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.

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….

I do not accept empowerment is a universal experience for adult women at all.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

I think we need for everyone to butt back in on a permanent basis.

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:

Well Patrick, I presume you are male…

…The answers to these questions will come from women, not men.

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:

Well patrickg I for one think that Greta is right in the sense that any sense of being wholly in control is rather fleeting.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.

It’s no accident that the empowerful woman has stepped into the void left by the absence of any actual, fully-realized women.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just sayin….

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 tried to find the introduction online, but with no luck.

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.

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.