Becoming Sexual

A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualization of Girls

R. Danielle Egan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745650739
  9780745650722
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745669588
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The sexualization of girls has captured the attention of the media, advocacy groups and politicians in recent years. This prolific discourse sets alarm bells ringing: sexualization is said to lead to depression, promiscuity and compassion deficit disorder, and rob young girls of their childhood. However, measuring such claims against a wide range of data sources reveals a far more complicated picture.

Becoming Sexual begins with a simple question: why does this discourse feel so natural? Analyzing potent cultural and historical assumptions, and subjecting them to measured investigation, R. Danielle Egan illuminates the implications of dominant thinking on sexualization. The sexualized girl functions as a metaphor for cultural decay and as a common enemy through which adult rage, discontent and anxiety regarding class, gender, sexuality, race and the future can be expressed. Egan argues that, ultimately, the popular literature on sexualization is more reflective of adult disquiet than it is about the lives and practices of girls.

Becoming Sexual will be a welcome intervention into these fraught polemics for anyone interested in engaging with a high-profile contemporary debate, and will be particularly useful for students of sociology, cultural studies, childhood studies, gender studies and media studies.

1

What is Sexualization?

It is a drip, drip effect. Look at porn stars, and look how an average girl now looks. It’s seeped into everyday: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes … We are hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired. They want to please at any cost.

Papadopoulos, quoted in Travis (2010)

Introduction

The twining of defiled innocence, precocious sexual promiscuity with a clearly defined antagonist – popular culture – makes this discourse deeply seductive and its rhetoric self-evidently true. Its omnipresence and the consequences involved make critique almost impossible and often politically suspect – after all, who can be for the sexualization of young girls? Within this context the question, what is sexualization?, becomes all the more salient. Is it a social phenomenon, an event, a type of representation, or an individual condition? Is it all of the above and more? Amidst claims of girls being taken in by a life of “fake breasts,” “fuck me shoes,” and desires “to please at any cost,” it is not hard to imagine why someone might experience powerful emotions when reading these warnings (Papadopoulos 2010; Harris 2010). This deployment of affect makes a more measured response far more challenging and the need for a critical exploration of the emotional work of anti-sexualization narratives all the more imperative. What happens when one moves beyond the affective in order to deconstruct the knowledge claims underlying this discourse? And, equally, what are the social and political implications of such assertions? The goal of this chapter is to wade through the term “sexualization” and the ways in which it is conceptualized in order to render visible the epistemological assumptions at work within contemporary writing on the issue. In so doing, this chapter will forward a number of questions and themes that will be explored in depth throughout the rest of the text.

Conceptualizing Sexualization

According to most authors on the topic, sexualization is pandemic in its reach and impact. Conceptualized as a dangerous influence that permeates the cultural landscape of girls’ lives, sexualization “places all children at risk for internalizing impoverished models of gender and human relationships” (Olfman 2009: 1). As omnipresent as oxygen and as toxic as poison, it seems impossible to escape this phenomenon. Whether it is in the form of erotic media messages, overly sexy clothing, salacious costumes for Halloween (a holiday termed “Skankoween” in much of the literature), sexual advice being offered in tween magazines, or in the toys scattered across a girl’s bedroom, advocates warn that “girls are [being] encouraged to act like teenagers just a few years after shedding their diapers” (Linn 2009: 49; see also Levin and Kilbourne 2008; Farley 2009a, 2009b; M. Hamilton 2009a, 2009b).

In large part, this phenomenon is seen as an outcome of a culture bent on enticing unwitting girls into becoming lifelong consumers and ultimately passive female subjects. Seducing them through sexy and provocative images akin to those featured in pornography is, according to radical anti-sexualization advocates, how this goal is achieved (Durham 2008; Levin and Kilbourne 2008; Reist 2009a; Dines 2011). Girls are “taking their [sexual] script directly from pornography” or what some activists in the Anglophone West have termed “pornification” – a cultural form so ubiquitous that women and girls find it near impossible to avoid (Papadopoulos, quoted in Travis 2010; see also Durham 2008; Farley 2009a, 2009b). In 2009, Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary to Gordon Brown’s Labour government, expressed her concerns over these developments when she commented that sexy clothes, such as “Playboy T-shirts,” pressure girls “to appear sexually available at an increasingly younger age” and may lead to a future of sexual violence (Smith, quoted in Travis 2009). Although the landscape of cultural representation is criticized, the psychological effects of sexualization are the primary cause for concern within much of the popular literature.

