I’ve been accused of ‘hysterical hyperbole’ by the post-modern fervent intellectual champions of the powerful. That’s fine. But I’ll keep raising the issue and encouraging the thousands of worried parents, and others who care deeply, to think, to speak up and to demand that children be protected from this subversive and manipulative exploitation.
Noni Hazlehurst, Melbourne, June 2009
INTRODUCTION
The Pornification of Girlhood: We Haven’t Come a Long Way Baby
Melinda Tankard Reist
Publicly sexual
In 2009, former Hi-5 children’s entertainer Kellie Crawford posed for a lingerie photo shoot for men’s magazine Ralph. The Ralph cover for April features Kellie in tiny knickers and black bra, and shouts ‘It’s Hi5 Hottie Kellie!’ with the subtitle ‘Busting out some bedtime stories.’ It includes another smaller picture of Kellie in her Hi5 costume.
In the accompanying interview, Kellie explained that as a children’s star, she ‘just forgot I was a woman.’ She did the photo shoot to ‘find the woman in me.’
I responded in media interviews by asking why it was that the Wiggles were not expected to prove their manhood by stripping down to their jocks and having their photos taken for a magazine shoot, yet women were expected to take off most of their clothes to prove their womanhood? Opponents of my position, both men and women, filled my inbox with intellectually challenging arguments. These included:
That I was sad, old and dog-ugly
That I had saggy breasts and a droopy arse
That I needed liposuction
That I was a bitter ugly woman
That my face would break a 60-inch plasma television
And, my personal favourite, that I was ‘as ugly as a hat full of arses’ (obviously not a hat full of Kellie’s arses, because hers was magnificent, according to her fans) (email correspondence, April 2009).
However, one little girl in Victoria who seemed not to care about whether I was bitter or needed cosmetic surgery, wrote (email April 20, 2009, used with permission):
My name is Delaney and I am 10 years old. On Today Tonight I saw a story about Kellie from Hi-5. Of course, you know that she has done a photo shoot for a men’s magazine. I think it is very silly how she feels she has to do it. It sets a horrible example for younger kids like me. When I was little I used to love watching Hi-5 and it makes me feel dissappointed [sic] that she has done something like that.
Delaney, and girls like her, receive messages from every level of the media and popular culture that the baring of the female body is what makes you a ‘real woman.’ Very few young girls have Delaney’s courage to distance themselves from this message. Ideal womanhood is now all about sexual allure; the ability to attract the male gaze has become what is important in life. As Pamela Paul writes in Pornified, ‘being publicly sexual has become the only acceptable way for girls to demonstrate maturity’ (2005, p. xxiv).
Putting yourself on show for the sexual gratification of others is what counts. Look at what happened after Susan Boyle’s stunning performance of ‘I have a dream’ on Britain’s Got Talent which had attracted 100 million YouTube hits at time of writing (June 2009). One of her first offers was from a porn film company keen to ‘relieve her of her virginity’—on film of course (http://evilbeetgossip.film.com/2009/04/22/susan-boyle-offered-1m-to-lose-her-virginity-on-camera/).1
The sexualisation industry has a voracious appetite for appropriating and corrupting people and things deemed ‘innocent,’ and remaking them in their own image. There are thousand of porn sites featuring children’s cartoon characters. And a growing number of sites depicting the ‘defloration’ of young girls.
Bearing the brunt
Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls argues that girls should not be objectified in this way. Girls are worth so much more than this. Our contributors take us on a troubling journey across the culture in which we are trying to raise happy, healthy, resilient girls, and demonstrate that much needs to change if this is ever going to be possible. Collectively and compellingly, the writers here show how adult sexual concepts are seeping into girlworld, co-opting girls into a XXX world well before they understand what is happening.
Even in ordinary everyday places, there is material that is deeply disturbing. Julie Gale, for example, exposes porn magazines sold in corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations, as well as porn-related products found in family shopping malls. Some readers might take offence at what appears in this book and wish they hadn’t picked it up. But care needs to be taken not to shoot the messenger. We should be troubled and disturbed by the way pornified messaging stalks girls and boys and threatens their healthy development.
