programs together: churches, school authorities, education departments, citizens’ ginger groups, all imagined that they smelled trouble in the air.
And they were right. However, it could be argued that the very fervour of bible bashers and tub-thumpers of different ilks made what came along in the 1960s so much more fun than even the enormous outbreak of gratuitous sex, drugs and rock and roll alone.
Youth rebellion was accompanied by the hysterical whine of spurned authority, with their grainy instructional movies gathering dust in presbytery cupboards.
Repression of the kind described by Mark creates the conditions for an outbreak of serious fun.
There will be others who can say what I have to say more eloquently but this post stirs great anger in me: you are just not comparing apples with apples. Progressive women who express dismay at the sexualisation of images of children or indeed at the near ubiquity of pornographydo not do so out of concern for morality.
We do it because of the immense harm that is done to children and women when they are subjected to sexual violence. Harm that I don’t believe men can ever really conceptualise unless they have been victims themselves. I have noted with chagrin the apparent abandonment of some of these issues by progressives precisely because they don’t wish to be identified with the religious right or from some ill considered attachment to freedom of speech. And here you are adding fuel to the fire.
It is as if the freely available statistics on these crimes simply don’t impinge on such people. Statistics of 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 for rape and child abuse represents an enormous problem. And there is considerable evidence, published in psychology journals,(but no doubt all disputed by libertarians), that cultural representations of children and women plays a role in creating this dangerous environment. This is not a moral panic it is an epidemic that some progressives are sweeping under the carpet leaving the field free for the moronic morality campaigners.
This is a really good, thought-provoking piece, Mark. I’d like to say more about it, but first I’m going to chew over the ideas you’ve raised and check out your links. Very classy.
three cheers, suze. you put it well.
the sexualisation is so subtle that it’s almost impossible to prove or disprove; it’s subjective appraisal of models’ expressions, after all. it’s almost subliminal; and easy to deny. (it reminds me of an elderly male neighbor who, while giving me a lift recently, tried the old accidental-brush-of-the-boobs trick. it almost angered me more than if he’d blatantly grabbed my tit. because i couldn’t even challenge him about it. if I’d challenged him about it, he would’ve feigned innocence, said “What are you on about? It wasn’t on purpose!” That’s sleaze though; it’s gutless, it doesn’t have the honesty of porn.
ultimately, who can deny the influence of advertising? of course it affects girls to see their peers valued on ’sexiness’.
btw, i certainly didn’t feel as if the AI report told me anything about the DJs ads that i hadn’t already suspected as a reasonable observer.
also while i think of it, you’d think a critical piece of evidence in any deffo case DJs wants to run is the brief they gave to their ad agency. though, as if they’d give us anything but a sanitised version. maybe the secretary of one of the honchos needs to contact wikileaks…
Thanks Gianna, it is an awful experience, the accidentally-on-purpose grope – and it is just a horrible indictment that it is such a common experience for women . I meant to say too that advertising and marketing of design hardly count as expressions of growing sexuality since they are entirely contrived by adult minds. This idea that young children are freely “choosing” representations of themselves when in fact they are merely following the direction of adult designers adult marketers and adult advertising execs is just a total misreading.
The whole purity movement fills me with disgust but there is a big difference between a young child experimenting with behaviour that she witnesses amongst the adult population in a safe environment (hopefully her family) and a child ( we are not talking about 15 or 16 year olds in this court case) who is actively encouraged into depictions of sexuality which are far beyond her ability to comprehend and whose repurcussions she simply cannot imagine or guard against.
Great essay, Mark. Gonna dust off Anne Summers’ “Damned Whores and God’s Police”, Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale”, and Willie Reich’s “Mass Psychology of Fascism”, chase up the history of medieval chastity belts and perhaps come up with something worth contributing.
First I’d like to get the opinions of the three wonderful women(wife,two daughters) with whom I’m priveleged to share my life.
yeah. and it’s not as if children are asexual beings; it’s just that your instinct is not to want to parade them as sexual creatures before adults reading the weekend color supplement.
…on a pretext of selling clothes, i mean.
A simple demarcation needs demarcatifying in this case, Mark. There are two quite different things we all (I hope) agree exist:
1. the right of young women to drink and take drugs in public or amongst friends in safety, without fear of physical assault—though obviously the remorse of the force-five hangover and/or Monday come-down is every drinker’s/user’s problem to him/herself. In other words, to be individually and adultly bad, if it’s fun.
2. the right of younger women, ie. women implicitly too young to drink, to unexploited childhoods. In other words, to be safe from the parade Gianna mentions.
These are two quite different issues, and I don’t think Lindsay Lohan’s legitimate struggle against the forces of furious Protestant sanctimony and neo-Temperance have much at all to do with the sexualisation of prepubescent girls in the Deejays catalogue; it’s perfectly coherent to stick up for the first and condemn the latter out-of-hand.
Incidentally, readers, who would you invite to your barbecue to introduce to your parents and friends, in the hope that they’d have something interesting to say, make conversation and be sociable: the Virgin Mary or Queen Jezebel?
Yeah, that’s who I’d invite, too.
Excellent post, Mark. It’s too late (and too many beers) to comment coherently, will try to add something worthwhile tomorrow.
Shame, shame, shame.
A nicely provocative piece, Mark. suze and gianna express my reactions to being tickled by your stick very well.
The AI criticism was directed at specific forms of inappropriate sexually charged advertising using children – it was not taking on, in toto, the current regime of pictorial representation of youth in society.
Whether or not children should be sexually exploited by adults is another question, but given that our society holds that they shouldn’t, then isn’t the advertising in question morally dubious and therefore a fair target for serious discussion?
(And I don’t know if DJs was singled out especially – they just happen to be the company that’s put the story onto the front page.)
Interesting post, Mark. I’m not sure if this is relevant to your post, but unfortunately Western society throws up so many images of a sexually charged society that the grace of innocence is almost impossible to champion and protect. The knights are overwhelmed by the dragons of explicit carnal knowledge.
Parental care and protection is an important part of teen development. I would like to see innocence and non-sexual relationships emphasised and encouraged more than they are, without withholding important information about what sexuality is and how our kids should learn to develop as mature adults with a high level of respect for the opposite sex.
As a parent, I’ll never forget the day my daughter, just 14 then, came to me and asked for permission to date a male classmate at a Christian school. After I’d talked to her and given it some fatherly thought, I said I didn’t think she should, and enjoyed the immense relief that came over her face, “Thanks, daddy!” It seems that she and the boy were the only couple left in her year who were not dating, so there was a pressure on them to bow to their peers’ conformity. Now she could ‘let him down’ kindly, citing her father’s decision as the main reason. No one lost face. No one was hurt.
We can’t go ‘back’ to any era where discussion about sexuality was a ’safe ‘issue, because I don’t think there has been any. But we don’t have to abandon good concepts of morality and respect, and we should encourage dads and mums to be wise guardians of their teen’s sexuality for as long as they will be heard without accusing them of interferance in their kids’ business by being wary or apprehensive about their offspring’s choices, because generally these concerns are driven by love and genuine care, rather than ulterior motives.
I agree with Suz. My concern about the sexualisation of young girls has nothing to do with puritanical morality, and everything to do with concern about the continued objectification of all females.
Objectification theory
Let me just make one comment to start off. What I’m trying to do with this post is to challenge people to look at these issues again. Although I’m not in huge disagreement with Geoff Honnor’s comment (quite the contrary), conversely I’m not trying to echo what Catherine Lumby had to say (which indeed I haven’t read – I’ve read her on quite a few things, but not on this issue. I can reasonably guess what she’s said about it – but I think someone on the other thread pointed out – and rightly so – that her work has a lot more nuance in it than the “takeout” line that the media picks up). But I am not arguing, as Gianna and suze seem to assume I am, that young girls should appropriate sexual imagery or modes of behaviour in order to empower themselves, or in some sort of Judith Butlerish way, to perform otherwise.
Nor am I arguing for the objectification or sexualisation of girls or women in advertising.
In fact, I was extremely careful in writing the post to make sure that I couldn’t be read that way.
The fact that Gianna, suze, wbb and Alex did read that into my text suggests to me that the debate is as pointlessly polarised as I’m suggesting, and that any intervention which can’t be pinged as “condemnation” or “support” can’t in fact be heard easily.
I’d just appeal to all of them to put aside their preconceptions and read what I actually wrote.
But thanks for proving my point – which is that the debate is so stereotyped and emotionally laden that it’s very difficult to stand back and think about it objectively.
Nor am I arguing a “libertarian” position. Again, I’d like to challenge suze to demonstrate that I am.
Because I’m not.
This is kind of an example of what I’m talking about (and that’s not to devalue the horrible experience that must have been).
I don’t see that sexualisation of models in any way leads to old blokes groping younger women.
The elderly man in question presumably had those behaviour patterns embedded in him from quite a young age. I very much doubt that the increased sexualisation of advertising or representations of women over the last few decades led him to suddenly think what should be absolutely unacceptable is alright.
That’s the point I think Geoff made – none of this is new.
The attitudes that men have – that women are sexual playthings – are not new. They’re deplorable but they are not something that has only arisen because of sexual poses by models. In fact, they predate capitalism and advertising, which is what I am getting at with my point (following Jennifer Baumgarnter) – the notion that men own women and can dispose of them as they wish goes back some millenia. We’ve actually gone a long way towards challenging that – through various waves of feminism and also through men deliberately and consciously attempting to resist the socialisation (which is very powerful) that suggests to us that women are sexual objects.
To illustrate by way of anecdote – in 1991, I remember seeing a woman I knew at a night club – I didn’t know her very well and in fact she was a prominent Liberal in student politics, and therefore I was somewhat surprised that she’d look past partisanship and trust me – who when I ran into her said “I am so sick of guys ‘accidentally’ touching my bum and boobs because this place is crowded – can you please pretend to be my boyfriend so they’ll leave me alone?”…
I obliged.
Now anyone who’s ever been out in a pub or a club will know that this dynamic – that is to say – that if a woman is with a man then she’s not to be abused – exists. It’s part of the bloody problem.