Authors state that sexualization creates a future of self-doubt, a lack of ability to form intimate relationships and fosters self-destructive impulses such as binge eating, sextexting, pregnancy, sex with older men, prostitution, and even suicide (Rush and La Nauze 2006a, 2006b; APA 2007; Durham 2008; Oppliger 2008; Farley 2009a, 2009b). Once lured, we are told that girls travel blindly down the road to ruin. Even though anti-sexualization rhetoric begins with a critique of media and popular culture, too often authors and activists turn their attention to individual outcomes in lieu of an analysis of cultural production. Although it might be tempting to view these distinctions as simple differences in what a methodologist might call the “unit of analysis” (e.g., focusing on the individual versus the culture industry) or a case of disciplinary distinctions (e.g., psychology versus sociology, cultural studies, or media studies), this logic becomes flimsy when one begins to map the epistemological and empirical assumptions at work in the literature. This chapter focuses primarily on claims surrounding the transformation of sexual subjectivity and resultant production of pathology in the narratives on sexualization.

Within the literature, sexualization operates in a tautological fashion. Pornographic-like advertisements, media, and objects produce the desire to purchase, which promotes a longing to look like and, even more disturbing for many, the impulse in girls to emulate the women in the pornographically inspired images that seduced them in the first place. This cycle is further exacerbated by exposure to more media and consumer objects. Consumption leads to unequivocal acceptance and, as a result, pathology. Reviewing these claims, it is no wonder that such a message would create anxiety, disgust, and anger in many readers, not to mention in most parents. The angst surrounding sexualization, however, is not confined to a particular subset of left-leaning criticism.

In his successful bid to become Britain’s Prime Minister, Conservative Party leader David Cameron echoed concerns about sexualization, promising that, if elected, he would free the children of Britain from the deleterious influences of advertising and overly sexy toys and clothing. For Cameron, ridding the country of such materials would ensure that “our children get a childhood” (Cameron, quoted in BBC 2010). As Prime Minister, he commissioned Reg Bailey, head of the Mother’s Union in Britain, to create a second report, Letting Children be Children, which was released in 2011 – less than a year after the Papadopoulos report, the Sexualization of Young People, written for the Labour government. Bailey’s report shies away from a critique of patriarchy and was more careful in its use of causal language; nonetheless, it relied upon and reproduced a similar set of assumptions regarding sexual materials and childhood corruption (Bailey 2011; Curtis 2011; Barker and Duschinsky 2012). In a less official context, Kristen Fyfe, a commentator from the Culture and Media Institute, an organization dedicated to “preserve and help restore America’s culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media elite” and to “promote [the] fair portrayal of social conservatives and religious believers in the media,” expressed her anger over the social implications of sexualization (Fyfe 2008). Like her counterparts on the left, she is upset by the dearth of media coverage on this important issue. Instead of focusing on the real issue – “the culture of sex aimed at girls and talk about the racks and racks of low-cut tops and cut-down-to-there jeans that fill the malls across America” and the dangers of “sex-filled music lyrics found on iPods plugged into the ears of hundreds of thousands of kids,” media stories are limited to salacious features covering “Skank-o-ween” costumes (Fyfe 2008).

Although critics bemoan the lack of coverage on sexualization, it is anything but a dead topic in the media. According to a LexisNexis search, the phrase “children + sexualization” has been featured in 935 newspapers since 2000. Searching the phrase “children + sexualisation” within the same time frame produces 234 results. The combination of sex, childhood, and popular culture creates a strong media response – and thus the theme of sexualization has had a prominent place in the news all over the Anglophone West. Ironically, media both perpetuates and foments the story of sexualization and is said to be one of its primary catalysts. Nevertheless, in an organization that might otherwise place feminist concerns under the umbrella of the “liberal elite” and a danger to traditional family values, movements of protection often require the strangest of bedfellows. Fyfe, for example, draws on the work of feminist educator Jean Kilbourne to support her critique of the media and overly sexual clothes. In particular she highlights their shared dismay over the growing disconnect between the advice offered in popular cultural media outlets and parental instruction. Levin and Kilbourne’s So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood, and What Parents Can Do to Protect their Kids details how one of the effects of sexualizing media is to create “premature adolescent rebellion” in girls, thereby fomenting hostility between tweens and their parents (Levin and Kilbourne 2008: 25; see also Fyfe 2008).

