A Queensland surgeon was quoted in the Sunday Mail report as saying that between five and ten per cent of young women want to look like the former Big Brother contestant Krystal Forscutt (in Giles, 2008). Cosmetic surgery practitioners are cashing in on the body angst of girls and women, with growing numbers of teenage girls having breast implants. A Cosmopolitan report noted:
Young women—many still in their early teens—are lining up in record numbers to get fake breasts… When Amy, a beautiful 18-year-old, performed well in her final year of high school, her parents threw her a graduation party. But to really reward her for a job well done, they bought her a special gift: fake breasts. “I just felt as though I wouldn’t be complete without them,” says Amy, who went from an A-cup to a C-cup… “I could have gotten a new car, but I’d much rather have bigger breasts. Now,” she says, “I feel like a real woman” (in de la Cruz, 2004, p. 129).
Thanks to the globalisation of the body-beautiful mantra, similar things are happening in almost every part of the world. A feature in India Today opens:
Dating her classmate was fun for Priyanka Sood, but keeping up with his demands was not. After a year, he began pressuring her to improve her vital statistics because she didn’t look “hot” enough in her halters and tube tops. So, at 16, she went under the surgeon’s scalpel to enhance her bust because she could not deal with the rejection. While admitting that she underwent a serious surgery at such a raw age, this teenager has absolutely no regrets. Now 18, Sood believes she is more confident than she was at 16 and besides, “I look great in my swim suit,” she says (in Bhupta and Pai, 2007, p. 57).
The makers of a UK Channel 4 documentary ‘The Sex Education Show v Pornography,’ screened in March 2009, showed photographs of ten pairs of breasts to a group of boys from Sheringham High School in Norfolk. According to a Guardian article (Campbell, March 30, 2009):
All say the most attractive are the ones that have been surgically enhanced. Alarmingly, a posse of their female classmates says the same thing. Both sexes are unimpressed with normal breasts, which—unlike porn stars’ silicone-boosted chests—are often not symmetrical and sit down, not up.
Almost half the girls at Sheringham High School were unhappy with their breasts.
Even small children get the message that the real thing just isn’t good enough. My Beautiful Mommy, a 2008 book by a Florida plastic surgeon, Michael Salzhauer, is written to explain mummy’s new makeover. The book’s front cover shows mummy in body hugging pants and snug top, enhancing her pert new breasts. Surrounding her is pink stardust, as though she’s been touched by a fairy. What girl doesn’t find sparkly stardust appealing? Maybe the magic cosmetic surgeon will visit them too one day? A more fitting title would be, ‘If mommy’s not good enough maybe I’m not either?’
The nerve-paralysing poison, botox, is being pitched to young women as a ‘preventative’ against wrinkles. Teenage girls ashamed of their pubic hair are also subjecting themselves to brazilian waxes. A thirteen-year-old girl I know received photos of hair-free genitals on her mobile phones from schoolboys who asked her when she was going to get hers ‘done.’
Because of the way pornography shapes expectations, young people are increasingly repulsed by a woman’s unmodified body. To take another example from the Channel 4 documentary mentioned above, when the program-makers showed boys and girls an image of a woman with pubic hair, they gasped.
Girl.com.au is a Melbourne-based website allegedly devoted to ‘empowering girls.’ In 2008, the site’s home page was promoting brazilian waxing along with High School Musical Two, Playschool, Fisher-Price smart toys for pre-schoolers and Barbie Princess dolls. The site’s creators wrote, ‘Nobody really likes hair in their private regions and it has a childlike appeal. Men love it, and are eternally curious about it.’ The creators seemed to have no problem combining waxing, men and childlike appeal in the one sentence.2
The disempowering adults at Girl.com.au seemed to think it a fine thing for girls and women to regularly submit themselves to a painful process in order to imitate the genital regions of prepubescent girls and to please ‘curious’ men. Promoting waxing to young girls leads them to despise their natural bodies, increasing their angst by making them feel there is something wrong with them for preferring to avoid hot wax on their body’s most delicate regions.