And that’s what I’m saying.
Incidentally, and this is part of my point too, I didn’t get very far when we made it outside to the balcony and had a drink together to persuade her to see that it wasn’t just this particular club or that night or that crowd that led men to assume they could behave to her in that fashion with impunity. She resisted seeing any sort of structural gender hierarchy, and continued to believe that the Women’s Rights Collective at uni were a bunch of commo lezzos. I don’t know, she might think differently sixteen years later. But these sorts of structured behaviours are so embedded they’re very hard to shift through the application of reasoned argument. They’re also, I think, not particularly influenced to any great degree by ads in department store catalogues or upskirt photos of Lindsay Lohan.
But I also tell the story to show that she had enough confidence that I was the sort of man who would understand, and be on her side. Despite the “homosocial” ties that make such behaviour acceptable.
Anyone who hasn’t read Irigaray on “commerce among men” should.
Since at the very earliest 1988 (almost twenty years ago now), I have been a very strongly pro-feminist man, and have attempted to do everything I can possibly do (at some times, and I’m not making this up – at physical risk to myself) to live my life in such a way that the sexualisation and objectification of women is rejected, and to convince other men that this is a very bad thing which also traps us in awful and lamentable behavioral patterns.
Now you can accept that or not. If you don’t know me. But I would ask you to read what I’ve been writing on this blog about feminist issues for several years now.
It isn’t facile to say that kids are not just victims in these scenarios of sexualisation. I don’t see how you can argue that without also arguing that women in their early to mid 20s – some of whom I saw tonight wearing essentially see through dresses when I was out and about with some friends at a bar – are just passive recipients of diktats from advertising and pop culture. It’s far more complex than that, and if you think it is a bad thing (and I’m trying to abstain from adjudicating on this as much as possible to open up a debate), then just saying so will not deter people from objectifying themselves. Whether it’s so simple a process, I would like to question.
Anyway, this is all by way of a plea to people to think seriously about these issues rather than adopt positions that are pregiven. Which I would dare to point out – are usually not ones people have thought through for themselves but themselves products of cultural and media debates.
My other point, which is perhaps implicit in what I have written, is that the sorts of behaviours and attitudes that Gianna rightly condemns are far more the result of a deeply patriarchal culture that all of us are complicit in than anything in the media or in advertising. We need to recognise that and challenge it, and live that challenge every breath we take. They’re not the results of what are surface phenomena. Models – to go back to Gianna’s example – were being sexualised in the 50s or in the 20s even if comparatively speaking they were a lot more covered up. It’s not the hemline or the push up bra that’s the cause of objectification – it’s the effect. If you want to change society to be one where everyone is empowered to live as they would choose and not according to deeply gendered and sexist scripts, as I do too, then you have to attack the causes and not the symptoms. Too much of the phenomena we’re agonising over are epiphenomena rather than causes.
What Mark says about his profeminist views is true – I can and am happy to vouch. He’s passionate and sincere. But it shouldn’t be about him. Perhaps some commenters on this thread would have reacted differently if exactly the same words had been written by a woman. The post is being read as if “only a woman could really understand”, as suze said. Well, that’s also part of the problem. Calls for dispassionate debate can be, and are, motivated by passion for real change, not ritualistic jousting. Not that I’m questioning anyone’s sincerity. Far from it.
I, for one, agree with it 100 per cent and that’s not just because he’s my buddy. These ideas aren’t just individual takes, but have been worked out in debate and discussion – with me among others. And I think over some years, not in the ten minutes it takes to write a blog post. That’s how it should be.
The last sentence of the penultimate comment is very apt. Let’s get beyond critiquing media influence by taking one side of a debate in the media. Let’s think about these issues otherwise. I think the point of the daddy dates is that sexualisation of children is always a possibility in a patriarchal society. Of girl children that is. Mark’s comment about the socialisation of boy children is again making a serious point. While we girls are being taught to be objects, what are boys being taught? To objectify. And that hasn’t come about because marketers have identified a tween demographic. It’s much deeper, and much older. For us to challenge it, and we should, we need to think for ourselves outside the square. That’s what Catherine Lumby I think is saying and the way that the media and commenters read her arguments also shows how narrow this debate has become.
Years ago, a number of British women (one in particular whose name I’ve sadly forgotten – a nice green Virago paperback long lost in a move) wrote seriously about how to bring up children in a sexist society to be non-sexist. They agonised, and thought, and worried, and suggested. That was back in the 80s. I don’t know what DJs catalogues were like then. Big hair on little kids perhaps. Who knows? But they realised that sexism in popular culture is a given. If tomorrow the sorts of ads the Australia Institute criticises disappeared, girls wouldn’t stop thinking of themselves in sexual terms, and nor would boys stop. Old anarchists like me realise that to change the world, you have to live what you believe, and try to counter others’ socialisation. That’s easy to say, but very hard to do. It’s easy to say – OMG! My twelve year old admires Paris Hilton and my eight year old wants a bra! It’s much harder to think about how to create an environment where pink isn’t for girls and blue for boys. I know tigtog, from the previous post, thinks very seriously about these issues as a mother. That’s great. I don’t have kids but I was a kid once! And I have friends who do have kids. I just think the whole “it’s the ads! it’s the slutty celebs!” discourse cheapens and demeans the real attempts of women – and men – to create a society where objectification is minimised. I won’t say – abolished. Because, hey…
“That’s the point I think Geoff made – none of this is new.”
Indeed. In fact, we might actually be living in one of the least child-exploitative periods of human history.
The cultural idea of childhood – and children’s clothing is actually a quite recent innovation.
In the western tradition, a culturally distinct childhood is actually a 19th century invention and the teenager didn’t emerge until the 20th. Prior to that children were actually treated and dressed as miniature adults once they’d passed the baby/toddler stage.
Eighteenth century portraitists frequently depicted little girls in the decolletage and big hair of the period while little boys wore the noble accoutrement of the sword, men’s breeches etc. And consider the nature of the industrial revolution ‘childhoods’ of the pre-pubescent children working in mines, mills, etc.
I assume that the AI would have a conniption fit if they ever stumbled into the National Portrait Gallery.
We might deplore the “innocence lost” aspect of the Paris Hilton aspiration, but it’s important to remember that it’s a blip in social history terms.
If you examine 18th century look a
Sorry about the unedited last line.
Ok Mark I need to say that I didn’t construe your post as being antifeminist and I did not accuse you of being a libertarian I just know there are quite a few of them who read LP. I thought I did read your post carefully. What was your purpose in saying that concerns about the sexualisation of children has it’s mirror image in the religious right’s purity movement? This was the statement that I found hard to swallow. For a start you continually blur the distinctions between young children adolescents and women. This is a statement which I vehemently disagree with
“It isn’t facile to say that kids are not just victims in these scenarios of sexualisation. I don’t see how you can argue that without also arguing that women in their early to mid 20s – some of whom I saw tonight wearing essentially see through dresses when I was out and about with some friends at a bar – are just passive recipients of diktats from advertising and pop culture.”
There is a Huge difference in these scenarios. A woman has some idea about the consequences of her actions, she can craft the way she behaves to minimise the danger. This is not playing into the patriarchies hands it is a simple necessity. Altering self-protective behaviour will never have any effect on sexism. The change needs to come from the other direction. I completely disagree with this :”I don’t see that sexualisation of models in any way leads to old blokes groping younger women.”
Really?? You don’t see that a culture in which women are represented as primarily the object of sexual fantasy doesn’t lead to the objectification and sexual victimisation of women. This is just plain wrong. Granted advertising is one small part but it IS a part and is therefore a completely legitimate target for protest. There is considerable quality research on these things. And what is your point Geoff-that children were worse off in the 18th century and therefore everything is just fine now? Come off it.
sorry that should be “leads to the objectification”. And I h=am quite happy to be told I have missed the point- I just need more explaination I guess .
I have little to add to Mark and Kim’s excellent long comments above.
Sexual objectification and exploitation of women by men is indeed nothing new. The socialisation of males which leads to objectifying sexual attraction also plays out in homosexual cultural emphasis on male bodies, which is probably one reason that sexualised poses of boys in family media are avoided: the perception that it is men who will be attracted to them rather than women. General homophobia means that even if many many many more women than men found such images attractive (thus buying the product), such images would still be avoided in order not to titillate Teh Gays.
This ties into women being regarded historically as sexually passive, that female sexuality is externally not internally derived, in response to and shaped by male desire. Women learn that from a very young age by how females are portrayed in stories and images and music around them, and by how the people around them react to their appearance. The idea that male sexuality could be in response to and shaped by female desire simply doesn’t come up (Darwin notwithstanding).
The corollary is that the male gaze is perceived as such a powerful sexual factor that if some men find an image of another man sexually attractive, then that man is thought to have his sexuality compromised by being an object of male desire.
I guess I had more to add than I thought.
Thought provoking and very interesting post.
Suz is right though, there is the world of difference in what very young girls do, including by choice, like smearing on Mum’s lipstick and parading round in her shoes and perhaps even touching up the girl or boy next door in innocent play. All these things can happily and innocently be done by a five year old.
Come the teen years and the same girl might like to go out on the town dressed in see-through or otherwise very revealing “sluttish” dress. The reasons for doing so to me are obvious, wanting to feel attractive, wanting approval, establishing sexual idenity, having fun with the group, competing with other women. But at the same time, such women do not wish to be and are not trying to be sexually objectified, and hate being hit on repeatedly in crude and sometimes violent ways by scores of men.
According to our culture though, just check out any rape trial, women who do dress sluttishly or who have had voluntary sexual partners, are open to the well-believed defence that they were just askin’ for it.
Mark, sorry, I wasn’t very clear in my response. Of course I do not mean to suggest you are anti-feminist. I was just meaning to generally support Suze’s point that women shouldn’t be afraid of being openly concerned about this issue for fear of being shamed into feeling like alarmist conservatives or feeling as if we are hysterically searching for problems that aren’t there.