Coalitions between the religious right and a particular subset of radical feminist activists have a long history in movements seeking sexual reform – particularly ones attempting to ban cultural materials and/or practices deemed morally and sexually corrupt (Luker 1998; Hunt 1999; Mort 2000; Egan and Hawkes 2010; Faulkner 2010). One need only look to the anti-obscenity campaigns of the Comstock era in the United States and the movements against prostitution in England, Australia, and the United States that took place at the turn of the century to gain a sense of their shared history in this common cause (Gorham 1982; Mort 2000; Brown 2002, 2004; Agustin 2007; Egan and Hawkes 2010).¹ During the 1970s and early 1980s, these groups formed strategic coalitions to ban pornography and prostitution in much of the Anglophone West (Rubin 1992; Egan 2006; Agustin 2007).²

Although the politico-moral impetus driving these groups differs – moral depravity and sin versus patriarchal exploitation and objectification, respectively – both imbue sexually salacious material with an unparalleled power of influence, one that is particularly dangerous if found in the wrong hands. Whereas in the past, the locus of concern was the risk posed to men, women, and children by erotic or “perverse” materials – albeit in strikingly different ways and toward different ends – the contemporary movement on sexualization focuses on a singular source, the tween-aged girl (the implications of which will be discussed at length in chapter 2). She is conceptualized as highly vulnerable and deeply dangerous, because once sexualized she readily embodies and enacts the ethos of a pornified culture and “wants to please at any cost” (Farley 2009a, 2009b; Papadopoulos 2010; Dines 2011). In this sense, the sexualized girl has come to replace another longstanding symbol of cultural decay – the fallen woman. Like the prostitute of the past who was conceptualized as both a victim of new urbanism and male lust as well as a risk to respectable families, girlhood innocence within the anti-sexualization literature is framed as both endangered and unstable, and, once stimulated, a threat to individuals and society (Gorham 1982; Mort 2000; Brown 2002, 2004).

According to many anti-sexualization critics, sexuality should be an “independent island nation” untainted by the avarice of corporations and free of cultural influence (Peters 2002). As activist Cynthia Peters warns, when our culture begins to send the message to very young children that we should “disassociate sex from nonmarket feelings (pleasure, desire, intimacy) and associate it instead with consumable superficial feelings, you’ll not only keep the rabble in line, you’ll have them lined up at the mall” (Peters 2002). The impact of sexualization extends beyond the pressure to dress in a particular way – it infiltrates the mental and imaginative life of the child. Susan Linn argues that “an endless, intensifying loop of commercially constructed fantasies” tarnishes a child’s imagination, limiting their vision of what is possible by defining what their future should be” (Linn 2009: 40). Instead of wanting to play hero or some other form of empowered play, girls get sucked into “media-driven scripts characterized by entitlement, helplessness and dependence” (Linn 2009: 33). Mary Beth Sammons, Circle of Moms contributor, argues that this is evidenced by the fact “Toys are growing up, shedding their baby fat, and waxing their legs. Even Disney fairies are boasting hourglass figures and trading in their innocent ballerina look for saucy wardrobes” (Sammons 2011). “Looking in mirrors, walking in fancy high heels and vamping,” while playing “dress up” are illustrations of sexualized play that takes place in the classroom and the home (APA 2007: 16). Although dress-up may have had a strong place in the life histories of many adults (including the author of this book), this form of imaginative fun is different because of the corporate narratives children draw on, which are inspired by the scantily clad outfits of Bratz dolls and other culturally backward sources.

Sexualization is believed to infiltrate a child’s innocence, which under normal circumstances is considered sacrosanct and inherently asexual, and it is for this reason that its results are so perilous and dangerous. Analyzing the increasing encroachment of consumer capital in the lives of children is deeply important sociologically and politically; however, the equation forwarded by Peters and Linn is ultimately problematic. The implicit assumption is that sexual innocence and, by implication, childhood is a state of nature which stands outside of culture and capitalism; while this is undoubtedly a potent and provocative stance, it ignores the implications of constructing the child and its sexuality in such a manner. This supposition strips away the socio-historical legacy of innocence, as a social construct, and how it has been used ideologically to support dubious social policies, bolster deeply problematic conceptions of race and nation, and as a weapon against poor families (Zelizer 1985; Sanchez-Eppler 2005; Anderson 2006; Cunningham 2006; Egan and Hawkes 2010; Faulkner 2010; Bernstein 2011). It also seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that innocence also sells and has its own market niche – Australian photographer Anne Geddes, for example, has created a veritable industry exploiting our sentimental attachment to innocence with her images of angelic babies as fairies, flowers, and animals on everything from dolls, calendars, mugs, and posters, to pregnancy diaries, baby books, and invitations. In addition, images of sexual innocence are used to sell clothing brands, baby food, and political candidates, to name only a few. More importantly, conflating childhood with innocence may unwittingly deem any child who consumes sexualizing products to be outside of childhood (because she is no longer innocent) and thus a byproduct of cultural contamination.