A Philadelphia Magazine article (Denny, 2008) describes mothers taking their pre-pubescent daughters to salons for beauty treatments. Some mothers requested waxing for their daughters even though there was nothing to remove. A paediatrician quoted in the article quipped that she was thinking of writing a book called Where has all the pubic hair gone?—she almost never sees it.
The Lolita Effect
We see in these examples a phenomenon identified by M. Gigi Durham as the Lolita Effect, that is, ‘the distorted and delusional set of myths about girls’ sexuality that circulates widely in our culture and throughout the world’ (2008, p. 12). Girls are encouraged ‘to flirt with a decidedly grown-up eroticism and sexuality.’
One mother described the impact of these myths on her thirteen-year-old daughter, in a poignant letter to The Age (Melbourne):
I AM THE mother of a 13-year-old girl. She is not overly developed, she does not wear makeup, she is aware of her burgeoning sexuality, but a little daunted by it and curious of it. Whenever I go out with her—be it to a shopping centre, a walk down the road or picking her up from school—she is gawked at, wolf-whistled and stared at by men usually aged in their 20s and 30s.
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2 Under pressure, the gushing endorsement of pubic hair ripping was removed from their website.
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It doesn’t matter that she is standing with her mother. They do not hesitate for a second. They wave and gesticulate while she’s sitting in the car next to me. Her girlfriends also suffer this indignity.
I believe this is the result of the sexualisation of children that some men think it’s fine to lust after them—and not just fine, but acceptable. It doesn’t matter if they see revulsion, fear or confusion because they’re looking at these girls’ faces. The girls are totally objectified… I don’t think it even enters these men’s heads that it is not only offensive, but frightening to attract naked lust when you are only 13 (Morris, 2007, p. 8).
It was also considered acceptable for images of a little girl depicted childishly yet with make-up and adult jewellery, to be mixed in with images of torture porn in Australia’s leading arts magazine. Critics were told they just didn’t understand art. In 2008, this young girl featured on the cover and, reclining naked and made-up, on the inside pages of Art Monthly Australia. The issue was intended by the editors as a defence of Bill Henson and his photos of pre-pubescent boys and girls, which had sparked significant debate in Australia (see Bray, this volume). The girl in Art Monthly was positioned alongside images of semi-naked and bound women with protruding sex organs, a Japanese schoolgirl trussed in rope and suspended with her skirt raised to reveal her underwear, and an image of a woman being bound with the tentacles of an octopus as it performs oral sex on her (Tankard Reist, 2008).
In so many ways, little girls are growing up in the shadow cast by a pornographic vision of sexuality.
Girl selling
In the year 2000, the International Labour Organisation estimated there were 1.8 million children being exploited in the commercial sex industry (ILO, 2008, p. 2). UNICEF’s report State of the World’s Children for 2006 gives an estimate of two million children now enslaved in this trade (ILO, 2008, p. 2).
The children are put to work in brothels, massage parlours and strip clubs. They are used to produce pornography. Violence and abuse are part of their daily lives. Writing this now, I can see the faces of the ethnic Vietnamese girls I met in Cambodia, being cared for by the Christian organisation which had rescued them from unspeakable terrors. Small human fodder for the facilitation of masturbation by men of all ethnicities, they suffered physical and mental injuries. One had a c
olostomy bag. Another had surgery to repair internal damage. Another was mentally beyond repair. Some of the girls were used to make pornographic films, which could be purchased for $US1.50 only blocks from where they were now living. Two village girls were about to travel to Los Angeles to testify against their American abuser, a daunting prospect that their carers feared might add further trauma to their already scarred selves.
This is the ultimate outworking of the sexualising of girls. M. Gigi Durham describes the links between sexualisation and girl selling:
Dressed up in the clothing made cute and seemingly innocuous by the Bratz, the Pussycat Dolls, and the juniors’ styles bedecked with sleazy slogans, child sex workers are living embodiments of Lolita. They take the implications of the Lolita Effect to the ultimate conclusion: that young girls’ bodies are an appropriate element of sexual commerce. The scale of this enterprise is monstrous…The children involved are as young as toddlers, sometimes even babies…[Children] are garmented in the skimpy skirts, bustiers, thong underwear, and transparent tops of the Lolita Effect (2008, p. 205).