Also, my point about the grope wasn’t that it was an example of abuse (it wasn’t – a little grope is human nature, not a police matter). I was just making an analogy about the way circumstances can be construed as innocent while masking genuine sleaze.
I think the case it will be nigh on impossible for AI to defend. How do they really prove that the girls’ expressions are ‘come hither’ or whatever?
I think Suz’s point is one I would like to discuss more, if I had time, which I don’t really. It’s perennial. I have to say I am entirely in agreement with her on two things. First, whatever anyone may argue about adults, young children are absolutely not in a position to make informed assessments and decisions about the kinds of products that are marketed to them nor to evaluate whether that marketing is done in an age-appropriate manner. Second, as moral conservatism’s bonds with patriarchal culture get ever stronger and more influential in the mainstream, it becomes more and more important that feminists be able to oppose expressions of patriarchy without being reflexively tarred as anti-progressive, or ‘puritan’.
I wish I had not packed up my back issues of The Monthly as there was a very good article by Anne Manne (I think in December’s) about the awkward fit of sexual permissiveness and the sexual revolution within a still flourishing patriarchal society.
Getting back to the topic I think it’s well worth noting that Fred Bare, another of the companies whose advertisements were identified in the AI report, has completely changed the style of its images for the current season. They would of course change it anyway but it’s a total turnaround.
Last season:
This season:
By the way, the AI report does discuss the way ads for boys clothes depict them as miniature sexually mature adults.
Thanks for posting those photos, Laura. I’d noted the difference as well due to the intermittent visits of Fred Bare apologists commenting on a post of mine from October.
I emphasise that I don’t think the retail corporations are/were deliberately setting out to make inappropriately sexualised images of young children. The point is that advertising is so replete with sexual objectification that the creep into a younger demographic was neither consciously perceived nor adequately guarded against.
It’s good to see that Fred Bare at least now appears to be actively guarding against sexualised imagery of children.
There are lot of forces at play here. Without reading all of the material my base position on these issues recognises:
As the father of daughters and long time arguer of nature over nurture it is my firm belief and observation that there is in females a drive to display. This incorporates a hightened awareness of colour, composition, relationship and self. It is natural for a fashion provider such as DJ’s to attempt to enhance their performance in providing for the interests of this female drive.
This would be alright if it were not for our communities over obsession with televised media. It is within this media frame work that the real danger lies. The oversexualisation of everything is most present in the music sales and marketing industry which uses over extended imagery to cover poor talent and repetition. The problem for DJ’s is that they become part of accumulated pressure.
At the other end of the image world is the Bindy Irwin model who I suspect wears more makeup than most girls her age but to a completely different effect. I believe that most girls live well in the middle between the extremes of Bindy Irwin (total passion for life and nature) and JonBenet Ramsey (fashion for fashion’s sake). Furthermore children have surprised researchers with their immunity to the media overdose. They appear to extract the parts that suit their interests and ignore the rest.
The people most vulnerable to all of this imagery are adult males who mis-interperate the female drive to show off along with the younger female’s need to learn what the purpose of this drive is. There is a lot of wishful thinking that goes on in a man’s mind over the span of his life.
I expect to find in the AI case more an expression of shock that DJ’s, being argueably Australia’s leading conservative purveyor of class and fashion, should
appear to drift more towards the less cultured media centre. It would be my recollection from my adolescent “research” of these matters that the use of younger models is not that new. The shock is more likely to be that such images are no longer exclusively in the DJ’s glossy catalogue, they are now used mainstream in the DJ’s advertising programme.
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I agree that it misses the point to blame the ads, the slutty celebs, the sexism of popular culture, for what as Kim said, has existed a long time.
But, my perception is the relative sexual freedom young women have today, encouraged and legitimised by all this, rather than empowering them, contributes to a growing culture of female bodily shame and self-loathing that many parents note their daughters exhibit at an alarmingly early age. And the link on objectification that Alex posted above discusses the possible related problems this contributes to of depression, sexual dysfunction and eating disorders experienced by large numbers of women in their teens, 20s and 30s in particular.
The “purity balls” seem creepy in the extreme. They encourage the sexualisation of the relationship between a father and his daughter in a way I find repulsive and dangerous. I think many fathers must struggle with their sexual feelings towards their daughters, even very young daughters, but this sort of thing legitimises and sanctions it under the figleaf of fatherly concern.
I was aware from about 10 that my father was, shall I say, conscious of me as a sexual being, and I found it both upsetting and quite destructive (though it was never made explicit) particularly as it was allied to a very strong puritanical prohibitions on me, my freedom to go out with boys, dress the way I wanted, wear make-up etc, even as a late teen. It amounted to a form of sexual repression by the most significant representative of patriarchy at the time of life that almost guarantees negative self-identity and can have repercussions for the rest of a woman’s life. I knew he struggled with it, but I hated him for it too – for feeling it.
great post mark.
soft of off-thread but, it is useful to remember just how recently sexual harassment laws have changed an entire work culture in this country. Laws which were derided by many conservatives and many men as totally unnecessary at the time. As a 16 year old junior office worker in the 70’s – I was “felt up” on the bus, in the lifts, and by my managers as a normal course of events – and this was in a stockbroking firm in the city, my first job, and also occurred in other jobs. (btw i wasn’t emotionally effected by these events!!)
One of the first things – other woman workers would do, when you joined a firm in those days – was tell you – “who not to get caught by yourself with” – ie. watch Mr X – he’s a real perve, and don’t fall for the office Romeo – he’s got the clap & married, and if you see young Steve coming at you from behind -move away etc.
You v. quickly learnt to side-step, and keep an vigilant eye out on blokes standing behind you, and to push their hands away, if you could, and when you did …the reactions were to either laugh and call you frigid, or get huffy…. or say you were making it up etc.
Within ten years of these laws being enacted, amongst other significant changes at that time – the whole workplace culture had changed. I remember the debates around Helen Garner’s First Stone – and although I agreed with Garner – ie, we’d (older women) would’ve just pushed the old/young fools off us – I also thought that the hard-line attitude of the younger generation was more important ie. to rid the workplace/study-place of sexual harassment, even at the expense of that one old fool.
My point is that while – these issues can seem to be about overturning cultural/power/biology from back in the slime…and they are ……on the other hand in cases where there are clearly defined parameters – a well drafted law, a tribunal and a few big $$ payouts – can make significant societal differences.
on the DJ’s thang – I had a draft letter ready to send re: the good weekend adverts – but never got around to sending it. I actually wrote to Target the previous year, about their girls clothing range and had a very long conversation on the phone with a manager who called me back…. being the mother of a daughter – the same age of those girls and a consumer of those very clothes (on special only!!), and living next to a beach – it was so very striking to me – that the poses of the children were sexualised and absolutely nothing like the natural poses of the very same pre-pubescent children I was closely watching every day….I agree with tigtog in that, i think the creators were probably somewhat unaware of the issues, though this is probably being a little generous.
thanks Laura for putting up the ‘before and after’ pics – it’s really not hard to see what the fuss is about, when you see the pictures themselves.
unfortunately, sexualisation of pre-pubescent children is in the eye of the beholder, and alot of people, even parents, are not going to agree with this view, and as you’ve pointed out Mark – this one issue raises up a whole corresponding bag of issues around human sexuality which are themselves in dispute or retreat. The atomisation into sub-cultures also means, that any consensus on these issues is going to be much harder to achieve – than it was say, even 20 years ago.
I think that’s a good point, jo, about sexual harrassment. I can remember in my first public service job as a clerk in 1985, the woman who sat next to me had to cop heaps of (allegedly flattering) remarks about her appearance and clothes – and no one would have ever thought of complaining. Worth remembering too the intense controversy over such laws – but the measure of how much things have changed is that we have a Coalition government and they’re still there.
Thanks, suze and Gianna – I’m sorry I thought you were saying I’d written an antifeminist post. I’m glad you don’t think that.
Suze – my point about old guys groping younger women, as I’ve tried to explain several times, is that the belief on their part that this is acceptable behaviour in any sense is from a broader patriarchal culture and I’m arguing that some 60 year old guy wouldn’t have suddenly started doing it because there are more sexualised ads now than when he was 30 or whatever. What I’m trying to argue is that the ads in question are a reflection of a very strongly patriarchal culture, and not in themselves a direct cause of behaviour like sexual harrassment. I hope that makes sense.
And, no, I don’t think that women (or men) who want to oppose these sorts of ads should have to worry about being accused of being “puritan”. But I do think it’s worthwhile making it clear that the issues are broader and that what is being discussed is not just a claim about declining standards or morality.
On Geoff’s point, and again this is something that I’m arguing about patriarchy and infant/child sexuality, it’s not too long ago in Western culture that girls were being married off at age twelve.
This would be very hard to measure (because the statistics are always fraught for obvious reasons), but it’s very possible that there’s less overt sexual abuse and assault of children than there may have been say fifty years ago because it’s no longer hushed up and there’s been lots of publicity about the issue (particularly related to clergy abuse). If one were to look at the extreme manifestation of treating children as sexual objects- that is to say, sexually assaulting them, I’m sure that was as if not more prevalent decades before ads like the one Laura posted existed. Representations of children in popular culture and advertising can be sexualised without overt mimicing of “sexy” poses.
TT:
“The idea that male sexuality could be in response to and shaped by female desire simply doesn’t come up (Darwin notwithstanding).”
Well, that’s just not true. Did you think this through? You’re usually so rigorous!
I think it would be relatively easy to trace the tradition of this representation of sexual dynamics all the way from Adam and Eve through Basic Instinct to Desperate Housewives.
Sure, it’s usually portrayed as evil, but it’s there.
Perhaps it was just your wording.
“What I’m trying to argue is that the ads in question are a reflection of a very strongly patriarchal culture, and not in themselves a direct cause of behaviour like sexual harrassment. I hope that makes sense.”