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1 Not that Susan hasn’t been humiliated before. Twenty years earlier, when she appeared on another talent show, My Kind of People, judge Michael Barrymore spent half the performance lying on the floor looking up her dress. After standing up, he ran his hands around his crotch area, while she continued to sing ‘I don’t know how to love him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar. At the end he grabbed Susan and forced his lips onto her mouth (it would be a misuse of the word to call it a kiss): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9WS3z3jAw
* * *
Girls are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological well-being at risk in many new ways. In The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes: ‘More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne the brunt of twentieth-century social change, and we ignore that fact at our peril’ (1997, p. 214). The proliferation and globalisation of sexual imagery, along with sexualised clothing, music, games and magazine content for girls, and the social imperative of a perfect body, are all part of this social change.
The pressure to conform to an idealised body type in a sex-saturated culture that values girls who are thin, hot, sexy and ‘bad’ is taking a terrible toll. Despite the many opportunities at school, university and in the workplace available to them, girls today are struggling. Courtney E. Martin (2007) describes it as ‘the frightening new normalcy of hating your body.’ Self-hatred is so prevalent, it’s like a rite of passage for teenage girls.
The 2007 report of the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on the Sexualisation of Girls (APA TSG, 2007, p. 3) links the objectifying and sexualising of girls and young women with the most common health problems suffered by them.
Objectification is reinforced through embedded sexual content everywhere we look. According to the APA, ‘A culture can be infused with sexualised representations of girls and women, suggesting that such sexualisation is good and normal’ (p. 3). The Report argues that this leads to girls and women feeling bad about themselves (p. 23):
…there is evidence that sexualisation contributes to impaired cognitive performance in college-aged women, and related research suggests that viewing material that is sexually objectifying can contribute to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self-esteem, depressive affect, and even physical health problems in high-school-aged girls and in young women.
In addition to leading to feelings of shame and anxiety, sexualizing treatment and self-objectification can generate feelings of disgust toward one’s physical self. Girls may feel they are “ugly” and “gross” or untouchable.
Supersexualise me
In the past it was often adult women who understood that their bodies were being pulled apart bit by bit and analysed for imperfections and flaws. Women understood the imperative to be sexy, a message shored up by advertising propaganda, which works ‘to deny women’s humanity, to present them not as whole people but as fetishised, dismembered “bits,” as objects’ (Gill, 2009).
Now this understanding has come to younger girls, who learn to see that they too are always at risk of failing.
Courtney Martin (2007, p. 1) has noted that many girls say they would rather be hit by a truck than be fat. I know of a fit and healthy five-yea
r-old who won’t go swimming because, she says, people would laugh at her and say she’s too fat. Eight-year-old girls are admitted to hospital with eating disorders. Schoolgirls develop ranking systems on the basis of ‘hotness,’ resulting in guaranteed misery for the girl with the lowest ranking. Cyberspace has become a central arena for bullying where girls are universally judged. Many feel they are dying a social death and disintegrate emotionally. For some, emotional disintegration leads to physical disintegration with the ultimate tragic outcome.
Girls internalise the body critiquing messages of shows like Extreme Makeover and America’s Next Top Model and its Australian version. The program Ten Years Younger in Ten Days puts couples in glass boxes at Sydney’s Circular Quay so that 100 passers-by can tell us what they think of their looks. ‘She looks like she just gave up,’ commented one viewer (Channel 7, May 12, 2009) before the transformation begins, and the women have their faces pumped full of botox and fillers until they look like chipmunks with cheeks so plump they can hardly talk, their feet stuffed into heels so high they can barely walk.
The main character of Twilight, Stephenie Meyer’s book series (2005-2008) and blockbuster film consumed by girls around the world, yearns to be a vampire like her romantic hero Edward. He and his vampire family are impossibly beautiful, ‘Greek god’ like, with perfect teeth, lips and skin and bodies. They are rich, have the best clothes and drive fast cars. While there are one or two salutary messages in this series—for example, Edward is sexually restrained (OMG!)—the emphasis on physical perfection and its potential impact on millions of young readers cannot be ignored.
