* * *
3 The phrase ‘holier-than-thou-f*cktards’ is from the blog http://fearofemeralds.livejournal.com/6261.html and the section called ‘You bastards—Bill Henson and the paedophilic gaze.’
4 See David Marr (2008) for an uncritical discussion of this event. See also Mathew Westwood and Corrie Perkin (2008) ‘Artists jump to Henson’s defence.’
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‘They’re very beautiful, they’re very, very still, they’re very formal, they’re very classical. They’re a bit like looking [sic] an ancient Greek Attic vase,’ commented Judy Annear in a Sydney Morning Herald article on May 23, 2008. And while ‘his images may take the viewer to an edge, to an uncomfortable place…it’s like great music or great literature. I don’t look at Henson’s work and see it as anything other than a broad field of possibilities’ (in Grattan, 2008). Australia’s leading cultural left journal The Monthly commented that: ‘[A]rt, at its best, often makes us feel uncomfortable. Many of us long for this discomfort, because we feel it opens onto truth’ (Smee, 2008, p. 62). Ironically, however, an uncomfortable feeling by Henson critics that the photographs were celebrating a heterosexual, paedophilic sexual aesthetic was outlawed as nothing more than a vulgar child sexual abuse moral panic.
Henson eventually triumphed—the charges were dropped after a couple of months—but in the meantime cultural critics had transformed the event into further proof that child pornography censorship legislation is limiting freedom with increasingly oppressive systems of surveillance and control. As Anna Munster (2009, p. 6) opines:
Although charges against Henson were not pressed, artistic image making will become increasingly monitored by police and concerned citizens alike and the climate for artistic ambiguity, the pursuit of difficult topics and the distribution of images will narrow.
Indeed, according to a range of experts across the disciplines, child pornography censorship legislation is one of the more nefarious symptoms of the child sexual abuse moral panics which emerged from the PC politics of 1970s feminism. In this context, not only is child pornography censorship legislation responsible for persecuting the innocent ‘brilliance’ of internationally acclaimed artists such as Henson, this ‘[d]isproportionate reaction to an exaggerated menace’ (West, 2000, p. 528) causes childhood obesity and mental illness, vigilantes and tabloid legislation, the debasing of all relationships between adults and children, the social construction of children’s sexuality and the eroticisation of innocence. As the Henson ‘affair’ demonstrated, the perception by critics that his photographs were sexualising children, was pathologised as a symptom of a dangerous child sexual abuse moral panic disorder.
However, as Mieke Bal (1993, p. 400) writes ‘[t]here are many ways of looking around; only we don’t see them because there are certain gazes that take all the authority.’ To such a critical gaze, Henson’s nocturnal photographs of thin, shy, fragile girls, his deliberate manipulation of shadow in order to draw attention to their budding breasts and hairless vaginal folds, belong to a context which goes beyond the genteel walls of upper-class art galleries and the in-bred world of art critics. This context is as unruly and uncomfortable as a streetwise recognition that while growing up, a girl too often learns the humiliating heteronormative rules of sexual inferiority from men who do not even bother to conceal their paedophilic intent and who know only too well that a child’s voice poses no threat to a culture that is governed by the voices of adult male authority. This ‘impolite’ context is populated by the whispered confessions of girls, shared warnings, fears, the countless stories of women about their childhoods, being stroked and pushed, about screams, pain, self-disgust, shame, wanting to die, wanting to break free. The girl in one of Henson’s photos reminds me of the shocking impact of sexual objectification on a child’s body. Her withdrawn, melancholic naked body reminds me of the paralysis of shame, of the humiliating interest of adult men who mask their intrusions as sexual compliments that demand gratitude not anger, obedience not rebellion. She reminds me of the discourse of Lolita, of the sexual politics of ‘jailbait,’ of films such as Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978), or Sonny Boy Williamson’s 1937 ‘Good Morning Little School Girl,’ of the incessant nudge and wink of a culture which plays with the ‘rift between decency, male interest and the profit margin’ (Rush, 1980, p. 126), of the sexual deregulation of the market place, and the global triumph of a paedophilic sexual economy. Her meek silence and downcast eyes remind me of how difficult it is to speak back to something which one is forbidden to.
Several months after the Henson affair one of his photographs was quietly auctioned in Australia for $3,800 by Menzies Art Brands. Lot 214, the black and white ‘Untitled 1985/86’ (see Henson, 2009) peers down on a naked child on the crumpled sheets of a bed, her knees bent, her legs wide open, her face turned away from the camera, her lips parted, her expression blank. She is wearing childish bangles on both arms and an ankle ‘slave’ bangle. Her hair is in a ponytail. Her vagina and budding breasts are highlighted by Henson’s trademark manipulation of shadow. The girl is anonymous. However, to see the ugly sexual political context of Henson’s photographs is to be dismissed as hysteric, prude or worse.
As Anne Higonnet (1998, p. 153) argues:
The sexualisation of childhood is not a fringe phenomenon inflicted by perverts on a protesting society, but a fundamental change furthered by legitimate industries and millions of satisfied consumers (also in its minor way by the art world).
