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.