English girl Sasha Bennington absorbed today’s messages about what constitutes female beauty early:
Sasha…has a spray tan once a week and a new set of acrylic nails once a month. Her hair is bleached white-blonde and regularly boosted with a set of extensions. She plucks her eyebrows and carefully applies makeup every morning. Her favourite outfit is a white satin boob-tube dress and Stetson hat. But Sasha isn’t a Vegas showgirl—she goes to primary school and only turned 11 last week [italics in original]. While most children her age have been desperately waiting for the arrival of the new Harry Potter, little Sasha has been hanging on for her heroine Jordan’s latest book. She says, ‘I’m obsessed with her’ (in Ley, 2007).
Sasha’s bedroom, the UK Sun article tells us, is ‘a pink shrine to Playboy, with a Playboy door curtain, satin duvet set, Playboy pillows and pyjamas.’ Her mother orders Playboy clothing for her daughter from the USA. For Sasha, the thought of not being pretty is just too awful to contemplate: ‘My mum would just call me ugly. Everyone would call me ugly. I wouldn’t like that at all.’
Playboy make-up, including ‘Tie me to the bedpost blush’ and ‘Hef’s favorite lip gloss’ (in colours ‘Centerfold Red,’ ‘Sex Kitten’ and ‘Playmate Pink’) is marketed to girls, along with Playboy doona covers and pencil cases. Girls are wearing the brand of the global sex industry directed by a sleazy 80-year-old man in silk pyjamas and they think it’s about cute rabbits. When Hugh Hefner was asked by the Washington Post about a growing trend among young girls to wear Playboy-logo clothing and accessories, he replied, ‘I don’t care if a baby holds up a Playboy bunny rattle’ (Sessions Stepp, 2008).
More generally, children’s underwear is described as reflecting moods which are ‘frisky, seductive or mysteriously alluring’ (http://www.jellydeal.co.uk/girls-underwear.html), and padded decorative bras and g-strings are sold in the children’s wear sections of department stores. T-shirts for babies include slogans such as ‘Breast Fed Baby: Stick around for the show,’ ‘All daddy wanted was a blow job,’ ‘Hung like a five year old,’ ‘F!# the milk, where’s the whiskey tits,’ ‘I tore mummy a new one,’ ‘I enjoy a good spanking,’ and ‘I’m too sexy for my diaper.’
What was once considered unthinkable is now ordinary. Children are no longer out of bounds for anything. Pornographic material became pervasive in the public space of adult culture; now it has worked its way into childhood, even into the crib.
The performance model of female sexuality
Everywhere girls are presented with a performance model of female sexuality. They are ‘being invited to see themselves not as healthy, active and imaginative girls, but as hot and sassy tweens on the prowl’, write Emma Rush and Andrea La Nauze in ‘Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia’ (2006, p. 23).
In 2008, the Vassarette underwear brand went searching to ‘find the most talented female musicians confident enough to perform in their bras’ (http://www.thevassarettes.com/, content quoted since removed due to the ‘band’s’ tour ending—but watch out for the ‘reunion tour’). Apparently, to sing with a top on means you lack confidence. Emily says, ‘Singing in my Vassarette bra makes it even more exciting. I got my first bra when I was 12. Now, I love getting up on that stage in my bra and proving to the world that women are amazing and unstoppable.’ And who does she thank for her inspiration? ‘That’s easy. My Mom. She’s the strongest, most beautiful woman I know. She taught me women can love their bodies and be sexy at any bra size. Wearing my RealSexy-DoubleDelight bra on stage makes me understand that more than ever.’
The pornification of young women is carried out under the guise of being in ‘her own interest.’ Cleverly, this process has become linked with the support of ‘good causes’ such as care for the environment.