However, the very phrase ‘sexualisation of childhood’ risks minimising a radical shift in the sexual politics of girlhood: what still remains largely unspeakable is the possibility that this historically recent change is about mainstreaming the old self-serving masculinist fantasy that girls are ‘up for it’ Lolitas. As the Bill Henson episode shows us, this very suggestion is currently being mocked as an unsophisticated moral panic. The irony is that in the name of anti-censorship, we are forbidden to name the new sexual politics of childhood. The Bill Henson episode suggests that this unofficial form of censorship is preventing important dialogues about the patterns of inequality that are being produced by the commercial exploitation of children’s sexuality. In 1980, Florence Rush (pp. 191–192) wrote that:
The concept of sexual liberation as the last frontier in the struggle for freedom closed the 1960s with The Sensuous Woman. The concept of children’s sexual liberation has closed the 1970s with The Sensuous Child. When sexual liberation becomes synonymous with political revolution a movie such as Pretty Baby can pass as a radical intelligent work of art and the new avant-garde can advise that “Every child has the right to loving relationships including sexual, with a parent, sibling, other responsible adult or child”…Today’s idea of sexual liberation and the sexual freedom of children is a euphemism for sexual exploitation, and at the rate we are going, today’s sexual freedom may well become tomorrow’s “opiate of the masses.”5
The cultural shift Rush identified almost three decades ago has, arguably, become normal to the point of invisibility. Challenging the sexualisation of girls is not the same as policing, pathologising or denying their agency. The problem is that their agency is read as sexual. They do have agency, they think, make choices, but this is not the same as adult agency. It is the relentless sexualisation of girls’ agency, and not agency itself, which is the problem. The sexualisation of girls’ agency just becomes another way of mystifying sexism when all that girls are free to do is participate in burlesque versions of older sexual stereotypes. Being sexier or having more sex doesn’t magically do away with sexism. It is surely naïve to argue that within this brave new masculinist world of compulsory sexual self-empowerment girls ‘kick ass.’
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5 The quotation is from Valida Davila, ‘A Child’s Sexual Bill of Rights,’ Sexual Freedom League Childhood Sexuality Circle, cited in Rush (1980, p. 192).
* * *
As Rosalind Gill points out in ‘Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemp
orary Advertising’ (2008) ‘[T]he figure of the “unattractive” woman who seeks a sexual partner remains one of the most vilified in popular culture…’ The unattractive, desperate, needy loser circulates as a cruel warning to girls about the dangers of not being sexy enough. The monotonously transgressive sexualisation of girls and women carries new forms of sexual humiliation: to be sexy or not to be sexy is no longer the question—one must be sexy if one is to escape social humiliation. Just as ‘victim’ has become a code word for a failure to take responsibility for one’s choices, the new culture of sexual humiliation is disguised as nothing more than a girl’s failure to ‘kick ass.’
In an era in which challenging the commercial sexualisation of girls has become equated with a disempowering denial of children’s agency, the responsibility of adult agency and adult corporations is frequently airbrushed out of the all too glamorous picture. Just as it has become cool to argue that girls are no longer innocent victims but rather self-empowered sexual agents, artists such as Henson have become the innocent victims of child sexual abuse moral panics. To put it another way, in the name of sexual liberation the bodies of children have been emptied of ‘innocence’ while artists such as Henson have instead become the new innocents, strangely passive, vulnerable and in need of protection, the new victims of moral panics about children.
We need to unmask the political ‘innocence’ of artists such as Henson, and more broadly, of a culture that trades in the sexual commodification and humiliation of girls. Far from offering girls new forms of social power, the sexualisation of girls’ agency is imposing a new tyranny of compulsive and desperate sexual participation.
It is vital that we continue to ask whose gaze and whose history is being silenced by the panic about child sexual abuse moral panics. If prohibitions are now circulating which are preventing a critical engagement with the sexual politics of the corporate and artistic sexualisation of children, then surely it is vital that we shake off this cruel and blind neoliberal indifference and begin to worry about why we no longer dare to speak out. Perhaps, in the end, the lesson of Bill Henson’s photographs is that it is vital that new thinking about the sexualisation of children interrupts this cool indifference and opens up cultural spaces in which we have the courage to see differently.
References
Bal, Micke (1993) ‘His master’s eye’ in D. Levin (Ed) Modernity and Hegemony of Vision. University of California Press, Berkeley. pp. 370–404.
Bray, Abigail (2009) ‘Governing the gaze: child sexual abuse moral panics and the post-feminist blind spot’ Feminist Media Studies, 9 (2), pp. 173–191.
Fearofemeralds (2008) ‘Bill Henson and the paedophilic gaze’ May 25, http://fearofemeralds.livejournal.com/6261.html
Gill, Rosalind (2008) ‘Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising’ Feminism & Psychology 18; 35 http://fap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/18/1/35
Grattan, Michelle (2008) ‘Is the art fuss justified?’ Sydney Morning Herald, May 25, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/michelle-grattan/is-the-art-fuss-justified-2008/05/24/1211183174659.html
Henson, Bill (2009) ‘Untitled 1985/86’ at http://www.menziesartbrands.com.cgi?file=DM=15772.jpg&text=&width=400 accessed 23 June, 2009.