Comedian and cultural critic Celia Rivenbark highlights this in her essay on school shopping entitled, “Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old like a Skank” (Rivenbark 2006), in which she recalls a particularly traumatic trip to the mall where the only clothing choices available in the “awfulness that is tweenland” were “well, slutty looking” or “hooker” wear (Rivenbark 2006: 28). Although she will have to search high and low, she vows that her daughter will avoid all clothes touched “by the wand of the skank fairy” (Rivenbark 2006: 28–9). A similar lament is offered by Jennifer Moses in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Why do we let them dress like that?” which details her attempt to make sense of why mothers buy their 12- and 13-year-old daughters clothes with “plunging necklines, built-in push-up bras, spangles, feathers, slits and peek-a-boos” (Moses 2011). Moses, like Rivenbark, forwards maternal responsibility as key to impeding the continuation of girls dressing and, by implication, acting like “prostitutes.”

In more serious tomes, commentators warn that “popular culture markets prostitution to girls as glamorous, fun, sexy and an easy source of income” and normalizes participation in “games” like “assess my breasts” (Farley 2009b: 144; see also Walter, quoted in Hill 2010). Sexualization is conceptualized as boundless in its effects – it penetrates cultural production, the economy, and taints our most intimate subjective sensibilities (APA 2007; Durham 2008; Reist 2009a; Papadopoulos 2010). Operating as the lens through which parents, teachers, and peers come to evaluate the appearance and actions of girls, authors argue that sexualization shapes the standards by which girls are assessed in multiple domains (APA 2007; Levin and Kilbourne 2008; Hamilton 2009b; Reist 2009a). Parents are as culpable of sexualizing their children as corporations when they engage in “fat talk,” purchase sexy commodities, and in the most extreme cases pay for plastic surgery (APA 2007; Farley 2009a, 2009b; Bailey 2011; Carey 2011). Girls find themselves in a socio-educational context that conflates erotic appeal with popularity (APA 2007: 17). “When sexual allure becomes girls’ only pathway to power and self worth,” Barbara Berg warns, “the roles of achievement, talent and being a decent person are diminished” (Berg 2009: 241). Parents, teachers, and peers may be unwittingly perpetuating a culture of disempowerment. Within this frame, girls are conceptualized as passive in the extreme, open receptacles into which sexualization messages are deposited and then enacted. The painful consequences of hegemonic beauty standards and restrictive gender stereotypes should not be discounted; rather, it is the assertion of uniform reception and pathology that should give us pause.

The question then becomes, to what effect? According to advocates, tawdry toys, pornified media, and salacious clothing are the ground from which the feminine and its eroticism get produced. Sexualizing materials eclipse and override every other cultural form. Despite the multiplicity of cultural representations, parental influence, school messages, or the various other ways in which a girl’s eroticism is socially sanctioned by peer groups (e.g., slut bashing), the allure of sexualization is said to be more powerful.

From Objectification to Sexual Action

Sexualized behavior and its consequences unfold in the following manner: mimicry, internalization, and finally self-destructive impulses that impinge upon the present and shape the future. While “act[ing] out in sexually provocative ways” may at first be the result of modeling, the authors of the American Psychological Association Task Force on sexualization caution that it would be erroneous “to state that girls are freely choosing these behaviors” (APA 2007: 18–19). Australian feminist Renata Klein further illuminates the effects of sexualization when she states: “surrounded by so much grown-up stuff, many girls perform these roles [engaging in seductive looks and behavior] in real life” (Klein 2009: 131). Media begets desire which begets action which then becomes compulsive; and “ready or not,” we are told by conservative critic Kay Hymowitz, the outcome is shocking and deeply disturbing (Hymowitz 2000, 2002). Eagerly simulating “sexual intercourse” and “masturbation” on buses and spending lots of time “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sexualization as a Social Problem
• 1: What is Sexualization?
• 2: (Hetero)Sexualization, Pathological Femininity, and Hope for the Future
• 3: Sexualized Tastes, Middle-Class Fantasies, and Fears of Class Contagion
• 4: Unmanageable Bodies, Adult Disgust, and the Demand for Innocence
• Conclusion: Reflexive Reticence, Affective Response, and the Social Construction of Sexual Problems
• Notes
• References
• Index