Yes I should have acknowledged that I see this point but to me there is a kind of feedback loop operating: the culture throws up certain representations which become accepted as mainstream which then reinforces the power of that culture. I agree we have to focus on other aspects of the culture but it is my personal belief that the representations of women and children in the media play a very important part in maintaining the status quo. My personal view is that in the name of freedom of speech and anti-religiosity we have now accepted cultural forms which are actively promoting sexual violence and which perpetraors are using as a tool in their offences. This view is supported by recent research literature.
“it’s very possible that there’s less overt sexual abuse and assault of children than there may have been say fifty years ago because it’s no longer hushed up and there’s been lots of publicity about the issue (particularly related to clergy abuse).”
I think things are improving and as you say it is difficult to know what the situation was 50 years ago, a lot of the evidence is anecdotal, but the current rate remains appallingly high & child abuse continues to be hushed up even by people who are required by law to help the child. Even now talked about in a kind of embarrassed hush, and as a longtime noise maker on these issues I am viewed as a bit of a trouble maker really. I think the media concentration on clergy abuse and small remote aboriginal communities is somewhat unhelpful since the vast majority of cases involve neither. I still get the feeling that the community at large has yet to get to grips with the extent of the problem. If you look at the statistics you come to the inevitable conclusion that not only are there a number of victims amongst the people that you know, but there must be perpetrators as well. I know that this is true amongst my own acquaintance.
Great post, Mark, and mostly great responses from the various contributors.
I don’t know that I’m yet prepared to plunge right in, but I’ll dip my hoof in with one point.
suze wrote:
I think the answer to that question can be found in Greta’s comment:
The issue seems to revolve around the fact that the most extreme response to concerns about sexualising young girls manifests another form of sexualisation. (The point is all the more pertinent in if it’s true — I don’t know for sure; I’m happy to be corrected — that sexual abuse of children is more often perpetrated by fathers, guardians and other near-relatives than by strangers or non-family members.)
For that matter, much of the big deal that’s made of saving yourself for marriage just reinforces the idea that sex is a woman’s purpose. That a girl has lost something of herself through teenaged sexual experience, and is now damaged goods.
Sex in this view is not something that belongs to the girl, to be discovered and explored for her own development, fun and fulfillment, but something she’s saving for someone else.
Umm, thanks?
I do see your point, FDB: the maneater, the femme fatale, the monstrous feminine. Although seeing as how the monsters end up getting slain/enchained (as every good fairy tale should end) aren’t they meant to be a horrible warning about stepping out of line?
I think I was unclear. I was thinking more of the establishment of patterns of male sexual behaviour: that sex is perceived and discussed as a male-initiated event. The whole point of the stories you raise is the transgression of normal boundaries (with a side-serving of “even girls who look nice might be dirty vamps within, so watch it”).
Hmm. Will have to think on that further.
“sex is perceived and discussed as a male-initiated event”
Oh sure, that’s still a very common perception, but it seems to me to be one of the things that’s breaking down.
[I hope so, because I've never been much of an initiator!]
Unfortunately, this “empowerment” seems to be, at least in pop culture and pornography (if indeed the two are worth discussing as separate entities any more) connected with looking and acting in quite similar ways to the slut temptress of yore. With girl-on-girl action thrown in.
Good point FDB.
Since when has being sexually attractive and active a source of empowerment for women? Was Marilyn Monroe empowered by her sexuality? Is Paris Hilton? It is not a source of power for women at all, or not the sort of power, social and personal, that women need to aspire to and really need.
But today it is being posited as one of the most important sources of power and girls are buying it and being blindsided by it and meantime, patriarchy rules ok.
In fact, the sexualisation of girls and young women, by a culture that does not care for them as whole human beings, too often directly leads to self-harm through drugs, alcohol abuse, myriad forms of reckless and damaging behaviour not to mention personal underachievement and crippling self-doubt.
We are born sexually, sensually, erotically hungry human beings. I was five when I first became of aware of all those drives in me. I was punished and humiliated for expressing them in a directly carnal way, naturally and spontaneously, on different occasions in different circumstances, involving both a boy and a girl the same age as I. I am talking about 5-7 years of age.
Next comes, around puberty, the admission and message from adults, yes, you are sexual, but that is problematic, potentially dangerous, a trap, something to be hidden or overcome, something for later.
But the very same people saying this are the people whose sexual needs are projected on to you, sometimes in real time, with real body-to-body contact, or just via the daily, ever-present, distracting and intrusive sexual gaze and verbals from fathers, teachers, older brothers, uncles, adult family friends, strangers.
Then, as you enter puberty and the hormones are raging and you are half crazy, the mixed messages again. You feel like a caged animal. And what do you do to escape the conflicted feelings? Well, you shut down completely, or you act out. You raise the stakes, you invite harm, knowingly, and you come a cropper, because you don’t have the skills or understanding to know what the hell you are dealing with and the men you are interacting with are driven by their own desires which have nothing to do with your wellbeing.
The message to girls today perhaps is more libertarian, less condemnatory, less rejecting, more encouraging of their sexual needs and feelings. But it is still, perhaps even more so, the same old defining of you by your sexuality, its availability, its market worth vis a vis others, its connection to commodity capitalism, to what you need to buy to have a sexuality worth loving, worth attention.
And so it is therefore, at the very least, often just as damaging at worst unfulfilling at best to young women today as it has ever been to women in the past.
I’m not altogether sure we’re on the same page, Greta. I think that it *should* be empowering for a woman to be in control of her sexuality, and comfortable projecting it as part of her display of “self” in whatever way she sees fit.
Unfortunately, the projections that tend to garner the most attention (from men and society at large) tend to be more or less traditional harlotry, or at least can be interpreted as such.
Does this mean we need a new language, body and verbal, for girls to explore their sexuality while avoiding being defined by it? I think not. As I think Mark suggests, a teenaged girl in a string bikini and makeup today need not be viewed as morally different to a girl in little petticoats and ribbons 80 years ago – in both cases they are mimicking the features of feminine sexuality prevalent in older women. Remember that “you’ve got to look pretty for the boys” is in essence the same thing as “you’ve got to look sexy for the boys” – the latter merely lays out the agenda more starkly.
What we need is what is happening in most cases IMHO (and neck o’ the woods, perhaps). Parents, schools and communities telling girls they have options in life – that they can define themselves as more than merely sexual, more than merely non-boys. Meanwhile, telling boys and men to stop being such cocks.
There won’t ever be anything even resembling a solution to the problems of developing sexuality though. The most obviously intractable being that some girls and boys are just more attractive than others, giving them different advantages and problems to deal with to the rest of us.
Woah, Greta, there’s some _Very_ big calls in that post there.
Ummm, being sexually attractive and active has been a source of empowerment for heaps of women. Germaine Greer, for example, Eve Ensler.
And regarding whether it’s the source of empowerment women need, well I for one am not going to pretend to know what every woman in the world needs, or even that they had the same needs. I always assumed different people needed different things.
I’m not saying it’s always a source of empowerment, or that it should be. I’m just saying sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
Dude – evidence, please? And I don’t like the whole New Critic-meaning-is-author vibe going on here. Young women are quite capable of sexualising themselves, or not.
Again, I’m not saying said sexualisation is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing per se, just that it’s a thing, and as such can be either good or bad.
To blame adolescent drinking and drug use problems on this is a bow so long that not even Atlas could draw it. There is no causal relationship going on here – or adolescent drug abuse wouldn’t be higher with young males than females, because presumably young males aren’t ’sexualised’ as much (which is also crazy talk).
I’m not saying adolescents or kids or whoever acting like this is a Good Thing, but the idea that as consumers of texts they have no power over the meanings they construct I find kind of reductive and quite old-fashioned to be honest.
These kind of arguments have been thrashed over well and truly in heaps of arenas, but most relevant here would be in the context of women in pornography – and whilst both sides of the argument have merits, it is certainly a debate without a winner of any kind, let alone the decisive one which has been confidently asserted here.
What FDB said.
Except in italics, just to be sure it doesn’t get lost in the bunfight. And maybe throw some quotation marks in there somewhere — around “just more attractive”, probably (unless it was a quip, in which case follow it up with a few chuckles).
Telling girls they have options in life also means creating possibilities, which is part of the logic behind the sexual empowerment line. Of course, that’s not to say that such campaigns will never be accompanied by undesirable effects, but I’m not sure that that’s a reason not to expand the range of options available to all (girls and boys).
Well Patrick, I presume you are male, would you like to tell this woman how you see it as empowering women? Take Germaine Greer if you like, since you mentioned her as supporting your position. In fact, Germaine has said the opposite about herself and her own sexual exhibitionism and practice as a young woman.
Yes there are different reasons young males successfully suicide at a far higher rate than young women, and abuse alcohol and drugs. I don’t follow the logic of your argument conflating the two genders and the things that are going on with them.
I take FDB’s point that:
I would say, as one of the “more attractive” and with relatives and friends with the same benefit/affliction, the problems far outway any perceived – usually by others – advantages.
er, outweigh.
Isn’t it silly to be debating the finer points of some femisnist theory and talkign back and forth about sexual empowerment and the rest when the central issue is the eroding of certain standads of sexual conduct and thereby placing children in danger?
When an 11 year old girl is encouraged by media etc to behave like a sexuall promiscuous woman do you not see that this can lead to a pinning of self-esteem to sexual activity or to a certain kind of sexual activity to be more precise.
I love the touching belief of educationalists in the efficacy of education. If it were just a matter of “patiently explaining” and pedagogy, how come human nature has changed so little? And how come we face the same social problems just endlessly mutated?
“These kind of arguments have been thrashed over well and truly in heaps of arenas, but most relevant here would be in the context of women in pornography – and whilst both sides of the argument have merits, it is certainly a debate without a winner of any kind, let alone the decisive one which has been confidently asserted here.”
I’m not sure if you are referring to something I’ve written but the arguments you speak of are ongoing- new studies a being published all the time. And I don’t think the point of any debate is to find a winner. I have a link to an article that covers some recent stuff. I have another journal article from last year but I only have it on pdf- I don’t think it is on the web. I’d like to point out that although I view the influence of pornography as pernicious I am not in favour of censorship- it is just that I don’t think it should be seen as harmless either.
