Girls! Girls! Girls!

Quote from website: 'Talk about branding, their logo was placed right behind all the girls and the entire room was memorized by the view.'

On the mass-marketable battleground that is the world of public imagery, women and girls are merging. Conceptually and physically. We are seeing an ever increasing sexualisation of female children and, simultaneously, the infantilisation of female adults. Much has been written already about the ways in which little girls are now encouraged to present as commercially sexual female adults - Bratz dolls and the insidious creep of the Playboy brand are just two cases in point. But there's another side to this coin: an increasing, dangerous, boiling down of women-into-sexual-girls.

Now, it's not at all groundbreaking to suggest that women have traditionally been treated like children. Pre-women's lib and let's face it, post-women's lib in most countries and most places, it's not uncommon to see women regularly othered as girls. This method of control is nothing new, but it is slightly distinct from a modern tendency concerning the way in which society genders the recipient bodies of sexual desire. As our girl-children are now, in many places, becoming fair sexual game, we are seeing a corresponding relegation of 'female sexuality'. It seems to me that the lack of body hair in mainstream imagery depicting women sexually is just the first stage on the way to a writing out of women as acceptably sexual. Naming is a powerful factor here: how often are fully grown women now referred to as 'girls' whenever a heteronormative sexuality is at question? And how often do we question it? There is now, seemingly, rarely a 'woman' in mainstream pornography - girls become MILFs, then GILFs. Pop groups like Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls have done nothing to help here. Perhaps the Spice Women would have been less disgustingly post-feminist.

Anyway, if you aren't convinced, type 'girls' into google search, you'll see what I mean (incidentally, my scientific research was conducted with safesearch on moderate. It makes little difference). Type 'young girls' into the main google search. Shockingly, the entire first page of links are porn-related, but (I hope - as the perhaps slightly lesser of two evils) that they feature pictures of women, not actual children.

One worrying thing about this trend is that the idea of a commercially sexual girl should be all rights be oxymoronic. Of course I don't dispute that many children have a kind of sexuality: that's not the point. Any second-waver worth their salt will tell you that gender just is sexual being, a main difference between a woman and a girl (apart from extra lashings of repression, prejudice, etc) is an emotionally and physically mature expression of sexuality. When women can't exhibit sexuality with the het-norm public's approval except 'as girls' there is something drastically, hideously wrong.

Why is this happening? Well it's only a theory, but I think this is just one more backlash. We know that feminism works in epicycles - no sooner do we, post-Female Eunuch, claim our sexualities as our own, claim the right to enjoy sex, the right to expect orgasm, and indeed, the right to be sexual aggressively, than the patriarchal machine takes that aggressive sexuality and infantilises it, reclaims it as something childish, something controllable, something ultimately passive. If all commercially sexual women are just girls, the male viewer seems justified on his pedestal of superiority. If women are just girls, then female sexuality is back to unthreatening old male-centricity.

A sexual woman is a force to be reckoned with and a person to be admired, and treated with respect. A sexual girl is not something that should ever be on a website. Women and girls are rightfully distinct, let's keep it that way.