It is becoming more routine for women to be expected to strip off for a good cause. On the cover of the June 2009 issue of Rolling Stone, the young Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr is depicted naked and chained to a tree. This is because she wants to save koalas. Most environmentalists seem content to chain themselves to trees with their clothes on—and it certainly helps lessen the chances of a koala scratch or a splinter in the bum. Miranda says she wants to ‘make a positive difference…especially for young women’ (Moran, 2009).
So, if you’re a young woman and you want to make a positive difference, get your clothes off. You can’t possibly expect to change the world fully clothed. Are girls included in important causes and debates only for the contribution they can make in ‘sexing up’ the issue?
And if you’re a young woman working for the man, it’s not a bad idea to wear a g-string in the office. In a 2006 article in The Guardian entitled ‘Today’s ultimate feminists are the chicks in crop tops,’ Kate Taylor points out the advantages of wearing the thong: it will cause men in the office to ‘waste whole afternoons staring at your bottom, placing bets on whether you’re wearing underwear.’ You should let them do so, Taylor writes, because you can ‘use that time to take over the company’ while they are distracted (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/mar/23/comment.gender).
Music video clips present women in highly sexualised ways, often as adornments, decorations and sexual play-things. A 2009 clip featuring Ciara and Justin Timberlake, Love Sex Magic, depicts multiple scenes of Ciara presenting her backside to Timberlake. He is seated and fully clothed. She is on the ground, backside in the air or legs spread. At one point he spanks her. A black woman, Ciara is also shown in a tiger stripe body suit behind bars as if she were a caged jungle animal, and with a chain on her neck pulled by Timberlake, bringing to mind slavery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTYT-SiZeFo).
The enmeshing of sex industry practices throughout the culture can be observed in the rise of ‘sexting,’ where teens and even pre-teens exchange sexual images of themselves via mobile phones. In a 2008 survey by the US National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, one out of five teens reported that they have ‘electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves’ (www.thenationalcampaign.org/sextech/). Girls as young as thirteen send explicit photos of themselves to others. A survey by Girlfriend magazine found four in ten readers had been asked to take a nude photo and forward it (Saurine, 2009; see also ‘Alarm at teenage “sexting” traffic,’ Bittersby, 2008).
Added to—and further fuelling�
�all these trends is the frequency of sex-based stunts in the public domain we all share. As an example of just how common this has become, on May 6, 2009, male radio announcers on 2Day FM radio in Sydney (in a show syndicated around the country) held a competition in the station office to see who could masturbate the fastest and who had the largest sperm count. They were each given a porn magazine and sent to the cordoned off toilets for the competition. Female host Jackie O, whose husband took part, cut and pasted photos of her head onto the female porn stars’ bodies to ‘help’ him.
When the competition is over, one of the men wipes his ‘sticky’ hand in Jackie O’s hair. Her co-host Kyle is declared the winner, having produced the most sperm in the fastest time. He is very proud of himself. The photo gallery on the 2Day FM website declared, ‘See Jackie get a hairful, take a closer look at Geoff’s shirt after the incident…there is a definite stain!! And see Kyle finish first!’ (http://www.2dayfm.com.au/shows/kyleandjackieo/highlights/sperm-test).
All this on daytime radio. This is the wallpaper against which women and girls have to live—and the wallpaper against which we try to raise boys of character and respect. And we’re supposed to be blasé about it.
Body image despair, beauty rituals, breast implants, brazilians
The sexualisation of girls has seen a rise in beauty rituals and a desire for cosmetic surgery at ever younger ages. Disordered eating is on the rise. A 2006 National Youth Cultures of Eating Study (O’Dea, 2007) found that close to twenty per cent of adolescent Australian girls use fasting for two or more days to lose weight. Another thirteen per cent use vomiting. Others rely on slimming pills, chewing but not swallowing food, smoking, and laxative abuse, as found in this study. One in four twelve-year-old girls in Australia would like to have cosmetic surgery (AAP, August 12, 2007). A Sunday Mail (Brisbane) investigation in 2008 reported a twenty per cent increase in inquiries from teenage girls for plastic surgery (in Giles, 2008).
Getting Real Page 2