What a cerebral and civilised exchange this thread has stimulated. A clear majority of “blokey� LP regulars are conspicuous by their absence. Probably the cricket finals.
Collected my daughter (14) from school this arvo and had a great yarn about some of Mark’s main points: — DJs suit against Clive and AI,
— the media’s ongoing celebrity slutfest,
— the Purity Balls ritual.
To précis some of her observations: She is aware of the way the “Bad Girls� are portrayed in the media, but with conviction: “I so don’t care, dad.�
Purity Balls: “Sheesh, that really creeps me out. The guys from South Park should do an episode.�
Back at home, she instantly “got� the difference in Laura’s Last season/This season pics. My daughter further suggested that I see “Little Miss Sunshine� because she said that it dealt with “these issues� rather well.
So thanks all, this post has been rather special.
That is nice enemy Cobatant. But I say if any male thinks either his wife or his daughter is telling him what she really feels and know he is kidding himself.
“A clear majority of “blokeyâ€? LP regulars are conspicuous by their absence”
Because from experience one learns to avoid any posts which have the tag ‘feminism’ attached to them – a lot of misandry tends to coagulate in them and strangle sensible discussion.
Tester, affectionately – get rooted. And I mean that specifically for you, in case you want to yell “misandrist!”
Not an argument just a piece of data, but I really get made uncomfortable by the Bratz dolls and associated products. I think the sexualisation and ramping up of same are quite palpable when you think about the difference between old-style dolls, Barbie and Bratz. And I think the target market really are too young to be as savvy and capable of brushing up as Patrickg fondly imagines them to be.
See here, for example
http://www.imvu.com/catalog/web_landing.php?p=int2&c=anime1
Hopefully there’ll be a lot of hee-ya warrior chicks, still, it is pretty much the regulation T&A isn’t it.
I have trouble seeing a 3D messaging avatar as a necessity of life but then I’m an old fart.
poor ol’ Tester, gettin’ all angsty about the frightful lack of ’sensible discussion’ to be had around these ‘ere threads.
well ‘ere’s a link to some ‘appy talk from that fine bloke Captain Sensible for yeh, refreshingly free from coagulating misandry…
whoops it didn’t work
http://www.blahparty.org/
“That is nice enemy Cobatant. But I say if any male thinks either his wife or his daughter is telling him what she really feels and know he is kidding himself.”
Thank you, Greta, for your keen insight into human Individual Difference. Had to read you comment several times because it made my brain hurt. Mangled syntax always does.
In our “castle”, I’m often told that “yer dreamin’”, even occasionally to “get yer hand off it”, but Greta, I wouldn’t swap it for quids.
Patrick, perhaps this research might be a starting point for you. I personally do not not doubt what Greta was saying.
Sorry about the 2nd not
Right Greta. Any contribution I make to this argument is invalid because my gender prohibits me from knowing precisely what is going in any woman’s head, whereas as you are obviously part of the great feminist hive mind, and because you are a woman, you by default can make any claim you like about what all women think, and it’s automatically valid. That is horseshit.
If you are seriously refuting the fact that some woman find being sexually attractive and active empowering, you are out of your tree. Germaine Greer changed her mind. So what? I’m not saying women _have_ to find it empowering, but she did at the time – was she then in fact disempowered?
By your shaky rationale, the only women in society that aren’tdisempowered are sexually repulsive nuns. That is plain crazy. You clearly think of yourself as empowered, and I’m assuming you don’t fall into either category (having referred to yourself as “more attractive”, presumably because if you look like someone you can therefore they think and feel in any given situation).
I brought it up because you claimed that being sexually attractive to men and sexually active results in substance abuse, depression and perhaps suicide. (”In fact, the sexualisation of girls and young women…too often directly leads to self-harm through drugs, alcohol abuse, myriad forms of reckless and damaging behaviour not to mention personal underachievement and crippling self-doubt.”)
If this was the case, which it’s patently not, the difference in rates would be really high – which it’s not – and girls, often more attractive to teenage boys than other teenage boys, would presumably have higher rates, which they don’t.
I’m sorry I’m going off my tits here, but this kind of reductive, sloppy thinking has no place in any discussion on gender relations, and the automatic sidelining of my perfectly legitimate, and fairly mild opinions (to quote myself: “I’m not saying it’s always a source of empowerment, or that it should be. I’m just saying sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.”) totally offends and infuriates me.
I studied gender throughout my entire degree, either in women’s studies or sociology: I am not claiming to know – unlike you – the inner workings of every woman’s mind, but I am trying to highlight some of the contemporary thought regarding these issues, and surprise surprise, it’s not running around screaming “won’t somebody think of the children!?!?!”
Your opinion and anecdotal evidence is all good and dandy, Greta, and I’m sure it makes carrying the terrible burden of being “more attractive” a little easier to bear. However, you have no right to inflict that burden on woman who may not want, believe, or need it.
That is how you feel about being sexually attractive and active – fine. But there are plenty of women who don’t feel that way, and to say they’re just wrong, or deluding themselves bespeaks an intellectual arrogance and chauvinism that has more than a little in common with a sexist male mindset.
The fact you happen to be female brings you no closer, or further away from this debate, any more than the fact that I’m white brings me any closer of further away from any other white person.
PS, I wasn’t referring to you Suze! I only brought that up to highlight, as you say, that there are no “winners” to these deabtes, because everyone is different.
Greta said -
I hear that same sentiment regularly. I don’t know your individual circumstances, Greta, but what I can tell you, is that you’ve just expressed the view of someone who has experienced a highly dysfunctional relationship at one time or another in their life.
It’s extremely unfair for you to label all men on the basis of your own negative experiences.
No, Anna, any relationship would be “highly dysfunctional” if we always told significant others what we truly think and feel about many matters. I would have thought that was obvious. But I was referring here in particular (and it is even more true in this relationship) to father-daughter ones.
No point in responding to your strawman arguments PatrickG. But you haven’t answered MY question. Exactly how is it that “being sexually attractive and active has been a source of empowerment for heaps of women”. In what way “empowering”?
Words in the ether from anonymous people folks. Hardly sticks and stones etc. Amazing what gets people fired up.
Mark mentioned Irigaray in a comment above.
She’s been trying through a very beautiful series of books to write what an autonomous female sexuality might be. She’s well aware that you can’t escape the sex/gender nexus we have, but she’s trying to stretch it, turn it around, and upside down.
I’m not sure I follow Greta’s logic. “Empowering” might be the wrong word, but I certainly think it’s possible for us to own and appropriate our own sexuality. Cf – being a lesbian. Not a soft focus porn for boys lesbian, but an actual lesbian. For decades, (if not centuries but therein lies another argument), we’ve been living it. Within the logic of what we’re given, but honestly, it’s worth a bloody go!
I refuse to have my own sexual persona defined by culture – I know it is, but I want to seize it and twist it and dance with it.
Mark,
I think you miss the bigger point and so do those that claim this “sexualization” of girls has its roots in the “patriarchy.”
Who exactly is designing these sexualizing fashions for young girls? Is it those “Purity Ball” dads? Is it those old white males making all that loot selling clothing?
All this sexualization and objectification of women and young girls is at the behest of a fashion industry dominated by homosexuality.
This sexualization of young girls by way of skimpy clothing closely mirrors the homosexualization of children at younger and younger ages in our Western cultures.
The sexualization of young girls via fashionable design lays first and foremost at the feet of the fashion designers. Who are these fashion designers and are they really part of the “patriarchy?”?
Oh my goddess!
that comment from thordaddy is a joke, right?
You are right Kim and Laura. The answers to these questions will come from women, not men.
Check out this priceless piece from Jenni Diski in LRB on “Second Life”.
This is what the millions of 25-35 year old males have come up with as an alternative universe. Their ultimate, idealised sexual fantasy, in a world that has no bounds, that is completely open to imaginative, sensual, erotic fantasy and its expression, amounts to nothing but skinny blondes with huge lips and breasts who “shimmy up to two-dimensional poles and rub their pixillated breasts and pudenda in the time-honoured weary wanton manner”. You gotta laugh and yes, look elsewhere.
Thank Christ brave warriors like thordady are out there saying the sorts of things we should all be saying.
These fucking queers not satisfied with ruining families, now have their beady little eyes on our children.
See here for information about the gay agenda.
“…sexualisation of pre-pubescent children is in the eye of the beholder,…”
There’s the guts of the issue. It is often impossible to prove or disprove an image is sexualised (as opposed to explicitly sexual).
I (a middle aged heterosexual male) look at the before and after photos posted by Laura (9 February 2007 at 8:12 am), and I can see why some see a difference, but equally it is not obvious to me that the before photo is clearly sexualised. It might be, but it might also be people reading too much into it. In a family photo album such an image is completely innocuous. In the possession of a pedophile it is potentially quite troubling, (though not prosecutable, being a legal image publicly available via the mainstream media.)
The problem is that those who are sexually attracted to children are going to be turned on by many otherwise innocuous images of a child. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put limits on the way children are portrayed, clearly we should, and already do for explicitly sexual images. But trying to set reasonable, enforceable, and effective standards against possibly sexualised images, such as the one Laura posted, is to plunge right into the middle of a subjective swamp, and invite hysterical overreaction, which brings all sorts of problems of its own.
I don’t really have any answers to these problems. I am not even sure how big these problems actually are. I will say that the ‘Purity Balls’ seem far more troubling than that before photo posted by Laura.
You do realise Soredaddy you run the risk of picking up gay germs just by commenting here? I do hope you have a disposable latex glove on your mouse hand as well on the other one.
And wot Goff said earlier. Childhood as a discrete condition was only really invented in the West about five generations ago – at about the same time consumer culture was also emerging.
And in a few generations time as kids come in biodegradable GM family-sized packs, we’ll all look back on this and laugh. Or possibly not.
“Childhood as a discrete condition was only really invented in the West about five generations ago – at about the same time consumer culture was also emerging.”