Higonnet, Anne (1998) Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crises of Ideal Childhood. Thames and Hudson, London.
Marr, David (2008) The Henson Case. Text Publishing, Melbourne.
Munster, Anna (2009) ‘The Henson photographs and the “network” condition’ Continuum, 32 (1), pp. 3–12.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1958) Lolita. Putman, New York.
Phillip, Richard (2008) ‘Australia: Labor Government Backs Witch-hunting of Photographer Bill Henson’ World Socialist Web, May 26, http://www.wsw.org/articles/2008/may2008/raidsm26-prn.shtml
Rush, Florence (1980) The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Shanahan, Leo (2008) ‘After the outrage’ The Age, July 11, http://www.theage.com.au/national/after-the-outrage-henson-steps-out-among-friends–to-defend-art-and-artists-20080710-3d6p.htm
Smee, Sebastian (2008) ‘Unsettled’ The Monthly: Australian Politics, Society and Culture, November, pp. 60–62.
Sydney Morning Herald (2008) ‘Henson a “whipping boy”’ May 23, http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/henson-a-whippingboy.2008/05/23/12118306044/8.html
The Australian (2008) ‘A good outcome’ June 7, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23823316-16382,60.html
Wells, Hal M. (1978) The Sensuous Child. Stein and Day, New York.
West, D. (2000) ‘Pedophilia: plague or panic?’ Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 11 (3), pp. 511–31.
Westwood, Mathew and Perkin, Corrie (2008) ‘Artists jump to Henson’s defence’ The Weekend Australian, May 24–25, p. 2.
Media Glamourising of Prostitution and Other Sexually Exploitive Cultural Practices that Harm Children
Melissa Farley
The contemptuous, sexually degrading treatment of women by men is so pervasive and so mainstream in the media today that it has almost lost its ability to shock us (Herbert, 2006). The message to girls is that they ‘… should always be sexually available, always have sex on their minds, be willing to be dominated and even sexually aggressed against’ (Merskin, 2004, p. 120).
Prostitution behaviours are part of what it means to be female today. Trained by popular western culture, girls learn to present a hypersexualised, prostitution-like version of themselves to the world. Ariel Levy described the ‘imaginary licentiousness’ that girls enact in order to appear grown up. One girl explained, ‘Sexually, we didn’t really do anything, but you wanted to look like you did’ (Levy, 2005, p. 150).
Today, children are enacting the sex of prostitution. Casually fellating boys at parties is normative for girls, according to a recent Canadian article. One girl repeated the classic pimp’s argument for prostitution, noting that if she was already fellating two or three boys every weekend at parties for free, she might as well do the same with five or six boys and get paid for it (Hanon, 2009).
Introducing children to a culture of sexual violence, web-based pornography bombards children with images of graphic and brutal exploitation of women. No hint of tenderness or intimacy is revealed in these Internet photographs. Boys who use the Internet are systematically groomed to be the next generation of pay-for-porn customers. They are also taught to normalise the buying of sex. One in three children who are online receive unwanted pornography. ‘I go to web sites about racing dirt bikes,’ said one boy, ‘and when I’m on there pop-up ads come up with naked pictures of girls and guys’ (Wolak et al., 2006).
Even though it is well established that pornography and video games powerfully influence real-life behaviour, we are told that they are mere fantasy and have nothing to do with real-life rape. But if fantasy has nothing to do with reality, why is advertising a multibillion dollar industry? In fact, advertising uses fantasy to influence reality. Twenty-five percent of all web search engine requests are for pornography, according to familysafemedia. com (2008). The 1.5 billion pornography downloads a month represent 35 per cent of all web downloads. Revenue from online pornography is greater than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink (Criddle, 2008).
It is a mistake to separate the use of pornography from other sexual behaviours. Given the saturation of the Australian and US media with sexually exploitive imagery, children receive a far more intensive sex education from pornography than from parents or teachers. A video game designer explained it this way, ‘We can’t, on the one hand, crow about the power of software as a learning tool, and on the other hand say the immersion in realistic graphic violence has no impact on a player’ (Interview with Steve Meretzky quoted in Brathwaite, 2007, p. 206).
Children live under tremendous pressure to act on the messages they see and hear in the media. Increasingly, young boys are learning to commit acts of s
exual violence against girls.1 In the following news account, one youth’s imitation of the violence in Grand Theft Auto IV is illustrated.
Sales of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV were halted in Thailand after a teenager said he had killed a taxi driver while trying to recreate a scene from the game. After the 19 year old, Polwat Chino, was said to have confessed to the killing, the police in Bangkok said the teenager ‘had wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game’ (Bloom, 2008).
Grand Theft Auto IV also gives players the option of increasing their points by sexually assaulting a prostitute and then murdering her.
Getting Real Page 12
