Comments on: Senate report on the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media

By: Adrien

Adrien — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:34:12 +0000

I’m not sure if this is strictly off-topic but I think it might be relevant.
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After all the Henson brouhaha I noticed something I’d never seen before. One of my favourite paintings is Veronese’s Nobleman Between The Active and Contemplative Lives. There’s a bunch of people and stuff in the picture. There’s also four cherubs. What I’d never noticed before was that one of them, at the nobleman’s feet is playing with himself!
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No-one’s paying him any attention. And I hadn’t even noticed. But there’s a case that could be made that if a similar group portrait was produced today then it might face the sort of opposition that Henson faced. This would tend to happen most especially if it was a photograph but even in a painting it would provoke suspiscion.
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Why? What has changed?

By: tigtog

tigtog — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:33:13 +0000

Too much work to read the introduction to the Senate Report, Paul?

1.25 Various definitions of sexualisation have been put forward. That offered by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls is very broad and has been quoted in a number of submissions:

…sexualization occurs when

* a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behaviour, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
* a person is held to physical standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;
* a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or
* sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person.

All four conditions need not be present; any one is an indication of sexualisation.[10]

1.26 Ms Gordon in evidence to the committee noted two important elements of sexualisation:

* sexuality [that] is inappropriately and prematurely imposed on a person such as a child; and
* sexualisation where ‘a person’s only ascribed value would be their sexuality, their physical sex appeal’.[11]

1.27 It is clear from these definitions that many of the matters raised in submissions fall into the category of ’sexualisation’. However there are important distinctions to be drawn between, for example, children becoming aware of ’sex’ as an idea from billboard advertising for men’s health treatments and the explicit and deliberate sexualisation of young girls through advertising, products and attitudes which seek to develop a sexual identity of a kind that is wholly inappropriate to their stage of development or is narrowly focused on their physical sex appeal.

1.28 Thus the committee has viewed sexualisation as a continuum from the explicit targeting of children with images, attitudes and content that inappropriately and prematurely seek to impose a sexual identity on a child, through the presentation of one-dimensional and stereotypical images of children and young people, predominantly girls, in content, products and advertising directed at them, to what might be described as the ‘background noise’ of society at large where products, advertising and other materials made for and directed at adults are readily accessed by children and reinforce the sexualising messages they are receiving.

By: paul walter

paul walter — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:45:14 +0000

Already am having big problems with this amorphous”sexualisation”term after the curious misuse of the term by Clive Hamilton, Miranda Devine and others. Are we in danger of confusing” sexualisation”( whoooaa- but what does this mean?) with “commodification”or “reification”?
With “sexualisation”, who is “sexualised”; the subject or the onlooker?
If I was “sexualised”, would I grow two heads and purple scales?
In order to be commodified, do I have to be sexualised first or can they commodify/reify me some other way.
Does the nonsense we read in Dolly magazine, for example, where thirteen year old women-of-the world are invited into a (mock) sophisticated discussion concerning various efficacies of anal and oral intercourse in the most matter-of-fact ways, a form of sexualisation and does this lead to commodification/reification for a conscious and specific, in particular, mass market’
Are todays starlet’s tomorrows lushes and how much of the (modified?) behaviour is knowingly instilled?
Could this be the real crime?