We keep slipping back into the postion that anyone who expresses concern over this issue is either a wowser or a religious nut. We all want to live in the 18th century now don’t we? Don’t see a tiny bit of of hypocrisy here? Not really happy to be travelling by horse and buggy and living in smoke filled houses but quite happy to say that childhood is an invention. Strangely enough science tells us that children are not just adults in wee form. Hold the f***ing presses.
Ok I’m taking that way too seriously. But I do genuinely get the shits that this seems to have been reduced to a polar either or thing: either you are in favour of purity balls or you shut up about the sexualisation of children and be a good lefty. (and I know that is not your position Nabokov, or Mark but the general tone of the debate seems to be about people saying what is worse creepy relig. fundamentalism or a little skewed advertising )
I imagine that western civilisation isn’t the only one to be fraught over the issues raised in this post.
Long before the supposed invention of childhood, there was already the age of consent, a fact that puts the lie to the notion that there was no recognition of the condition of childhood.
Moreover, church authorities have long talked about the transition between innocence and an awakening moral sense in children.
Thus we have in the Christian west a tripartite division of life stages: flawed innocence, adulthood, and a transitional stage in between.
To complicate these matters, we have a countervailing Rousseauvian timetable of infantile perfection progressively corrupted by the corrosiveness of evil society.
Most people’s ideas about adolescence are a bit of a mish mash of these two contradictory ideas.
The religious right seeks to extend as long as possible the period of flawed innocence in children, especially in girls. That’s why there isn’t a program of mums taking their sons to Purity Balls.
conversely, the left tends to blame society for forcing young people to conform to destructive models of belief and behaviour. A just and properly ordered society wouldn’t need pr0n.
These two tendencies meet in addressing a very difficult question that hovers behind the oft-raised cocempt of “empowerment”.
The question is: are men more evil than women?
The answer of the religious right tends to be “yes”. Females are more at risk. However, it is necessary not altogether to repress that evil in our sons. It is right and proper for a boy becoming a man to be allowed greater autonomy in making his way in the world. Males, after all, are the active element in God’s great plan. This is the essence of patriarchy.
The Left is bitterly divided over this question. Rousseau would have thought the question to be absurd. But various projects for social reform have foundered on the problematic nature of masculinity. Now there is strong support for the idea that society in general, and females in particular, deserve to be protected from the innately destructive tendencies of masculinity.
This attitude bears many similarities with that of the religious right. However, it does not share its most important quality: hypocrisy and double standards.
Katz,
Please explain the link between masculinity and sexualizing fashion for prepubescent girls in this particular debate? These are antithetical concepts.
The complaint seems to be that prepubescent girls are being influenced to dress in sexualizing fashion and the parallel marketing/advertising that comes with it adds to this sexualization. Yet, no one has addressed the designers of these sexualizing fashions and the concurrent advertising/marketing campaigns. Are the designers of such fashions, in concert with the push to sell these fashions, part of the patriarchy?
My experience tells me that the impetus behind these sexualizing fashions and the hair, make-up and photography that is used to sell such fashions is the workings of a highly homosexualized and “progressive” fashion industry. Where is the AI report addressing the real “root causes” of sexualizing prepubescent girls?
The deliberate sexualisation of young girls through fashion and other means is a logical outcome of a culture that sexualises all females and is linked to misogyny and the fantasy of and quest for masculine omnipotence.
The latter is closely connected to deep feelings of disgust and shame about the body and what it represents: vulnerability and mortality. That which reminds males most of this, femaleness, makes women the vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and of the potentially decaying.
A sexualised very young girl is a long way from the physical form much closer to what masculinity abhors. These male attitudes towards women are inevitable aspects of male sexuality in all known societies and are connected to political and other forms of discrimination against women and their greater economic exploitation.
Thordaddy,
In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve copped a bit of a hiding from other posters.
Now I’m going to give you another.
It should be clear that what I wrote has nothing to do with what I think about this question.
Rather I attempted to show similarities and differences between Right and Left attitudes to sexuality.
Greta,
You say,
Nonsense! Masculine men don’t sexualize prepubescent girls via fashion due to some kind of misogyny.
Rather, progressive homosexuals, by and large, design sexualizing fashions for prepubescent girls. Furthermore, it is a highly homosexual and “progressive” fashion industry that creates these sexualized images of prepubescent girls.
This has nothing to do with masculinity or the “patriarchy.” It has everything to do with a progressively homosexual fashion industry that sexualizes prepubescent girls in much the same manner that a progressively homosexual contingent homosexualizes prepubescent children at younger and younger ages in our Western school systems.
Katz – that was an interesting analysis. I wonder whether this statement of yours is true: “The question is: are men more evil than women? The answer of the religious right tends to be “yesâ€?. ” Because my take on it is that women were represented in the bible as the root of evil, the temptress etc and so, though they may be sold as protecting girls, the purity ball actually springs from the desire to protect society from women and you do that by quite literally reinforcing the patriarchy: the girl is to be passed from the father directly to the husband and so her evil influence is contained.
And I don’t agree that it is necessary to conceive men as “innately destructive” to be concerned about violence sincemen are just as much a product of both biological and social influences as women. Some of the social influences on men reinforces violent and dehumanising attitudes toward women and that is what concerns me.
I suppose I just don’t accept the premise (thanks West Wing) that the discussion of sexualisation of children that I am having is even on the same spectrum as the morality crusaders’. The similarities are only superficial. Just because something is grey doesn’t mean it is an elephant.
Best not feed the homophobic troll.
Katz,
You say,
The question is what does this have to do with the sexualizing of prepubescent girls via fashionable clothing and its attendant imagery?
The more pertinent question, if one believes that prepubescent girls are being sexualized by way of popular fashion and its imagery, is why is the progressively homosexual fashion industry behind such sexualization?
This issue nothing to do with masculinity, its perceived proclivity for evil or the “patriarchy.”
suze,
The sexualization of prepubescent girls in the manner being discussed is the impetus of a predominately homosexual fashion industry.
How does this play into your paradigm of masculinity and patriarchy reinforcing “violent and dehumanising attitudes toward women?”
This doesn’t contradict my case at all. Note that being the “root” of evil is not to say that they are the “evil-doers”. In the West women have been traditionally seen as a passive vessel through which evil is visited on the world. Witchcraft is the leading example of this.
Again, I neither agree nor disagree with this. You have voiced here the essentially optimistic Rousseauvian view. My point is that there is a split in the left over this question. This split probably embodies the great crisis in confidence in the left: the question about the perfectability of humans.
Thordaddy, as is your usual debating tactic on any threads about feminism, you just restate your offensive points endlessly. Well, it ends now.
I’ll have to bow to your greater knowledge there- I don’t have the framework to discuss that with you. I was actually wondering if there wasn’t another more prosaic dynamic at work at least recently. Each time Paul Sheehan writes another book or article about sexual assault I quail because I instinctively feel that some people will just avoid discussing for eg the area of law reform for sexual assault victims because Sheehan has his mits on it.
Gosh Greta, it’s like stepping in a time machine back to the seventies reading your posts, Andrea Dworkin seventies at that.
Again, you make all sorts of grand pronouncements about what all men and women do, etc. etc. but lack any kind of emirical framework in which to place these remarks.
I’m not trying to deny the fact that women are actively and pervasively discriminated against in today’s world. They are, it’s a fact. However this neo-Freudian analysis is so far away from the empirical it resembles a thought-experiment more than anything else. It reminds me also of another feminist writer in the seventies, with a valuable but flawed argument: Laura Mulvey.
My two problems with her writing are my problem with yours:
Firstly, that in positing women as perpetual victims, and men as perpetual opressors, you are in fact ignoring the many discourses of power that women have participated in historically, and presently also. That is to say, your writing approaches power from a definition supplied by men; the idea that there could be other power, or that power could be effected in a different discourse is effectively ignored.
I’m not saying that all women should be ecstatic about porn movies or being housewives or some such. But, there are many different ways of empowering yourself, and to ignore them is to say that most women have never been empowered; their choices – where they had them – never valid, through history and the present.
There has been a lot of discussion about this in regards to indigenous feminism, and of course, feminists writing about the position of women in parts of the Muslim world. What constitutes empowerment in these contexts, etc. I think those debates have a value in this discussion.
My second problem, which I alluded to before, is that you seem keen to deny any agency that women – and teenage girls – have. The idea that women (or anyone) have no choice at all in regards to the meanings they take from text is a dinosaur of intellectual thought.
Sure, maybe a percentage of women want sexualised women because it deprives said women as power, but why should that mean any woman who is sexualised isn’t empowered?
Many feminists have taken great pleasure in appropriating signs of male chauvinism and using them as signs of independence; as controllers and producers, rather than consumers.
The idea that anyone is some kind of vegetable, passively consuming what texts happen to be thrown there way is a depressing, and I believe ultimately defeatist position.
As I have said before, I’m not saying these things are bad or good; merely pointing out that they happen all the time, and in ignoring them, or denying the motivations of the women involved, you are effectively dismissing a huge proportion of the people you are trying to represent.
Oops, I mean “A percentage of men want sexualised women…
patrickg – surely the rest of your comment was good enough to stand on its own without resorting to throwing about the name “Andrea Dworkin” as if it’s a great way to insult someone?
patrickg, Greta is talking about very young girls. If we are still discussing the children pictured in the ads which the AI drew attention to, then we are talking about pre-pubescent children. You are being rude to her for no reason. Perhaps you could talk about how your ideas about sexual agency apply to five year olds.
patrickg, you are funny. Do you always argue at cross purposes with women about feminist matters that they would by definition know more about?
Oh, I don’t deny agency to women, or girls for that matter. No siree. In fact, I agree with the riposte of Jane Heap, the publisher of “Ulysses” who noted, in the obscenity trial challenging its publication, when the prosecution accused the novel of potentially “endangering the minds” of young girls, that “there are few things more to be feared than the mind of a young girl”.