These links between sexualisation and the selling of girls become even more sinister in Third World contexts, where the sexual exploitation of very young girls, so often for the benefit of western male tourists, is on open display. As Durham further notes:
Peter Landesman of the New York Times Magazine describes child prostitutes in Mexico ‘in stilettos and spray-on-tight neon vinyl and satin or skimpy leopard-patterned outfits.’ The New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof writes about ‘Chai Hour’ in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where young teenage girls ‘in skimpy white outfits’ stand in glass cages to be rented for sex. An Economist story depicts young Vietnamese girl prostitutes in heavy makeup and Gucci high-heeled sandals. Lisa Ling’s documentary Slave Girls of India shows a madam in an Indian brothel bragging about her ‘baby beauties.’ It’s no wonder, then, that when we see these outfits in the children’s sections of department stores, or in Halloween costume catalogs, or in media targeted to kids, some of us are creeped out (2008, p. 206).
In the transmission of messages to girls about their role in providing round-the-clock sexual come-ons, the media acts in many ways as a de facto pimp for the prostitution and pornography industries.
The impact of pornography: girls as service stations for boys
We don’t have to travel overseas to see the way the Lolita image is traded as sexual merchandise. Adult sex magazines encouraging sex with young girls, rape and incest, are easily accessible in corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations in Australia (and elsewhere), although thanks to women like Julie Gale, at fewer petrol stations than previously (see Gale, this volume). The young women in these magazines are supposed to be over eighteen. In some cases, this is questionable. But even if they are over eighteen, the models are often posed and styled to look much younger, with toys, braces, pigtails and other accoutrements of childhood (Tankard Reist, 2008). In the words of Pamela Paul (2005, p. 198), ‘the desire for a child and the desire for a childlike woman blur and overlap’ in these materials.
Pornography has become the handbook of sex education for many boys. An estimated 70 per cent of boys have seen pornography by the age of twelve and 100 per cent by the age of fifteen (Scobie, 2007, p. 35). Girls are also increasingly exposed to pornographic images. In her research for Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers, Australian author Joan Sauers found that 53.5 per cent of girls twelve and under in Australia have seen pornography, 97 per cent by the age of sixteen (2007, p. 80).3
Fourteen-year-old girls are even looking to pornography for guidance. ‘I just copied what i had seen from porn, he enjoyed it,’ a girl of this age told Sauers (2007, p. 53). The main aim seems to be the boy’s enjoyment, even when a girl is in pain. Some girls in Sauers’ study reported being in pain but allowing their partners to continue in order to make them happy; the girls ‘put up with it’ to make sex enjoyable for their boyfriends (in Sauers, 2007, p. 57). They were treated like crash-test dummies, not intimate partners. Another girl wrote: ‘it really hurt, I bled, but I let him keep going, he seemed happy. i really regretted it after doing it, but there wasn’t much I could do, I just felt way too young and that it was too early.’ This girl was aged 13 (in Sauers, 2007, p. 57).
Even magazines that are not explicitly pornographic in intent often promote a view of girls as service stations for boys.4 A 2007 issue of Dolly—read by girls not yet in their teens—contained a section entitled ‘OMG my boyfriend wants me to…’, followed by three sexual acts: ‘Give him “head”,’ ‘Have anal sex’ and ‘Give him a hand job’ (Dolly, August 2007, p. 141). Dolly gave a clinical description of each act. There was no mention that the girl might be physically or psychologically hurt or violated, or that it might be a crime depending on their respective ages.
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3 More statistics on young people’s exposure to porn can be found at: http://www.enough.org/inside.php?id=2UXKJWRY8. See also Flood and Hamilton, ‘Regulating youth access to pornography,’ Australia Institute, 2003.
4 The expression ‘girls are like a service station for boys’ comes from Liz Perle, vice president of Common Sense Media. Girls in these sexual relationships are the ‘pleasure providers’ (in Durham, 2008, p. 55).
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Girls are expected to possess a sexual knowingness at increasingly younger ages. They learn not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired (Wolf, 1991, p. 157). Girls who want romance must pay for it with sexual tokens. This is the advice for those looking to be romanced by their partner given in the Q&A section ‘Paging Doctor Love’ from Famous Weekly (June 11, 2007, p. 56):
Q: How can I get my partner to do more romantic things?
A: Promise him wild sex in return for romance and be sure to deliver—then keep rewarding him like that.
The magazine then goes on to dispense advice to romance-seeking women who aren’t enthusiastic deliverers of oral sex.
Ten years ago, in The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer was already observing the way magazines endorsed a role for girls as pleasure providers. Her words apply even more today:
The cynicism of the merchandisers of bad-girl culture is perfectly reflected in the brutal lay-out of girls’ magazines…From them the emerging girl learns that the only life worth living is a life totally out of control, disrupted by debt, disordered eating, drunkenness, drugs and casual sex…The little girl who pores over this sinister muck has no way of knowing whether the life described is real or not…they [tell] them that any sexual interaction is better than none; that a cool girl gives hand-jobs and head, fakes orgasm and has less flesh on her limbs than a sparrow (Greer, 1999, pp. 313–314).
The rhetoric of empowerment becomes the face of degradation.
Wendy Shalit puts the point well in Girls Gone Mild, in writing about nineteen-year-old Debbie who appeared in a ‘scene’ for a Girls Gone Wild video. Debbie was upset about ‘not doing it’ right for the camera; she just couldn’t get excited. Shalit observes: ‘Debbie is publicly sexual while remaining utterly alienated from her own sexuality’ (2007, p. xii).
No matter what spin is put on it, however, degradation is not empowerment. To apply a question asked by Ariel Levy in 2005: ‘Why is this the “new feminism” and not what it looks like: the old objectification?’ (Levy, 2005, p. 81).
Pornography is also used to groom children for sex, normalising graphic depictions of sex acts in a child’s psyche. Growing numbers of children are even acting out on other children what they have seen in porn.5
It was reported in 2008 that a group of six-year-old boys ran a ‘sex club’ at a Brisbane primary school, threatening girls who refused to comply. The Courier Mail reported the case of a seven-year-old girl performing oral sex on a boy during lunchtime: ‘The witness said the boy had menaced the girl and threatened her with violence’ (September 13, 2008).
Pornography presents women as live sex toys, and men as wild and predatory animals. It makes the abuse of women inviti
ng and erotic. Pornography’s scripts (‘command the bitches’) are being acted out in real life in Australian cities and towns, involving younger and younger boys and girls. We are seeing more of the male sexual bonding rituals in which girls are seen as conquests, there to be degraded. Kerry Carrington, writing of the murder of fourteen-year-old Leigh Leigh at a party in Newcastle, Australia, described these rituals of sexual conquest as the ‘product of a social chemistry forged on a dangerous cocktail of mateship and machismo’ (Carrington, 1998, p. 163), arguing that ‘Girls are the pawns in this ritual demonstration of sexual vigour’ (1998, p. 161).
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5 The Ninth Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in November 2003 was told by staff from the Child at Risk Assessment Unit at the Canberra Hospital that exposure to X-rated pornography was a significant factor in children younger than ten-years-old sexually abusing other children. In the first six months of 2003, 48 children under ten were identified as having engaged in sexually abusive acts. Access to graphic sexual images had shaped the trend (Stanley et al., 2003). In the UK, the number of cases in which children received court orders or warnings for sex offences has jumped by twenty per cent in the past three years; experts say that the youth behaviour has been changed by ready access to sexual imagery on the internet (This is London, March 3, 2007).
Getting Real Page 3