Women do not own or control our sexuality and its expression despite what you might wish to force us to accept patrickg (why one wonders) and despite the voluntarist fantasy of individual women.
Not saying we never can. But I sure don’t recognise ownership and control and free unfettered sexual agency and I have never met one woman who has argued she has it either.
Anna: I wasn’t trying to insult Greta with that; I think Dworkin has made some incredibly valuable contributions to feminisim and feminist theory. I was just trying to point out that much of Dworkin’s work has taken place in the seventies, without (no fault of her own) the context of third-wave feminism and the emphasis of postmodernism in it.
Laura: Come now. Who is being rude here? I am dissecting Greta’s argument, I think reasonably politely. My initial post, and all subsequent posts in this thread were/are dealing directly with Greta’s words: “Since when has being sexually attractive and active a source of empowerment for women?… It is not a source of power for women at all, or not the sort of power, social and personal, that women need to aspire to and really need.” (emphasis mine).
There is nothing in that statement relating to age, indeed, Greta has made no moves to modify her position to make it age-contextual, and her use of Marilyn Monroe as an example and many subsequent posts would imply that age is immaterial.
I don’t really have any ideas about sexual agency in five year olds; it’s not something I’ve read a lot of or thought about at this level, and I honestly don’t understand why you are so eager to paint me as some kind of ignorant, girl-hungry chauvinist. I realise this thread is about that specifically, but I am responding largely to the comments, not the post. I’m sorry, I should have made that clearer.
Meanwhile, Greta is dismissing my arguments based on the fact I’m a man, for the third time now, which is just so much insulting bullshit.
She then says: Women do not own or control our sexuality and its expression. and then: I have never met one woman who has argued she has it either.
Are you telling me you agree with that statement? Are all the women reading this telling me they agree with that?? That there is not one woman in the entire world who does not control her sexuality and its expression?
Greta: I’m not forcing anyone to accept anything. Fuck, when have I said that? The whole freaking point of my posts here is to say that different women have different feelings about different things.
You’re the one who dismisses anyone who disagrees with you either on the basis of gender, or a “voluntarist fantasy”. Who are you to legitimise the choices of women, or not? Surely they are capable of legitimising, or not, their own choices?
What paternalist, imperialist bollocks.
I don’t know if you can get your hands on a copy, Greta, but I thoroughly recommend Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s book; Talkin’ Up to The White Woman”, if you’re at all interested in why I have a problem with your position.
I tried to find the introduction online, but with no luck.
patrickg, if you think that empiricism and science have the answers to questions of human sexuality and its expression and male-female relationship, then no wonder you go so badly awry.
If your gender studies course included plumbing the lower depths of Andrea Dworkins, whom I never read for more than 5 minutes, but then I wasn’t obliged to do so for a meal ticket degree and puffed up cv, then no wonder you are so grumpy and hostile.
I must confess my lineage goes back even further than 1970s feminism, much as that may appal you, you modern “cool” hip thing you, and if you mean by “neo-Freudian”, thinkers such as Fromm, Melanie Klein, Norman O Brown, Winnicott, and their literary and philosophical relatives, Lucretius, Plato, Spinoza, Proust, etc., then yes, this is a major part of my reference point.
These figures are unsurpassed humanistic interpretative thinkers who help me and many others begin to understand these questions.
You should try them.
I think both of you should cut out the snark.
Just sayin….
Well patrickg I for one think that Greta is right in the sense that any sense of being wholly in control is rather fleeting. Unless your chosen mode of sexuality is celibacy which is a bit of a problem. In so many ways the culture invades and distorts it.
Patrickg, in my book it’s a bit offensive to tell people they should read something. Particularly when you’re not 100% sure they haven’t read it already and come to their own conclusions. It’s akin to setting homework.
Greta did actually write about the connect between patriarchal fetishising of girl children and patriarchal hostility to the mature female body, you know. Check her comment of 10.09am which preceded your very long one.
I almost always like reading your comments here but that thing about recommending reading is a particular red rag to me and I had to respond.
I will butt out now.
Point taken Laura. I really wasn’t trying to ‘educate’ Greta, it’s just that Robinson articulates the way I feel about this so much better than I have obviously been able to. I still recommend the book – to anyone, it’s a cracker read – but not as some kind of point-scoring.
And you’re right, Greta did mention the sexualistation specifically, but she also mentioned it generally, too, and that is what I took exception to. But oh well, I think I’ve exhausted myself, and it’s certainly not my intention to offend any more people; I do apologise for that. I too, shall butt out.
Shame really I think we need for everyone to butt back in on a permanent basis. I don’t want to see the general debate reverting to the moral panic vs pornification schtick lead by the Rev Patriarch vs Hustler Patriarch because there is only one loser there and no guesses who. Just be prepared not to dismiss the idea that maybe the current orthodoxies concerning “empowerment” and “appropriation” are at least in some instances, complete horseshit.
Twisty has a rant worth reading on what she prefers to describe as the “empowerful woman.”
suze wrote:
Well in that case I’ll butt in, though I’m wary of the kind of reception I’ll get. But before I open myself to who knows what kinds of criticisms, let me just state right up front: I can’t argue with the following comments from Greta.
Greta wrote:
I can’t argue with them not because I agree with them, of course, but rather because they don’t extend to me the option of debating their logic. I can’t argue with them, because I’m not being allowed to do so, and there is therefore little point in doing so. It’s tempting to think that behind those sorts of claims lies a kind of “see how you like it” counter-oppression. I don’t really believe that, though (even if that’s the ultimate effect of the statement), partly because it’s a pretty weak form of exclusion that hardly undoes or makes up for the effects of centuries of patriarchy, but mostly, as I’ll come back to in a moment, I don’t have much time for arguments that need to impute some ultimate intention as underlying the complexity and multiplicity of forms of power.
suze wrote:
suze: you said that you “don’t want to see the general debate reverting to the moral panic vs pornification schtick lead by the Rev Patriarch vs Hustler Patriarch because there is only one loser there and no guesses who” — in which case I hope you’ll agree with me that the implied criticism of patrickg in the above is a little unfair. I haven’t seen in any of his comments a suggestion that whatever empowerment women may find in taking “control” of “their” sexuality amounts to complete control or total empowerment. Certainly, every other aspect of his argument is geared towards emphasising differential responses, variable forms of power, etc., such that even if parts of patrickg’s argument may seem to suggest that he’s saying women are “wholly in control” he might be afforded the principle of charity on that point.
If we’re hoping to get beyond positions that have been defined in advance by a massively simplistic and misleading binary, then we need not just to show nuance in our own arguments but attend to it in the arguments of others. I hope I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Now, back to the original topic of the debate.
Greta wrote:
As I suggested a moment ago, I’m not convinced by attempts to ascribe some kind animating intention behind complex processes. And, unfortunately, that means that I’m wary even of talk of “the patriarchal system (or culture)”. Now, that doesn’t mean that I disagree with claims that the signs of the oppression of women, of unequal power relations, and (sometimes) of out-and-out misogyny aren’t visible just about everywhere you look. What it means is that the assumption that such forms of oppression, etc. are all driven by some simple, originary logic seems to me not only to lead to a misdiagnosis of the individual cases we might want to address, but also to compound the oppression of women by adding another dimension to that oppression.
The logic underpinning notions of “The Patriarchal System (or Culture)” makes it virtually impossible, that is, to imagine social practices, forms of representation, policy repsonses to discrimination, etc., that can escape the insidious effect of this all-encompassing system. To that extent, any forms of “empowerment” that are imagined and championed for whatever ameliorative potential they may have become denied and discredited by criticisms premised on such a notion of patriarchy. And so, for all their good intentions, those kinds of criticisms run the risk (please, note the hesitancy and qualification here) of compounding effects of oppression by further denying women various avenues for taking (a limited) control, for reacting against discrimination on multiple fronts, etc.
What especially worries me about this logic is that it has been appealed to at different times both by Greta and by Mark in their respective attempts to mount an argument about the issue in question. To the extent that these two contributors represent “both” “sides” of the debate — notwithstanding Mark’s admirable (IMO) attempt to get beyond the limits of that debate and its well-worn positions — it would seem that this idea of a general logic of patriarchy doesn’t get us very far at all. Or, rather, it gets us only so far. It gets us to the point where we can find horrific and completely unacceptable the oppression of women, unequal power relations, and (especially) out-and-out misogyny.
The advances that the idea of patriarchy have afforded women (and society generally) should not be denied or underestimated. But neither should those advances be seen as being devalued in any attempt to question the logic and on-going effectiveness of that idea. At the very least, do not mistake my critique of that notion as an attempt to discredit the legitimacy of women’s claims to justice and equality nor to deny the value of feminism(s) of any colour, stripe or wave.
So: if we suspend belief in the notion of patriarch as a single-minded logic, we may need to be wary of seeing the sexualisation of children under discussion as being a deliberate process. As it turns out, I’m not the first person in this thread to suggest this, for tigtog has already said the same thing:
This seems to me to be a very helpful observation, in more ways than one. First, it invites us to consider “sexualisation” as an effect of an array of otherwise unrelated or disconnected practices, techniques, etc. In this case, it’s possible to imagine that the “sexualisation” of children in advertising has as much to do with the utter conventionality of particular practices of fashion photography (e.g. this is “simply” how you shoot a fashion photograph), of advertising techniques (e.g.the creation of desire for a product via glamourising it, etc.), and perhaps of others. None of this is to say that these practices/techniques, etc. don’t have a history or that they aren’t themselves questionable in terms of their potential political effects. Nor is it to deny Just Me’s point that the end products of these processes (i.e. the images themselves) aren’t open to different reading strategies such that some may find them “innocent” while others put them to other kinds of uses. But what’s at stake in this kind of analysis is a greater awareness of how “sexualisation” (or discrimination, or oppression, etc.) is underpinned as much (if not more) by specific, concrete practices than by some general, immaterial logic. (Though, this is to simply things a little for the sake of time; I can elaborate on this point later, if necessary).
Second, tigtog’s remark shifts the practical-political focus onto questions of heightening awareness regarding the potential for certain practices to lead to particular effects, and thereby may lend support to specific, targeted campaigns for change without having to make appeals to otherwise contestable (even ineffective) arguments about “The Patriarchal System”. This kind of approach can produce outcomes — in the form of policies on advertising to children, etc. — in a way that, I don’t think, arguments about “the fantasy of and quest for masculine omnipotence” can.
Let the criticisms and/or abuse begin.
“the signs of the oppression of women … aren’t visible” should, of course, be “are visible”.
Thanks, Rob, you’ve outlined how I feel about this issue far more eloquently than I was able to.
I’m going to butt in again, because I’ve had a second thought.
At the risk of sounding like I’m on a campaign to blame “feminism” for everything (which, of course, is the total opposite, almost, of what I’m intending), I have to say that the interpretation of this issue as a feminist issue is also a major obstacle to thinking through the issue and properly assessing what’s at stake.
For instance, nearly every single contributor here — from “both” “sides” of the debate — has agreed, more or less, that the “empowerment” argument (to give it an overly simplistic title) holds only above a certain age. Everyone agrees that, to quote Greta, “there is the world of difference [between] what very young girls do, including by choice” and what adult women may do. Mark, to be sure, wants to recognise in children at least some agency, but I think it’s a compete misconstrual of his argument to say that he’s suggesting that five-year-olds are capable of “freely expressing” “their” sexuality and/or “appropriating” images of sexuality.
In other words, the central issue here — or at least the thing that we can all agree on as being at issue — is the question of the limit between the child and the adult. The problem, though, is that the appeal to the feminist perspective (to pretend for the moment that there is such a thing as “the” feminist perspective) invites the reduction of this difference. In other words, discussing the issue as though it’s primarily a question of “patriarchy” encourages us to see the two forms of “sexualisation” (if that’s what it is), i.e. both of children and of adults, as the same, or as part of the same problematic.
Nothing is further from the truth: as everyone here will agree (I think), the two are very different processes and they therefore pose very different questions. Consequently, I think it’s more valuable to put the “patriarchy” question aside (again) in order to tackle what’s at issue in the case of the “sexualisation of children”.
Now, as has been commented a few times in this thread, “childhood” is an historically recent phenomenon. While this argument has largely been used to forestall conservative appeals to “childhood innocence” — a use of the argument to which I am happy to lend support — it also points to the practical-political question here. As Suze mentioned, it’s not as if anyone wants to go back to a time when there was no such thing as childhood. On the other hand, I don’t share Suze’s confidence in what “science” tells us about childhood.
As far as I’m concerned, the kind of approach adopted by the AI report, which is underpinned by the presumption that it is protecting some natural childhood innocence by tackling so-called corporate paedophilia, gets things the wrong way round. The point is not that there is some natural condition called childhood that is being threatened by advertising, sexualisation, etc. Rather, childhood is produced by the exclusion of a particular demographic from the range of people (or “consumers”) who may legitimately be addressed via sexualised and sexualising modes of address (though not just “sexualising” modes, but any others we decide are also unwanted).
In other words, we produce childhood by calling for policies “protecting” a particular demographic from specific kinds of advertising, or from eligibility for certain kinds of activities (e.g. voting, gambling, drinking, etc.), and by mandating that demographic engage in certain,other kinds of activities, etc., (e.g. primary and secondary education). The point about “childhood” being a historical product, in other words, is that we can continue to produce it if it is something that we (as a society) value. To that extent, I’d like to engage more closely with Mark’s comment:
I agree with Mark that thing’s are complex and that it’s not so easy to draw the line between kids-as-victims and adults-as-agents. On the contrary, I think the only sort of line you can draw here is between what kinds of agency “we” are willing to allow kids to have. The line needs to be produced by specific policies and other kinds of social practice — if, that is, we value “childhood” (which is not to suggest that there might be competing versions of what might properly constitute such “childhood”). To that extent, though, it’s not actually possible to “abstain” on the issue of whether the sexualisation of children is a good or bad thing. Indeed, that debate is one of the forms of social practice through which “childhood” may be produced.
Holy cow!
I am going to have a go at just a couple of points (others will do better because I have absolutely no background in political science or sociology at all but I will stick my oar in anyway)
Firstly, because in matters of science I am on home turf, psychology and neuroscience can tell us a lot about childhood and they range from the simple fact that an 11 year old’s brain is very different in terms of the connections that are still being formed between different parts of the brain and in how these connections are reinforced or allowed to slip away as a result of an enormous range of factors like nutrition experience environment etc, to the very well established concept of developmental stages which all human beings regardless of culture experience. Of course there is a huge amount to be learned but childhood is an absolutely established fact, it is not going away. I do remember an english lit course where they talked about the invention of childhood- the invention of the CONCEPT of childhood. This is epistemology! Childhood itself wasn’t invented just the conception of it as something other than adults in little packages.
Secondly I do not accept empowerment is a universal experience for adult women at all. (By the way did anyone read Ruth Ostrow describe the living wake for some old codger in Byron- pole dancers were involved! What a steaming pile of shite. He can now safely go to his grave in the full knowledge that his male privilege allowed him one last chance to buy a woman.) Others may disagree.
Lastly I see the issue of child sexualisation as absolutely seamlessly connected with the progressive morphing of images of females into the very narrow & dangerous confines of modern “femininity”.
I do agree that there is no point as seeing this as all directed from patriarchy high command because, like neocon/zionist/halliburton high command it doesn’t exist as an entity. Doesn’t mean that the dynamic/s isn’t or aren’t there however. And it means that we are forever committed to fighting an assymetric war. We have no choice but to tackle issues as they arise. For the time being anyway.
Thanks, patrickg, for your encouragement (missed your post the first time round).
Thanks, too, suze for your response. I suppose that since the debate as a whole seems to have gone off the boil, I should probably let it go. But, like you, I think we’re dealing with very important questions, and I don’t think we’ve got to the point where we’re each rehashing what’s already been said, so….
Neither do I. Nor do I believe, from what he’s written, does patrickg. That was my point. Far from being a universal experience, empowerment, I would argue, is an incredibly variable and unevenly distributed form of experience. Moreover, such forms or moments of empowerment are undoubtedly “compromised” in various, often unpredictable ways by the forms of power which they may seek to react against.
My point is simply that the absence of a universal experience of empowerment doesn’t mean that women (or anyone, for that matter) find absolutely no empowerment anywhere. And that, consequently, reading every use of the term “empowerment” as meaning “total, universal empowerment” in an argument that otherwise seeks to stress the variability, multiplicity and differentiality of forms of experience does not do justice to those arguments.
You’re right; we are talking epistemology when we talk about the invention of “childhood”, which is to say the invention of the concept of childhood. Obviously no one’s saying that “back in the olden days” three-year olds turned eighteen at their next birthday. By the same token, concepts have effects; they constitute part of what orders “our” world and thereby help to define particular forms of experience and accord some kind of sense to the singular experiences that make up individual lives.
As I mentioned before, I don’t share your confidence in science’s ability to identify and to define the features of childhood. This includes developmental psychology and neuroscience, and this precisely because they proceed from a concept of childhood that is a product of history. While you’re familiar with work in these disciplines which define and identify the features of “childhood”, I’ve read some pretty convincing arguments that that kind of work ends up identifying features, etc., that are a reflection of the limits to the concept of childhood from which they set out. Again, that’s not to say that there are no differences between the forms of experience and potential that organise the lives of children and adults. It just means that there’s more to the issue than science alone can address.
I’m in no position to recount those arguments in any detail here — which is why I said before not that the science is wrong or flawed, but simply that I do not “share your confidence” in what science tells us about childhood. More to the point, I simply don’t feel the need to ground my arguments in an appeal to some ahistorical, pregiven fact of childhood. From the point of view of history, childhood is a political achievement — one to be prized, I might add. Science, for me, constitutes a part of the history that enables certain ideals of childhood to be imagined, sometimes a very useful or instructive part, but it’s only a part and (again, for me) not a necessarily authoritative or overriding voice.
There’s so much more discussion to be had on these questions, though — on the question of agency, for instance, and in particular of the limits (or otherwise) to children’s agency. There’s also a great deal still to be debated over the more directly relevant question of “sexualisation”, especially concerning the various practices that underpin such sexualisation, whether the ends or logics of such practices are identical and uniform in their political effects (and hence desirableness).
I’ve got a few thoughts on these questions, but it looks like people have moved on (or I’ve scared them away) and are no longer interested, so I’ll leave it at that….
Cheers
I find it alarming that our government is funding these purity balls. Many of the churches promoting this stuff are Reconstructionist denominations. Reconstructionists follow the teachings of John Rousas Rushdoony and Gary North, and their goal is to eventually take over America and install their brand of faith as the state religion.
Here are a couple of websites that will show you what these folks really believe:
http://0rz.com/?vDVsP
http://0rz.com/?vcDYg
http://0rz.com/?NsCrB
And, here is a link for VisionForum, a HUGE promoter of the Purity Ball concept and one of America’s leading homeschooling curriculum companies. VisionForum is run by Doug Phillips, son of ex-Reagan cabinet member Howard Phillips and pastor of Boerne Christian Assembly, a hyper-patriarchal Reconstructionist congregation where women are relegated to virtual slavery in their own homes, denied higher education, are not permitted to participate in prayer in the church services, make prayer requests in church, or even receive communion unless it is served to them by their husband or another male member of the congregation.
http://www.visionforum.com/
The Phillipses are quite the father and son team, too — Howard Phillips is the founder of the Constitution Party, whose 2004 presidential nominee was League of the South member Michael Peroutka. While the Constitution Party courted the votes of the League of the South and other Southern hate groups in 2004, Howard’s son, Pastor Doug, was hard at work garnering the Christian vote, encouraging his congregation to vote for Peroutka and warning them that they were not spiritually “at liberty” to vote for the Bush or Kerry because of their unBiblical stances on key issues.
And our government is funding father-daughter dinner dances for these groups. Sweet.